Politics

How Could We Have Let This Happen?

A Trump presidency never should have been possible. Now, we stand to lose so much.

Donald Trump holds a campaign rally on Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Near the end of this hellish summer, after the xenophobia and the racism (or at least some of it), and before the bragging about pussy-grabbing and the alleged assaults (or at least the reporting on them), I attended a wedding in Maryland. A Pakistani friend of mine from a Sunni family in Lahore had come to the United States to study and work years ago, living first in Washington and then in New York City. She had met an Iranian American man from a Shia family, and they had fallen in love. The ceremony was largely Persian, with some Pakistani and American traditions added to the mix. We sat in a large tent and ate and drank and danced. I was placed at a table with a number of their other friends, a high percentage of whom were Jewish. So was the officiant.

As Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros blasted from the sound system, it occurred to me that our country was simply better than Donald Trump and all he embodied. The wedding itself, or my brief sketch of it, may seem cornily “multicultural” to some, but perhaps it takes an event like the one that occurred Tuesday night to make us remember how valuable such things are and how much fighting had to take place for them to be possible in the first place. When I think back to the wedding now, I can’t help but remember the bride’s father, who gave one of the most loving toasts I have ever heard and who now might not be allowed back into the country to visit his daughter.

Perhaps sadness is an insufficient emotion after such a disastrous evening for America and our democracy. Rage works too. I can feel it boiling up inside me: for everyone from Trump; to the Republican politicians who allowed this to happen; to Jill Stein; to Jeff Zucker; to, finally, the voters who have made Trump our next president. Amid an endless stream of articles about their plight—too many of which I wrote myself—the simple fact remains that they chose this white nationalist candidate through their own free will, despite his complete inability to deliver them from their predicament. Into what further predicaments he will now deliver them, and everyone else, we can now only speculate and shudder.

And then there is Hillary Clinton. It’s fitting that the Clintons’ permanent dance on the line between outright corruption and simple bad judgment ended up foreclosing any chance that Hillary Clinton had to be president. The email issue was wildly overblown by the media, but there is something almost Shakespearean about the Clintons as the authors of their own demise. The American people’s distrust of Clinton was the result of many factors, including her gender. But it was also a consequence of decision after decision that she made. It is infuriating to think that her bad judgment helped elect Trump.

Tell someone you are angry, and he or she will often say, What’s the point? How does that help? That’s fair, as far as it goes. The task now is to resist Trump in whatever form one can, whether through electoral politics, investigative journalism, or (say) working to make better the lives of the depressingly few Syrian refugees who managed to settle here over the past several years. But I also believe that a lack of anger—a lack of moral rage—is partially to blame for how we got here. Yes, the Trump supporters were plenty angry at the media, the Jews, the blacks, the immigrants, etc. But where was the anger directed toward this hateful candidate? Where was the anger at every last one of his supporters and enablers in the Republican Party? For a culture that so often appears tiresomely judgmental, the inability to make an instant, withering judgment about this monstrous man should be a mark of eternal shame.

Perhaps this is too gloomy. Clinton essentially garnered as many if not more votes than Trump on Tuesday, and one can hope America’s institutions will show more resistance to him than they did this past year. But at least at this moment, the election feels like something that won’t be easily made right. On Tuesday night, when it became clear that the results were going Trump’s way, my Pakistani friend texted me. “I’m an immigrant, a woman, and a Muslim. Wtf am I supposed to think tonight?” I don’t have an answer. Right now, the memories from her wedding, and all it symbolized, don’t feel like enough.