Despair, anger, and confusion combined to overwhelm me in the wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016.
So I took to my bed with a bottle of white wine I was saving for a special occasion. The wine wasn’t chilled, but I uncorked it anyway.
When I woke up later that morning and saw the bottle standing 3-quarters empty, the reason for my upset came flooding back: The worst person imaginable was going to be president of the United States.
Donald Trump got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but was still the winner thanks to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution and the Electoral College.
While it’s maddening that our democracy has such a quirky provision, more maddening is the fact that tens of millions of Americans thought an obnoxious reality TV host was presidential timber.
Some voters may not have known or didn’t care that their candidate loves to stir up trouble, including racial animus.
As a New Yorker in the 1980s and 90s, I knew Trump’s shady side all too well.
The man would go to great lengths to feed his need for constant attention. He even disguised his voice to plant stories in the tabloids about his business dealings and sordid personal life. He denied doing so but his second wife and others confirmed his craziness. Plus, reporters knew it was him by the laudatory superlatives he often repeated.
As a friend of mine said back then, “You can’t believe a word coming out of that hole in Donald Trump’s face.”
His lies and distortions about The Central Park Five are what irked me to no end. The young Black boys were wrongly accused of raping and nearly killing a white female jogger in 1989.
The Netflix mini-series “When They See Us” details their heart-wrenching ordeal of being railroaded by overly-zealous prosecutors and a police department that most Black New Yorkers did not trust.
Trump concluded, without evidence, that the Harlem teenagers were guilty. A mere ten days after the assault, he bought a full-page ad in every major newspaper that called for their execution.
It read in part: “Mayor (Ed) Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers.”
His goal was to shape public opinion quickly and further rile up white folks in a city already festering with anti-Black racism.
A particularly heinous example at the time was the death of a Black man who ran onto a busy highway to escape a mob of white teenagers chasing him out of “their” Queens neighborhood.
The Central Park Five are now aptly referred to as The Exonerated. They spent six to fourteen years in prison before the real rapist finally confessed in 2002. DNA evidence backed up his confession.
Yet fourteen years later and just two months before the 2016 election, Trump insisted the men were guilty and refused to apologize for his egregious actions.
He was being true to form as an extremely stubborn person who developed his racist proclivities early-on at his father’s knee.
Fred and Donald Trump purposefully violated the federal Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent apartments to Black people in Brooklyn. In 1975, the Department of Justice ordered their real estate company to devise a plan to rectify the immoral practice.
Another galling move by today’s Republican frontrunner was his haranguing Barack Obama to produce a birth certificate. This, from the slacker who threatened to sue his high school, two colleges, and the College Board if they released his grades or SAT scores.
Years of claiming Obama wasn’t duly elected appeased his far-right supporters who were apoplectic over having a Black president.
My despair that early morning in 2016 came from knowing that the next commander-in-chief was, as Sen. Lindsay Graham once put it, “A race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”
First-time Trump voters may be forgiven, “For they know not what they do.”
But with his history of racism, a reckless presidency, two impeachments, and four criminal incidents, there will be no absolution for anyone voting Trump in 2024.
Jo Ann Allen retired recently from Colorado Public Radio in Denver after 47 years of reporting the news. She is the creator and host of the podcast Been There Done That.
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