A Message To Trump Voters, Non-Voters, And The Media

The following is a commentary by Joy-ann Reid (pictured), host of NBC's AM Joy. It is well worth your time to read it.

To the sixty million two hundred and sixty-five thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight people who voted for Donald Trump and the nearly one hundred million who didn’t bother to vote at all, even though you were eligible, we here at AM Joy are going to tell you what you have won.

Donald Trump now heads the Republican Party which controls all three branches of government. which controls the House, the Senate, and the White House. And the Supreme Court is poised to be filled by the new Republican President.

Now you have given Trump, a man alternately described as vengeful, erratic, narcissistic, and dangerous, and temperamentally unfit to be president — and that’s just what Conservative Republicans said about him. You’ve given him control of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the IRS, — pretty ironic since he probably hasn’t paid taxes in eighteen years — not to mention drones and nuclear weapons.

Politically Republicans no longer have any excuse to not do the things that they have been promising their voters for decades. And Trump has no excuse for not doing the things he promised during his campaign. And that means when he gets to Washington, Trump will have to get really busy.

He’s promised to build a wall across the southern border. Now that’s going to require an appropriation from the Republican Congress. Now, why wouldn’t they do it? You wouldn’t want Trump voters punishing you in 2018 in the midterms for not keeping your promises, right?

Mexico paying for it is not going to happen so America if this wall is going to be built, you are going to have to pay for it. Trump has promised to cancel DACA meaning seven hundred and twenty-eight thousand people who have identified themselves to the Federal Government under the protection of President Obama, will be at immediate risk of deportation once Trump takes office. Congress doesn’t have to lift a finger to let this happen. Trump can simply rescind President Obama’s executive order and start the deportation through ICE which he will control. And also through local police departments some of whom have been quite enthusiastic about his candidacy.

Trump has vowed to repeal Obamacare, replace it with something terrific. That means the Republican Congress will need to either pass a new repeal bill or send one of the fifty plus repeal bills already passed in the House, to the Republican-controlled Senate and then to Trump’s desk. To prevent Democrats from filibustering, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can simply end the filibuster on the first day of the new Congress. Once the repeal is signed what happens next is that twenty-two million of you, presumably many who voted for Donald Trump, will lose your insurance. That number can go even higher because now Trump is saying he will keep the provision of the law that left by itself could force insurance companies out of business.

Trump has also vowed to institute a ban on any new Muslim immigration to the U.S. and even Muslim tourism to the U.S. Now if you are in a state with a large tourist economy like Florida you might want to start thinking about what that means to your state’s bottom line since Middle eastern, Asians, Europeans, and other international tourists offended by this idea might also rethink a visit to the United States in the Trump era.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will now have an open lane to overturn Roe v. Wade, meaning women may soon be refighting issues of legalized abortion and maybe even contraception state by state.

For Black Lives Matter activists and anyone who values the civil rights division of the Justice Department as the protector of voting rights, prepare to face Giuliani time. Unless of course, Rudy becomes Secretary of State instead of Attorney General as the rumor mill suggests he prefers. 

And then, hello world, he could be joined in the cabinet by pitchfork sheriff David Clark as head of the Department of Homeland security. That would be interesting.

And that’s not to mention foreign policy where with a pro-Putin administration in the U.S., a woman is now leader of the free world. No, not that woman [Hillary Clinton], this woman, Germany’s Angela Merkel. She is now all that stands between Russia and its global ambitions.

So now that I have told you what you have won Trump America, allow me to tell you what you have lost.

You have lost the morality card. No longer can the U.S. go around lecturing the world about democracy. Because in our democracy, the person who got the most votes will not become the president for the second time in the last three Republican presidential victories. Nor would the party that got the most votes control the House of Representatives. Again we are required to accept this affront to democracy because that’s our system. But our acceptance doesn’t make it any less undemocratic. And hey, maybe it is a good thing that we can no longer go around the world lecturing them about how to live.

You have also lost the notion of an exceptional America. Because as it turns out, we are just another Western nation falling to the Ethno-nationalist forces sweeping across Europe, from Brexit in the U.K. to France’s Marie Le Pen fueled and egged on by the Russians and feeding on the fear of non-white and non-Christian immigrants. We as it turns out are not that different after all.

You’ve also lost the right to moralize to Blue America about family values. Now we sincerely hope and pray that your daughters or sisters or your wives and all women and girls are never disrespected, never abused the way the next President of the United States has boasted about disrespecting or even sexually assaulting women including walking in on teenage pageant contestants when they are naked. When your sons and daughters ask you if little girls are as valuable as little boys or if they should emulate the President of the United States, we will leave that to you to explain.

And lastly, you’ve lost the right to rattle along about the Party of Lincoln and Reagan. You are now the Party of Donald Trump, the Party of the Alt-Right, of Breitbart.com. You have ratified Trump’s vulgarity, his crassness. You saw exactly who and what he was and you chose it. You are going to have to own that. If the incoming president makes you feel proud, I am very happy for you. But please don’t tell the people who are afraid that they have no right to be.

And to my friends in the media who are rushing to normalize Trump, who are blithely calling on parents and teachers of scared Latino and Muslim kids, and little boys and girls of color to come together and accept what is happening, while Trump ushers in an embolden KKK and an Alt-Right that will soon have a place in the White House, let’s remember that nothing at all has changed about Donald Trump. Nothing. He is still the same historically unpopular person who is under criminal investigation over Trump University, whose foundation was revealed to be a sham of self-dealing, whose campaign the Washington Post reports was in direct contact with Russian authorities and who is in an unknown amount of debt to unknown foreign entities in a way we have never seen in a president. He is still the guy who has made racist m

He is still the same historically unpopular person who is under criminal investigation over Trump University, whose foundation was revealed to be a sham of self-dealing, whose campaign the Washington Post reports was in direct contact with Russian authorities and who is in an unknown amount of debt to unknown foreign entities in a way we have never seen in a president. He is still the guy who has made racist misogynistic statements that have offended virtually every group in the U.S. He is still the guy who said this. (She plays the ‘grab her by the pu$$y’ video).

We owe it to the country to cover him with clear open eyes. This isn’t about access or normalized homogenized politics with a pageantry of succession. We need to cover the next president with the same cynicism the current president was treated to and with the same zeal and skepticism and doggedness, that we expended on I don’t know, Hillary’s emails. Given how unprecedented what is happening is, including his veiled and not so veiled threat against the First Amendment, maybe we need to cover him with more toughness and skepticism.