People were in shock yesterday to learn that Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States of America.
It seemed even Trump and his people were caught off guard by the news. For a long time now, all the polls pointed to Clinton winning. Then on November 8, the only poll that matters took place and the voters chose Trump over Clinton. Trump garnered 290 electoral votes compared to Clinton’s 232 electoral votes.
A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to become president.
A lot of people seem to be genuinely upset about this. The Twitter hashtag #NotMyPresident almost immediately began trending. The same thing happened eight years ago when Barack Obama won. I don’t remember if there was a Twitter hashtag dedicated to the feeling, but I know a lot of people were saying it. They were wrong back then, and the people expressing it now are wrong too.
Donald Trump will be everyone’s president.
If he turns out to be a terrible president, then historically speaking, he’ll be in good company. Two of the four presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore thought it was morally acceptable to own other people.
Most of the presidents in my lifetime have been bad. I’m old enough to remember Richard M. Nixon and the crap he put our country through. If we can get through the Nixon years, we can surely get through the Trump years.
Contrary to what anyone says, we don’t know what a Trump presidency will look or feel like. We know he campaigned on things like building a wall on the southern border and deporting over 11 million people who are here illegally. We’ve been told this makes Trump a racist.
Under the Obama administration, over 2.5 million people have been deported. Does this make Obama a racist too? His administration was enforcing existing federal law, just like the Trump administration would be doing if they deported everyone who is here illegally.
When Trump was running for the Republican nominee for president, his campaign released the following statement after the San Bernardino attack:
Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.
Many people reacted negatively to this statement. For years now we’ve clung to the narrative that Islam is a religion of peace and the people who practice the faith, Muslims, are just like everyone else.
The problem with that narrative is that it seems to fly in the face of reality. The perpetrators of the San Bernardino attack, Rizwan Farook, and Tashfeen Malik, attended two mosques in southern California, the Islamic Center of Riverside and the Dar-Al-Uloom Al-Islamia mosque located outside San Bernardino. Both of these mosques are descent and respectable places of worship, not radical hotbeds of hate.
After Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people and injured another 24, they were killed by the police. When authorities released their bodies, they received a traditional Islamic burial at the Wal-Hamdu-Lillah cemetery located in Rosamond, California.
The cemetery is owned by the American Islamic Institute of Antelope Valley, a mosque located in Palmdale. This mosque is also a decent and respectable place of worship.
How is it that these two murderous terrorists could attend normal, regular American mosques and then receive traditional Islamic burials at a Muslim cemetery operated by a mosque that neither one of the dead terrorists had ever even attended?
Either Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were Muslims in good standing, or they were not true representatives of the Islamic faith. The fact they received traditional Islamic burials by a mosque they had never attended would seem to indicate that they were thought to be good Muslims.
These are the type of problems we face while fighting a war against Islamic terrorists. Even though we’ve been fighting this war since 2000 when the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, killing 17 American soldiers and injuring another 39, we don’t seem to be any better at differentiating the “good” Muslims from the “bad.” Not because of any prejudices we have, but because the “good” Muslims seem more than willing to embrace the “bad,” both before and after a terror attack. It’s one of the many reasons this war has been going on for so long.
Something has to change. 17 years is far too long to be fighting a war. You may not agree with Trump’s idea of banning Muslims from entering the country until we can figure out what’s going on, but at least he tried to find an answer to the problem. Hillary Clinton, the candidate I voted for both in the primary and in the general election, seemed to have difficulty even saying the words “Islam” and “terror” in the same sentence.
Contrary to what you might read on Reddit or The Huffington Post, nobody really knows what type of president Trump will turn out to be. The same people who say Trump is just like Hitler were the same people who said Hillary Clinton was going to be our next president. They were wrong about that. Who knows, maybe they’re wrong about Trump too.
I prefer to take a wait and see attitude when it comes to Donald Trump as president. He wasn’t my choice, but he will be my president.
