~a column by Colleen O’Brien
What a relief. Trump won and so we didn’t have to have rioting at the polls.
An Iowa woman who was ready to start a revolution if Hillary won was rightly worried, however. “I’m ready for a revolution because we can’t have her in,” said Rhonda from Newton on Election Day. “What are we going to do to safeguard our votes? Because we’ve seen how the Democratic Party is just crooked, crooked, crooked.”
The voter fraud actually did show its crooked little head when another Iowa woman voted twice for Trump because she was worried that her first vote would be stolen by the Clinton campaign. I guess her chosen candidate was right in suspecting voter fraud.
He did inform us a couple of months ago that he was not inciting anything in his followers, so this votern thought this all up by herself.
There is relief throughout the land because of his acceptance speech in which we got to see a Donald we’d neither seen nor heard before – soft-voiced.
In a controlled, relatively nice reading voice (getting his words off a teleprompter as he was), he repeated himself only once with “very, very,” managing not to say it a third time. He mentioned that Hillary fought a good fight, never one time calling her “crooked Hillary.” It wasn’t exactly an apology when he admitted, “Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division” because he did not fess up to creating a lot of this divisiveness himself.
But he did pledge to be MY president, as well as yours: “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all of Americans.”
And then he asked for help from those of us who chose not to help him get elected. “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country,” he said. I just hope that Hill heard this conciliatory talk and doesn’t take a page out of his playbook and try to get him indicted on some charge. This would so spoil his newly congenial behavior and perhaps again rile up a few folks into disunity; a thing that, now that I think about it, could happen any time or many times in the next four years.
A fellow in Virginia told a reporter that the best day of his life would be when Trump got elected. He, the Virginian, would then have hope.
Now I too have it. I have hope that since he got himself elected, Trump will maintain the easygoing, polite, suave demeanor of his acceptance speech rather than his often inarticulate, yelling, frowning, repetitive, ill-informed, misogynist, racist, zenophobic bullying demeanor.
Fifty-six percent of Iowa men voted for this behavior, and a quarter of Iowa’s women without college degrees; so we are still solidly in a misogynist zone and do not have to fear electing a female head of state to ruin our gun lives and run our country into the ground anytime soon.
The important part to remember is that we are a democracy. A majority – 49 percent to 48 percent (these are the figures at the moment) – wanted Trump. So that means we all get him. Not exactly a mandate, although I have a feeling he’ll call it that once off the teleprompter.
Just consider for a moment the perks of the coming administration: our new president will get rid of that pesky universal health care attempt, see our wealthy citizens happy with reduced taxes, overjoy our military with a build-up to make us strong again (we have a military bigger than the next five countries put together). We shall not tire of his eloquence on the subject of climate change but will be riveted by his manly ways in dealing with the wall and the exportation of millions; and we will be surprised at our new foreign policies from a fellow who is refreshingly unburdened by any knowledge of the existing ones. A bonus — we can look forward to closer ties with Vlad over there in Moscow as well as having those princely fellows – Christie, Newt and Ailes – help him run our country.
One commentarian called Trump a political poseur, asking him to live up to his promise to restore the country’s self-confidence as we citizens make sure Trump does it according to the Constitution and with decency.
I think that’s asking a lot. A President should be able to be decent on his own. But it’s a new world order, and who knows if all those folks who voted for him will not only help him but themselves maintain decency like their candidate-now-prez is expected to do for the next four years.
I honor the position of President of the United States. I look forward to the time when I will be able to honor the holder of it. Only once have I been unable to; I must hope that it’s not going to happen again or I might despair.
