I Didn't Vote for Trump. So Why Do I Feel Hopeful?

This is nothing like 2016.

The day after the 2016 election felt like the end of the world. Under Obama, same-sex marriage had become the law of the land, and in 2014, I got to marry the man I love. For the first time in my life, I was truly happy. I feared that a Trump presidency meant it would all be taken away.

I’m about as far as you can get from a physicist, but since then I’ve thought a lot about Newton’s third law of motion, which states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In January 2017, Donald Trump took office, and the Left reacted.

They lost their fucking minds.

As a thirty-four-year-old undergraduate student at Columbia University, I had a front-row seat to the madness.

What do you mean this straight girl with blue hair ‘identifies’ as a gay man? I wanted to ask my classmates, though I could sense it was verboten to ask questions. Do you seriously think that all white people are evil? What would decolonizing America even look like?

But it wasn’t just the ideas. It was the people espousing them. These warriors for social justice were the cruelest, most sanctimonious people I had ever encountered in my life. And my god, were they racist. To them, the entire black population was a single-minded monolith, a giant mass of ‘bodies’ that had been run over by capitalism. Indigenous people, by virtue of their DNA, were holy. ‘Latinx’ people were divine. But Asians were ‘white-adjacent,’ and Jews were white supremacists.

By the way, did you know that biological sex is a western construct? Black and brown people don’t conceptualize ‘male’ and ‘female’ in the same way that we do.

It. Was. Insane.

Believe it or not, it’s only gotten worse. In October 2023, after Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 men, women, and children in Israel, Columbia students rejoiced. They strapped on keffiyehs and marched through the streets, banging drums.

It’s an understatement to say that my political perspective has changed over the past seven years. It’s more like it’s been blown wide open. I just can’t unsee the toxic pipeline that leads straight from Columbia to MSNBC and all the way to the DNC.

In 2020, after Biden won the election, I was cautiously optimistic. Trump’s refusal to accept the results and the events of January 6 confirmed my belief that America had made the right decision. But after four years in the Ivy League, I also wondered just what, exactly, we were signing up for. These regressive ideas about race and sex had made their way into the mainstream. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” Ibram X. Kendi wrote in How to Be an Antiracist, which Democrats quoted like it was scripture. Had I voted for a political party or a religious sect?

Immediately after he was inaugurated, Biden essentially dismantled Title IX by issuing an executive order that prohibited discrimination on the basis of ‘gender identity.’ This gave males the right to enter female bathrooms and to play on female sports teams. Then Biden appointed as U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine, a straight male in his sixties who, after marrying and having children, insisted he was a woman. When Levine was sworn in, the White House tweeted that he was “the first 4-star female officer in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.”

The first female.

In his new role, Levine began advising doctors to prescribe puberty blockers to gender-nonconforming kids. He fear-mongered worry-sick parents into giving their consent to this mad science by saying that their kids would otherwise take their own lives.

Those who objected to all of these changes—female athletes who didn’t think it was fair or safe to have to compete against men, let alone undress next to them in the locker room, and gays and lesbians who argued that most gender-nonconforming kids were likely to grow up to be gay and not transgender, so perhaps we should just leave them the hell alone—were smeared as bigots by Democrats. Over on Twitter, if a woman called Levine “he,” she’d be permanently banned from the platform.

It’s been a special kind of hell for Americans who think that all forms of racism suck and that sex is real. Especially for liberal, Democrat-voting Americans. Just an absolute fucking nightmare. Which is why, today, I can’t help but feel that everyone responsible for this nightmare—including those who stood by and said nothing—deserve exactly what they got on November 5. A red wave wouldn’t suffice. It needed to be a tsunami.

Am I worried about a second Trump presidency? Of course! But after four years of screaming into the void, it’s vindicating to watch Democrats finally reckon with what they’ve been getting wrong. Which, bless their hearts, is basically everything.

Call me selfish, I don’t care. As a ‘cis white gay,’ I’ve heard it all before. Today, I feel nothing but hopeful. Electing Kamala Harris would have signaled to the Democratic leadership that we were all okay with where the party was headed, and so many of us were not. At all.

The 2016 election felt like a death. This one feels like maybe, possibly, it could be a rebirth.