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Dear Mr. Trump, we are all watching you

Dear Mr. Trump, we are all watching you

Dear Mr. Trump,

Though you can understand this is a hard piece to write, I wish you the best during your transition and I will pray — for the sake of communities like mine all across the country — that you surround yourself with decent, righteous policymakers and that your presidency leaves our country more stable and more able to handle the profoundly complex challenges that face us in the 21st century.

The uncomfortable, and perhaps avoided, truth for you and your transition team is that you will have to put together a White House that a majority of voters did not want you in charge of.

As of this moment, Hillary Clinton had received 668,000 more votes in this election than you did, and by the time all votes are counted, The New York Times estimates that Clinton will lead you by more than 2 million votes and more than 1.5 percentage points.

You are no longer simply aspiring to the presidency. It has been given to you by the Electoral College, and your job is now to bring us together as one country. With the selection of a rabid bigot as your Chief Strategist, it is apparent you don’t care about bringing us all together. Yet, I will organize my community and we will pressure you to do so.

This election is difficult for me to move past because many of the supporters you exploited during this campaign were the same people who made it hard for all of us to fulfill President Obama’s agenda for eight years. We weren’t able to create the most helpful, most cost-effective health care bill because people like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his party’s top political priority was “to deny President Obama a second term.”

We weren’t able to pass immigration reform because the 2010 midterms elected unrelentingly right-wing policymakers who punished even other Republicans for being willing to talk to the other side. Whether it was protecting communities from gun violence, providing job training for veterans, or establishing federal employment protections for LGBT Americans, politics in its ugliest form prevented us from doing what was right.

That was all due to the rhetoric you built your political career on and the divisiveness you never tried to cure during the campaign season.

My opinion is not the only one that matters, so I asked a few friends and family members for their thoughts on the election, and they all felt the same way. Dan, a college student, said he was stressed at first, but was not just hopeful you wouldn’t take us to war.

“I don’t think I can accept him as my president. I’d respect any other Republican, but not this guy,” he said.

Shiva, an active community member, said, “Our battle just got harder having Trump to fill the highest office in our country.” He spoke about your blatant and unrepentant bigotry, opining on how the hate you have empowered in our country makes communities like his less safe.

No matter the background of the people I spoke to, every single one of them was ashamed of you and demoralized over what happened on Tuesday. Yet, as saddened and sometimes even victimized with your violent political rhetoric as they were, they all expressed hope for for the next four years and a strengthened resolve to oppose you whenever you used your powers to infringe upon their lives and rights as Americans.

That gives me hope, and it should humble you.

You’ve got a lot to do in these next couple months, so I’ll wrap this up with one final thought. Whenever you aim to make a positive impact on our country, I will absolutely support you and pray for your success. With that same fervor, I will also vigorously oppose every single action you take to advance the kind of discriminatory and bigoted policy positions that propelled you to where you are in the first place.

Sincerely,

One Resilient American

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