It has been a month now since Donald Trump was elected president. He has selected two-thirds of his Cabinet and filled key posts, including chief of staff and national security adviser. As he begins the task of dismantling much of what President Obama accomplished over the past eight years, he will have the support of Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress. And while he didn’t come close to winning the popular vote, he has the fierce loyalty of millions of Americans who are counting on him to do what he promised and return the nation to some past glory.
You can count us among those who want Trump to succeed beyond all expectations. We hope that things go so well that he decides, at the age of 74, to run for re-election and that he wins in a historic landslide. We hope that mountains are named for him and that Donald becomes the most popular name for boys born not only in America but throughout the free world. We hope these things happen because it would mean that President Trump has brought the nation together and improved America’s standing in the world. It would mean that when he vowed to “Make America Great Again,” we shouldn’t have taken him literally (as Corey Lewandowski likes to remind us) because what he really meant was “Make America Truly Great For All Americans For the Very First Time.” It would mean that the dark moments of his campaign were unrepresentative of who Trump really is.
We also agree with the many Trump supporters who wish the left would stop whining. The election is indeed over, and barring an unprecedented act by several rogue members of the Electoral College on Dec. 19, Trump will go to work in the Oval Office (or its Trump Tower equivalent) on Jan. 20. Protests that are essentially directed against the peaceful transfer of power are misguided. Concerns about some of Trump’s words and policy positions are warranted, but any outrage should be precise, focused and nonviolent.
Meanwhile, the honeymoon for Trump’s hardcore New Hampshire supporters, those who wouldn’t dream of removing “Trump-Pence” bumper stickers from their vehicles or lifting yard signs out of the ground, doesn’t seem close to check-out day. Optimism is a good thing, and we hope theirs doesn’t fade any time soon.
But we also hope they don’t let their admiration for the man and his message prevent them from considering what some of his Cabinet and Cabinet-level choices might mean for New Hampshire down the line.
For example, his choice to lead the EPA is Scott Pruitt. As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt has made his mark by attacking environmental rules that anybody who hunts, fishes or hikes – anybody who breathes New Hampshire air and drinks its water – should cherish, such as limits on ozone and mercury released by Midwest coal-fired plants. As most people around here know, New England is the tailpipe for those Midwest emissions. That’s a fact, and so is Pruitt’s very cozy relationship with fossil fuel executives and lobbyists.
And Trump’s choice for secretary of education, billionaire charter school lobbyist Betsy DeVos, is also unsettling for a state that has struggled with education funding for a very long time, a burden carried primarily by those who pay local property taxes. Few have followed DeVos’s lobbying efforts more closely than the Detroit Free Press in DeVos’s home state of Michigan. The DeVos family, the paper wrote, has “helped private interests commandeer public money that was intended to fulfill the state’s mandate to provide compulsory education” while fighting any attempts at oversight. Michigan now has more for-profit schools than any state in the nation – with outcomes rarely better than public schools, and often worse. DeVos has shown no interest in improving public education; instead, she has helped create an environment in which even charter schools that consistently fail their students profit.
For a month, Trump’s supporters have acted as though they have won something. And they have, but only in a superficial sense. Elections are a coin toss; the game begins on Jan. 20. And there will be no Hillary as a magnet for anger. No Obama, Biden or Reid to blame for every economic hardship or foreign policy failure. Just Trump, his hand-picked Cabinet and a Republican-controlled Congress. We hope that in four years, New Hampshire’s air and water are fresh and clean. We hope that the state’s public schools are stronger, not destroyed in the name of “school choice.”
We hope for all of these things because what kind of an American would root for a president to fail?