#HeIsStillYourPresident

donald_trump_august_19_2015_cropped

donald_trump_august_19_2015_cropped

Madison Dibble

Trigger Warning: Sarcasm

Dear fascist trying to undermine our republic: Donald J. Trump will be your president.

The only way he will not be your president is if you have revoked your citizenship, which half of you might as well do, because you did not show up to vote.

Yes, while thousands of Americans can find time to hit the streets to protest and shut down the highway while using profanities as arguments, more than half the protestors arrested in Portland, Oregon, did not vote. Even here at home in Minnesota, Trump won 18-24 year olds, yet the protest started on campus by the Socialist Alternative was attended by hundreds of students ages 18-24.

So thousands of democratically confused protestors hit the streets and Twitter with one phrase spearheading their cause: #NotMyPresident. Powerful stuff from the courageous left because everyone knows that if you skip voting but manage to get a hashtag trend, the election results are voided.

If Trump is not the protesting left’s president, it begs the question: Whose president is he? Who are these awful people who turned out to vote?

The left spent this election creating a group of “others” they could label as the problem in America. The Trump Train was fueled by “racism”, “misogyny”, and “bigotry”, “islamophobia”, “xenophobia”, and “sexism”. The only reason Trump won was that the America we have been warned of finally revealed itself: The evil America that is full of “deplorable” who want to send women back to the kitchen to cook pies for the Klan meetings.

But that America does not exist.

Trump’s victory resulted from the fact that people are tired of being told that America exists. America does not have a race problem, or a misogyny problem, or a bigotry problem. This does not mean that there are not individual racists, misogynists, or bigots. They exist. We have a problem of people being divided into groups instead focusing on the individuals.

Clinton thought she could win this election by sorting people into the groups Trump offended, and Trump offended just about everyone: women, veterans, Muslims, and people with disabilities. The Clinton campaign did not realize that people do not care what group they are in. They care about change, and there was no change in Hillary Clinton and the only guarantee in Donald Trump is change.

The similarities between 2008 and 2016 are undeniable. President Obama ran on a promise of change from the previous eight years of Bush. President-elect Trump offered the same thing and in both cases, people voted for change. They did not vote in hope for a new white supremacist nation to rise, but you would not know that if you have seen the reaction liberals have had.

The liberal media cannot see that this was an election for change—a change from both parties. Trump is as big a change from Obama as he is from Bush. That is why both opted out of voting for him.

Consequently, now we have a new president-elect, but we have thousands of people saying he is not their president. Before he was able to unpack even one ill-fitting suit into his White House closet, people were protesting him.

For better or worse, he is still your president. If he succeeds, we succeed. The most dangerous thing to think following this election is that a candidate or party is always right or always wrong. If Americans want to improve this nation, they have to be willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt. They need to know that both parties are coming from a place of hope and optimism for our country. The least we can do is to give our President a chance before we protest.