Editor’s Note: Andrew Gilmore ’17, News Co-Editor’s wrote a dissenting opinion to the following editorial “Dissenting Opinion: In Defense of the Donald”
The University School News aspires to be the voice of the student. As such, we almost always refrain from commenting on issues that are not of direct relevance to the US community. However, on some occasions, events are so earth shatteringly important that every community will be affected, and as a matter of clear conscience, it would be wrong of us not to voice our perspective as students and citizens.
We feel obligated to express our utmost regret for the results of the election.
The awfulness of Trump’s candidacy begins before even looking at a single thing he wishes to do with his seat in the White House. Indeed, that we know so little of how he will govern points to the problem. Donald Trump is a profoundly uninformed, unprepared, and unintelligent leader.
One needs to only listen to the way he speaks to understand this. The words we use when we open our mouths are the closest window observers have into our unfiltered thoughts. When Trump speaks, he rambles, he struggles to express direct meaning, he gets sidetracked, he becomes distracted, and he spins sentences that any English teacher at University School would circle in red pen with massive question marks if they appeared on even a freshman’s work. That Trump claims to “have the best words” is the most direct evidence he does not. Trump is genuinely incapable of expressing nuanced thought, pointing to his staggering lack of human intellect.
Moreover, Trump has consistently seemed uneducated and even disinterested in how American government actually works. When asked about Article I of the constitution, Trump responded, “I am going to abide by the Constitution whether it’s number 1, number 2, number 12, number 9.” The constitution has seven articles. When asked how to deal with terrorism, he advocated murdering the innocent families of terrorist, showing no respect for international human rights norms or human life itself. When asked how to deal with the national debt, Trump proposes attempting to negotiating it down, otherwise known as defaulting on the debt, showing no understanding for the foundation of the global economy. When first given national security briefings, Trump repeatedly asked why we do not just use nuclear weapons against our foes, showing no understanding for the international order that prevented humanity’s annihilation during the 20th century.
Trump is not just ignorant, however; he lies willfully and with absolutely no respect for the truth. It is no coincidence that Politifact ranks his statements as false more often than anyone else it checks, including, of course, the supposedly untrustworthy Hillary Clinton. Trump has claimed baselessly that Ted Cruz’s father had connections with the killing of President Kennedy, that Hillary Clinton may have been involved in political murders, that American Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the September 11 attacks, that Hillary Clinton wanted to let 650 million immigrants into the US (magically tripling the population of the country), that President Obama’s 2008 election was illegitimate because of non-citizen voters in North Carolina, and most insultingly, that the African American community has never been worse off in American history than now (perhaps, as President Obama noted, Trump missed the school lessons about slavery and Jim Crow). Not one of those things has any grounding in reality whatsoever. And there are too many more statements of his with no basis whatsoever in fact to even count. Yet he continues to create a parallel universe of untruths, where evidence means nothing, and his fleeting emotions are enough to prove right. For those conservatives who have continually complained that emotion drives modern liberalism rather than fact, Donald Trump should surely be anathema. Trump spits in the face of a desire for fact.
But even looking at those few places that Trump has been lucky enough to wander into proposing a policy position, the results of enacting his agenda would be disastrous. Trump’s policy on trade, for example, was rated as one of the top ten threats to global economic stability by The Economist, ranking among a Chinese stock market crash and the collapse of the European Union. His proposal to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants would be an ethnic cleansing campaign the likes of which has only ever been done on such a scale before in history through one means: mass murder. His call for a national registry on all Muslim-Americans, which his surrogates have continued to defend to this day, goes against the reason the United States ever came into existence: as a safe haven for all religious faiths. His desire for a new era of law and order would wind the clock back to Nixon-era War on Drugs style policing, perpetuating a state of mass incarceration that destroys communities of color and is ultimately counterproductive at stopping crime. He rejects the scientific consensus that global warming is real and that humans are causing, and has plans to pull the United States out of the Paris Accords, which are one the last barriers holding our planet back from the brink of catastrophic climate change. Yet again, we are left asking what those who claim to support facts over feelings have just done by electing this man whose few proposals deny all that we know about how the world works.
Many an esoteric conservative retorts that Trump could never actually get these policies passed. Unfortunately, even if congressional Republicans try to moderate Trump’s incoherency, America will soon come to reckon with an ongoing trend of the imperial presidency. A modern president, just with the stroke of his pen, can end all of our current climate-saving policies, start any war he likes, remove any protection for undocumented immigrants and/or their children, and ultimately bend US policy however he likes. In the 21st century, congress is no check on a president who can be baited into a fit by a Broadway cast talking about him after a showing.
We write this to the community not in any hopes to prevent Trump’s presidency; it is inevitable. We write not to wish his failure; his success is the country’s success. Nor do we even write to shame those who voted for him; your vote cannot be recast. Rather, we write only to make our voices heard by posterity. We refuse to be complicit. We refuse to normalize this event. We refuse to be associated in the future with the results of this election by product of our being here as it occurred.
We write because, even against the commander-in-chief of the world’s greatest military, we believe that the pen is mightier than the sword.