A Sad First Example

Crooked. Sexual assault. Pay to play. Walls. All these words and phrases were the basic “substance” of this past presidential election. For young people and first-time voters across the nation like myself, these words were our introduction to democracy.

This campaign has definitely been a memorable one, to say the least, specially for millennial voters. And if there’s anything millennials know how to do best, it’s social media. Twitter had its fair share (pardon the pun) of campaign news and drama. The candidates themselves argued with each other, quoting each other’s tweets with the latest insult. Notably, President-Elect Donald Trump continuously referred to Secretary Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.” On June 9, Trump tweeted, “Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary. He wants 4 more years of Obama – but nobody else does.” Secretary Clinton fired back, and this time, it was quite humorous. Clinton quoted the aforementioned tweet with the now-meme “Delete your account.” However, our new President-Elect has been pretty ruthless with his social-media attacks; again, on November 2, Trump tweeted “Crooked Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails e-mails AFTER they were subpoenaed by the United States Congress. Guilty – cannot run. Rigged system.” Clinton did not respond.

It’s really unsettling to see that the people who were running for control of our country couldn’t even cohabitate on a social media website together. It wasn’t just Twitter that was riddled with allegations towards both parties – from both parties. Media and news outlets across the country covered the slew of insults. President-Elect Trump was a lot more outright with his criticisms. During the second presidential debate, Secretary Clinton was saying how good of a thing it is Trump isn’t in charge of the law, when Trump interrupted with “Because you’d be in jail.” It’s insults like this – underhanded and immature – that didn’t sit well with me.

Of course, Secretary Clinton’s email scandal was a large part of this debate, and one of Trump’s biggest criticisms of her. However, Trump had faults of his own. Trump was accused of sexual abuse after a recording was released of a conversation between Trump and others in 2005. He spoke very lewdly of women and what he did to them. It was rather disgusting, and I was extremely surprised how any woman could stand by and still support him. Not to mention all the cruel things he said about the Mexican population, as well as other minorities.

There were some really big topics for first-time voters to follow and take sides on  inthis election season. But unfortunately, most of them had nothing to do with policy or what the candidate would do in office.  

My thoughts on this electionare still all over the place. It’s hard to live in a country where your only two viable options for President are a debatable-criminal and a reality TV star whose companies filed for bankruptcy six times. It seemed as though the votes in this campaign were just to keep the other out of power. You had to choose between two evils.

Minorities and the working class are building blocks of this country, and quite frankly, for the candidates to be so demeaning or dismissive of them is alarming. We have things to look forward to, now, as young people of this country. And we have things we need to focus on and change. We need to be able to trust in our government again.  If Trump can help us, then we will fully support him. But if President-Elect Trump continues with his harsh criticisms, there will be complete outrage for the next four years. We need to see change from the Democrats, the Republicans, and from ourselves.