Reminder: This is an opinion article. Any and all viewpoints are not reflective of The West Press or Lakota West High School as a whole.
Entering the 2024 United States presidential election, the world knew it would be a tight race; no one candidate was expected to outpace the other by wide margins. As results trickled in throughout Tuesday, November 5th, they consistently leaned towards Republicans, including the 45th President, Donald J. Trump. This proved to be so, entering the early hours of November 6th: Donald Trump was declared the 47th President of the United States around 1:30 a.m. ET the morning after the election. Now that the dust has settled, we have to ask ourselves: How did we manage to elect a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic 78-year-old billionaire con man with 34 felonies who wants to give tax cuts to the wealthy, strip away women’s rights, ban trans people from getting gender-affirming healthcare, destroy the Department of Education, execute a mass deportation of millions of Americans, and divide the nation more than ever before?
Donald Trump is not a president for the people: He is a president for the powerful, rich billionaires of America. As he said at a private campaign meeting, “You are all people that have a lot of money. I know about 20 of you and you’re rich as hell. We’re gonna give you tax cuts.” With just 1000 billionaires living in the United States, why does a man who only cares about the top .01% of people speak to over 70 million voters as the man who cares about you?
Many will argue that the economy was in shambles thanks to Joe Biden and his “Bidenomics” plan. To them, a stronger economy was a good enough reason to vote for Donald Trump, even if they didn’t agree with his social policies. Gas prices, for many, were a determining factor. Under Donald Trump, gas prices were consistently around 2.50, dropping as low as 1.90 during the peak of COVID-19. Under Joe Biden, gas prices averaged at around 3.50 thanks to both a resurgence in national activity after the pandemic, and the war between Ukraine and Russia. Reaching prices as high as 5.10, gas prices steadily decreased to roughly 3.30 as of October 2024. According to many Republicans, Donald Trump is worth the presidency thanks to saving an average of just one dollar in gas prices. Those who voted for Trump believe lower gas prices are more valuable than basic human rights. Let that sink in: Your rights aren’t worth as much as a few extra bucks saved at the pump.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign throws any ounce of women’s rights to her own body in the dumpster. Although he often attempts to distance himself from it, Project 2025 further outlines the extremes Donald Trump could go to during his 2nd term to limit women’s rights even more.
Project 2025 was written by dozens, possibly hundreds of individuals within the Heritage Foundation, outlining what a second term for Donald Trump might look like. Although Trump has denied implementing any of the ideas into his own agenda, he has mentioned before that he wasn’t against all of the ideas it presents. The 887-page book was written by numerous Trump cabinet members from his 2016 presidential term, including notable figures such as Dr. Ben Carson, Christopher Miller, and Russ Vought, all former cabinet secretaries. Trump’s denial of implementing their ideas is statistically false: According to the Heritage Foundation concerning Project 2025 and its effect on his campaign, “The Trump administration embraced nearly 64% of the 2016 edition’s policy solutions after one year.”
Even if Donald Trump preaches to others that he knows nothing about the plan, he hasn’t been afraid to make decisions that align with what the Heritage Foundation has written. In regards to women’s rights and abortion, the decision on Roe v. Wade was “just the beginning.”
As Project 2025 states, the next conservative president (Trump) should, “work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”
The document also includes a discussion of privatizing the TSA, National Weather Service, as well as the Board of Education. This, of course, would allow Donald Trump to make any changes he wants and control what information the public would know, including what would and would not be taught in classrooms around the country. Gender theory and critical race theory, just to name a few topics, would never see the light of day thanks to Project 2025.
Thriving off the uneducated isn’t something Donald Trump is new to, however. NBC exit polls show 63% of voters who did not attend college voted for Trump, compared to Harris’ 35% of voters. Those who had received a bachelor’s degree or above (as far up as a PhD) leaned heavily toward Kamala Harris’ more liberal ideas.
Let’s not forget the other notable achievements of Donald Trump over his lifetime. To start, Trump had a lot of failed businesses you might not have even heard of: The Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Mortgage, Trump University, The Plaza, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Shuttles, and Tour De Trump. All of these failed either because of poor planning, work accidents (such as the Trump Shuttles plane incident that shut down the business swiftly), or simply a lack of consumer appeal. Trump was also sued multiple times for these businesses, including his university, which never existed in the first place. As Republicans boast about Trump running the country “like a business,” it becomes blatantly obvious why this might go downhill very quickly.
This election also marks the first time a convicted felon/criminal is president of the most powerful nation in the world. Trump, who was only able to vote thanks to Florida law after his countless felonies, could also go to jail as a sitting president thanks to these charges, along with 54 others that are not currently settled. A major topic after the 2020 election, Trump also stole hundreds of classified documents from The White House and stored them in his 350 million dollar home in Mar-a-logo. With an extensive history of poor business management, dozens of court cases, felony charges, and presidential indictments, how can the people of America think that a criminal is the person to run the country?
Thanks to his victory, Trump is now the oldest president-elect in American history, and should he finish his 2nd term in good health, the oldest president in the history of the USA. Humorously, the endless chatter of Joe Biden being too old for the Oval Office has seemingly faded from Republican Trump supporters, now rallying behind their leader standing as a beacon of hope to carry the nation out of these “troubling times.”
Entering the Oval Office for a 2nd term has left many Americans unsettled. Thanks to a long and perilous campaign trail for both sides, President-elect Trump has made comments both to his supporters and his campaign officials behind closed doors that have left voters perplexed at his way of thinking. Trump had made comments in regards to the Nazi regime, comparing his officials as needing to be more like Hitler.
I am consistently blown away by the amount of Republicans who blissfully ignore the atrocities that Donald Trump has committed. During his debate with Kamala Harris on September 10th, he spent his time avoiding questions, avoiding any concept of a plan, and yelling about illegal alien immigrants eating the pets of American citizens. Those remarks, in turn, have resulted in numerous bomb threats, crimes, and lasting repercussions for those living in Springfield, Ohio, the town Trump accused of these events. As MAGA supporters have made their excitement about the orange man returning to the office, there has been a distinct lack of concerned citizens discussing the possibility of a stolen election. Before the election, it was not uncommon to find posts about voting to have comments saying things like “can’t wait for 400k votes to show up at 3 am. It’s always the Democrats!” Now, as Trump has secured his second term, these complaints suddenly seem to vanish. When Trump wins, the election could NEVER be stolen. But when a Democrat wins? You get events like January 6th. And let’s not forget that Elon Musk offered people one million dollars for voting for Trump. Bribery, in the eyes of Republicans, is completely acceptable. If we want to talk about stealing elections, maybe we need to reconsider who could be doing the deed in the first place. How can we accept a president who told his followers to “fight like hell” when he lost the election in 2020? When he stole documents from the White House? When he told four congresswomen of color in 2019 to go back to where they came from?
Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Earlier this year, he said he “wouldn’t be a dictator, except for day one.” If a liberal candidate was a felon, Republicans would lose their minds. How come when Donald Trump does it, everyone seems to look past it? Latino voters who chose Trump over Harris will feel the effects the moment his “mass deportation” takes place on his first day in office. Any gay person who voted for Trump might suddenly realize that their rights are going to be taken away, and same-sex marriage could be put at stake (which Trump has said he would heavily consider). Black people who voted for Trump could be faced with even more police brutality after Trump gives them full immunity, and any woman who voted for Trump can look forward to limited healthcare when they have a miscarriage and are denied an abortion, possibly putting their lives on the line. This is the reality Donald Trump thinks is best for America.
If you think Donald Trump is a man for the people, you could never be more wrong. When you have nearly half the country fearing for their lives, you chose wrong. When you thought a few extra bucks saved was worth more than human rights, then you are in the wrong. So tell me: Would you be proud to look your kids in the eye and tell them you voted for a 34-time convicted felon, racist, sexist, bigoted man for president of the greatest nation in the world?
