Bill White: Trump’s election no reason to stop making America kind again

It's no longer about HIS character. It's about ours — popular pre-election Facebook meme.

Eight years ago, I struggled to write a column about Donald Trump's shocking victory over Hillary Clinton. I ended up writing two.

The first was about the failure of conventional wisdom, which had told us that Clinton couldn't lose, for all kinds of reasons that sounded valid, but weren't.

Struggling to find something positive to say about Trump, I suggested that his political clout and lack of any genuine ideological convictions might allow him to pull Republicans toward the center for some compromises, perhaps on infrastructure, for example.

Clearly a stretch. His first term, like his first campaign, was about us vs. them and dismantling any remnants of Barack Obama's legacy.

But hey, I tried.

The second column ruminated on what we should tell our children about the fact that we elected a man like this as our president, given the rhetoric and themes of his campaign.

I concluded that politicians aren't our children's most important role models. We are. So we needed to explain to them that a lot of the people who voted for Trump didn't like the ugly things he was saying, either. They just were frustrated with the direction of our country and felt he was more likely than his opponent to bring about change.

I wrote, "The healthiest way for all of us to approach what happened Tuesday, after we're done celebrating or mourning, is to find ways to come together as Americans and ensure that our communities are places where everyone feels safe and welcome.

"Our kids have seen something ugly. Let's show them something good."

That message still resonates with me today, despite my sleepless night and my deep depression over what Trump's resounding return to office — as a much more frightening person and candidate than he was eight years ago — says about us as a nation. We collectively decided character doesn't matter in our national leader, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with that.

But adopting a fetal position or hating half my neighbors isn't going to help. I refuse to believe that half our electorate are terrible people, even if I feel they've made a terrible choice.

The conversations I've had with my young grandsons over the last few weeks about Trump and this election make me even more convinced that I and the rest of us need to commit ourselves to speaking and living in a way that will teach those children that hate isn't OK and that the best antidote to MAGA is a variation I've seen often lately in another Facebook meme.

Make America Kind Again.

I won't attempt a detailed analysis of why so many people voted for someone so clearly unfit for any public office, let alone the presidency. I argued four years ago that voting for Trump was less excusable at that point than it had been in 2016, and that's far more true today, where we've handed him the Stay Out of Jail free card that I still believe was his prime motivation.

But there's plenty of blame to go around. Joe Biden, for stubbornly pursuing a second term so long instead of allowing a full season of primary elections to determine his successor. Kamala Harris, for failing to separate herself from the direction charted by the Biden administration, a heavy anchor for someone who was trying to sell herself as an agent of change to a dissatisfied electorate. The Russians, once again very successful at spreading disinformation to help their preferred candidate. Single-issue progressives who somehow concluded there was no difference between two incredibly different candidates. A Democratic Party struggling to find messages that will resonate with constituencies it once could take for granted.

As a sometime Republican, one of the many reasons I'm feeling so disappointed is I believed the only way to save the Republican Party was to soundly repudiate Trump and worst excesses of the MAGA movement so it could rebuild itself from a motley crew of bomb-throwers into a party of serious conservatives who are legitimately interested in governing.

That may never happen now.

But giving up isn't an option. One of the few positive things about the 2016 election was the way many people turned their despondency into activism. Engagement, I believe, is the healthiest response for all of us who were devastated by this week's result.

So we need to continue to speak up when we see hate and injustice. We need to actively seek ways to make government better. We need to reach out to people in our communities, including those who disagree with us on some issues, to find common ground. We need to demonstrate what real patriotism looks like.

That fetal position felt pretty good when I finally crawled into bed on election night. If you're still mourning over the results, I won't rush you.

But once you're done, we have work to do, modeling the kind of community, state, country we want this to be. Yes, some of us are hurting today. But we're not dead.

Bill White can be reached at