The staggering hypocrisy of #NotMyPresident

The world was outraged a few years ago when it was revealed that as soon as President Obama was elected, in a closed door meeting with his colleagues Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to oppose him every step of the way as a strategy to secure their own reelections in future years and make Obama a one-term president.

The entire media establishment went apoplectic. How could he oppose the new president before he even knew what he was going to do? It must have been racism!

Hogwash. Republicans don’t want Democrats to get their agendas passed or be elected or reelected, and vice versa. This is not horrifying or unprecedented on any level. They work with each other when they need to and oppose each other when they feel they must.

Now, after a year and a half of the most ugly and divisive presidential campaign in any of our lifetimes, the same thing is happening, but on a more base level.

Following Donald Trump’s surprise victory on election night, protests have sprung up around the country, some organized by the now-ironically titled MoveOn and a group called Socialist Alternative. They’re not protesting any policy he’s proposed, any bill he’s introduced, any cabinet selections he’s made, because he hasn’t done any of those things. They’re protesting the results of the election itself, calling for violence against a free and fair democratic process.

Even worse, there is a nascent but high profile effort in California to secede from the Union. When Texans proposed the same thing for their state after a enduring most of the Obama administration, they were, surprise, labeled as racist.

Look, y’all. I get it. Donald Trump is a nightmare. He’s a nightmare personally, politically, stylistically, verbally, demographically, fiscally, and so on. But the people of the Several States have chosen him to be the next president. Like it or not, that’s how the system works.

Elections have consequences, remember?

Democrats ought to know better. They were outraged, OUTRAGED!, when Trump refused to say in a debate that he’d accept the results of the election. Now that we have the results of the election, and they happen to have not gone their way, it’s those exact same Democrats who are refusing to accept them.

In that same debate, Trump called Obama “your president”, implying the same otherness that Democrats are claiming today. The hypocrisy goes both ways, by definition.

I didn’t vote for Trump. I opposed him from the beginning and spoke out against him along with the rest of #NeverTrump throughout the entire campaign. I changed my voter registration and left the Republican Party in March when it became clear that Trump would win the party’s nomination.

But he won the election. It’s over. He will be inaugurated in January and immediately have the power to act within the constitutional confines of the office of the presidency. As Bush did in 2001, even after that controversial election, as Obama did in 2009, and as President-elect Trump should in 2017.

I’m not even giving him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust him to be a good president or even be a good human being. I will oppose him as loudly as anyone else when he acts heinously, but I will support him when he stumbles into a good policy too, just as I have with President Obama, who I also voted against 8 years ago.

As Democrats said a month ago, the integrity of our democratic processes should not be questioned, either before or after the results are in. It’s a shame they no longer believe that now that they’ve lost.