Photo Courtesy of Tribune News Service | President Donald Trump greets Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson.
By Graham Armknecht ’18
THE ROUNDUP
It’s odd to think that the United States of America elected Donald J. Trump as its 45th president. From someone who openly supported Hillary Clinton (and wrote a column supporting her in this newspaper), I started not knowing how to feel about the results of this election. I could only think, how did this happen? Polls showed that Clinton would win in a landslide, and yet we ended up with Trump.
At first, I felt horrified. I couldn’t sleep the night after the election, and I played REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” in my car on the way into school.
There was a tone that clashed on campus the next day. Trump supporters whooped and cheered around campus, while everyone else stayed somber for the most part.
Everything just felt different.
However, over the course of the day after the election, I started to feel hopeful. Trump’s acceptance speech eased the tensions I felt in some capacity. The day went on, and not much got done considering the shock of the events of the night before.
One question I’ve struggled with is how did we get here? How did we end up electing Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States?
First, we need to examine Clinton and her likeability. She had the experience needed for the office; she’d been in the public eye for some time. However, she always seemed robotic in some ways.
For example, she carefully planned everything, each jump in power carefully calculated.
One thing she couldn’t plan for was her campaign in 2016. She couldn’t have predicted Bernie Sanders, which split Democrats, and she really couldn’t have predicted Donald Trump.
These unpredicted variables seemingly threw her off, and she came off as cold, at least in comparison to President Obama.
This, in combination of a bunch of other factors, led to Trump being our president. So, what now?
Primarily, all that we, at least at Brophy, can do is hope. Not these petitions to get Trump out of the White House, not the protests, not the online videos. What we can do is hope.
Because, like it or not, Trump is our next president. He has a fully Republican government, which means a lot will get done.
However, we can also express our displeasure not though protests, not through online videos, but by going out in 2020 and voting.
That’s how democracy works. If we don’t like something, we vote on it. In the meantime, he’s our president for next four years no matter what. Whether or not you’re left or right, we are all Americans. Right now, we need to unify and support Trump, despite feelings before the election.
