I don’t remember Obama being elected—I was three in 2008, and seven in 2012 —but I do remember an America with Obama as President. I also remember having a theory that whoever my parents voted for automatically won. This theory was disproved by Donald J. Trump.
Everyone remembers November 4, 2016: everyone has a story to share about the moment they finally realized America’s fate. It was the first election when I was aware of what was going on. I didn’t know what made my parents hate Donald Trump so much, but I did know that all of my teachers were crying, my mother was crying, and that something was really wrong.
My generation has been raised in Trump’s America. We don’t know another President—we haven’t been around for one. During this time, we’ve watched him ban Trans people from the military, starve children to death in border camps, blame a global pandemic on China, watch 200,000 Americans die with no plan, and call fallen soldiers “losers.” During these four years, I have woken up and expected the worst from the President.
When I watched the presidential debates this year, it seemed like America was shocked by their behavior, and for a second, I was incredibly confused. As someone who grew up in Donald Trump’s America, this is the only way I knew a President to act. Talking to my friends, they each echoed my view. Isn’t this what America expects from a President? Isn’t this how debates are supposed to go? Isn’t this how Rose Garden speeches are supposed to go? Isn’t this how oval office briefings are supposed to go?
For the rest of my life, this will always be my first example of a President. Today, November 7, I woke up and I learned that Biden was pronounced President-Elect. Yet after phone-banking for him, writing 50+ letters for him, and talking about this election for the last two years, I don’t feel like celebrating. Maybe it’s because of the emotional rollercoaster that I have been through or maybe it’s because Donald Trump has not yet conceded, but I can’t even imagine dancing out in the street right now like the people I’m seeing in the news. Yesterday, I watched a video of people celebrating after Obama’s win and I cried because everyone seemed so innocent.
Maybe some got to live in that imaginary world of a fair and equitable society for those eight years, but Trump slashed through any idea of that. Today, when people celebrate, I don’t want them to feel like they did after Obama—I don’t want them to feel content with a Democrat in office. I don’t want people to see this as the end—it is only the beginning.
I hope that for the kids who will see Joe Biden as their first President, they will see a President who is faithful, a President who listens to the people. I hope they will see a President who tries to represent every single American and vows to keep every American safe. I hope that we will see Climate Action and the Green New Deal instituted, that there will be free healthcare access for every single American, that children separated from their families at the border can find their parents again, that the concentration camps at our border will be eliminated, that harsher restrictions on guns will keep kids in schools without the fear they will be gunned down, that American cities will take down Police Unions. I hope that they will see money getting poured into Native American reservations. But most of all I hope that America doesn’t give up—I hope that America does not become comfortable just because we have a Democratic President.
The reality is that this will be a very long hard fight, and as of right now, we have simply picked the lock to the first of many many doors. We cannot just build back: we have to build back better. Perhaps we had Trump as a President just so that we could realize just how corrupt our country really is. He shines a flashlight on every gash. Perhaps Trump’s presidency was there to inform us that having a Black President fixed very little, that Obama only placed bandaids on America’s wounds. Right now, hours after Joe Biden’s announcement as President-Elect, I can only hope that we learned something, anything.
In the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency, when he instituted the Travel Ban, there were protests in Washington that hundreds of thousands showed up for. I remember listening to an interview with an immigration activist—she was talking about how grateful she was that so many people showed up to protest. The moment that stuck with me was when she said something along the lines of this: “There’s never been this amount of people protesting about immigration and I think people’s rage at Donald Trump has led them here, but I can only hope that when Trump is no longer President, people will keep showing up.” I don’t remember her word for word, but what she said stuck with me, and I’m reminded of it today.
I hope that Americans won’t stop fighting. I hope that they won’t forget about the issues they cared about so heartily in the Trump years. We have to keep in our minds that the Trump years happened, that Donald Trump was our President, and that we have to fight as hard as we can to get as far away from that as possible.
Thus, it’s not the fact that Biden is President-Elect that’s holding me back from celebrating today—it’s the realization that Trump was once our President. Joe Biden will be sworn in January 2021, yet he will still be governing in Donald Trump’s America. I’ll end with this Chris Rock tweet: “Oddly I don’t feel like celebrating. I feel like Tom Hanks towards the end of Cast Away. I’m really happy the ship came but I don’t want to party. I just want to take a shower, cut my hair, eat a shrimp, find Helen Hunt, deliver my last package, and figure out the rest of my life.”