The 2016 Presidential Election is over and we have our next president, President Donald J. Trump and, as a lesbian, I am happy that there were so many people who did not vote for Hillary Clinton.
To my Republican voters, I am happy that you stuck to your guns and supported your party elect, no matter what anyone told you. I'm glad that your party loyalty is so strong that despite studies proving the threat that a Trump presidency poses to the global economy and the environment, you voted for your party's candidate anyway. I commend you for being such a good, obedient party member that you could ignore the pleas of everyone who Trump has targeted and pretend like you don't see the fear in our eyes or hear it in our voices.
To my third party voters, I am so glad that you feel so safe in your privilege that you could willfully ignore how this country's elections actually work. I'm happy for you because you are so naive as to think that your protest vote, casted in effort to make a statement rather than based off logic, is actually valuable. I'm glad that you will never accept the fact that you essentially handed your vote directly to the man who openly mocks people with disabilities and brags about committing sexual assault. I'm comforted knowing that you may never feel the weight of what you've done by trying to take a stand against the election process now rather than in a few years when so many lives weren't on the line.
I'm happy that none of you have to feel the terror that the rest of us have to face now. There are journalists wondering if their president will try to take away their credentials for reporting facts that he may not like and try to break their freedoms as the press. There are veterans with PTSD who wonder if their president actually means it when he implies that they are anything less than strong. There are women wondering if their male coworkers will follow their president's example and make them want to crawl out of their own skin for being female. There are Latinx children wondering if their parents are going to be forced out of the country. There are same-sex spouses who are wondering if their marriage is going to be invalidated. There are LGBTQ+ children wondering if they might be forced into conversion therapy and given electroshock treatments because of who they are. There are minorities everywhere becoming increasingly scared to walk down the street at the wrong time of day, in the wrong clothes, in the wrong color skin because their new president openly devalues their existence.
A presidency shouldn't breed this much fear among SO MANY different people.
I hope that you all enjoyed watching our stock market plummet further for every state that Trump won. I hope you enjoyed watching world leaders bow their heads in disgust and other countries openly mock America for choosing a rapist for our president. I hope you enjoyed knowing that threats to human rights like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin are smiling, knowing that the candidate they endorsed is now the leader of the Free World.
There's a reason you can't look me in the eye when you say that you voted Trump/Pence -- it's because in your heart, you know that you may have just handed me a death sentence.
