The Butterfly Effect

was sued for racial discrimination by the Department of Justice for not renting to black tenants. In 1989, he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, asking for the return of the death penalty in the case of the so-called “Central Park Five” (now the “Exonerated Five”), a group of young teenagers who were falsely accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park. The boys were arrested and coerced into false confessions that landed them in prison. Even after they were exonerated in 2002, Trump remained steadfast, insisting that the boys were still guilty. He refused to apologize, and in the years following the incident, Trump used the same racist rhetoric to rally a base that finally had the platform to openly spew hatred. If elected, he vowed to build a wall along the southern border of the United States and ban Muslims from coming into the country. This was the kind of man we were dealing with, a complete danger to civil and foreign relations, who could unravel all the goodwill the country had attained during the Obama years. Still, no reasonable person could hear his views on women and minorities and think he should be the U.S. president, right? Despite all the protests, all the vitriol he spat, all the hollow, rambling speeches, his chances of winning were slim to none… right?

9

Mourning in America

I’d never heard Hyattsville that quiet—ever. On the morning of November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump shocked the world by becoming the forty-fifth president of the United States, the city felt remarkably still, like a close relative had died. We were trying to process the despair of the previous night; foolishly, we all assumed we would wake up to the nation’s first woman president. There had been feelings of optimism and overconfidence, and as the vote counts had begun rolling in, and the night shifted to morning, the country’s tenor—at least in the East, West, and certain portions of the South—slowly began to shift. As Election Day waned, we started to realize that things were quickly changing for the worse, and that our lives as we knew them would never be the same. Nonetheless, Hyattsville had never been this immobile; usually, even at seven o’clock in the morning, there’d be some semblance of activity in the bustling Arts District. But the air felt a little gloomier, a little colder, and the clouds seemed to hover just a bit lower.

We couldn’t fathom what had just happened; the city couldn’t, either. Hyattsville is a smallish area just outside the northeast border of Washington, D.C. The city, like the county it is in, is majority black and mostly Democratic. So on the voting line, there was an overwhelming feeling that Hillary Clinton had this: there was no way she was losing to that dude, who said those things, and grabbed women by their you-know-what. Clinton was endorsed by almost every major newspaper in the country, and she’d won the popular vote the night before by a record margin. Meanwhile, Trump was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and seen as a proponent of white supremacy. Clinton was thought to be a shoo-in, a battle-tested politician who’d dealt with the absurd many times over and surely could handle someone like Trump. But that’s where many of us fell down on the job: we took him lightly, and as that was happening, the would-be president centered his campaign in battleground states whose voters felt left behind by the so-called American dream. Unlike Clinton, he made it seem like he was there for them. Working-class whites felt left behind by a globalized economy that valued college degrees over blue-collar work, and by growing diversity that reduced the power of white men. Seeing Obama in power for eight years also didn’t help; they sensed that the America they once knew and controlled was slipping away. So when Trump came through, with his gruff shit talk and plainspokenness, he was thought to be a beacon of light for a class of people who’d rather it be 1936, not 2016.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times went with a simple headline: “Trump Triumphs.” The New York Daily News opted for a more dramatic headline (“House of Horrors: Trump Seizes Divided States of America”). On the cover of the L.A. Times in big type: “STUNNING TRUMP WIN.” Indeed, it was a stunning upset, and there was a feeling that Trump somehow stole the White House with the help of Russia, which reportedly spread propaganda on social media and hacked Clinton’s campaign to induce mistrust in American democracy. Minorities wept openly; it seemed the country had made its decision, and that we needed to go somewhere, anywhere, else. Hysteria ensued since here was no longer an option; when Trump won, many of us said we were moving to other countries, because the place we’d known to be home finally showed it wasn’t that at all. It never really was, and to live under Trump’s rule didn’t feel safe. If law enforcement had been a threat in recent years, what was going to happen with Trump in office and bigotry so out in the open? It felt like we didn’t have any allies. We were scared, angry, shocked, and disillusioned. Overnight, we went from feeling empowered by the president to feeling despised by the president-elect. We didn’t quite know how to process what had happened: What do we do with the fear? The sorrow, the anger, the frustration? How do we swallow that, pick up the pieces, and move forward? What could we tell our children, especially those who’d known only Obama as president? How could we explain the tears?

Up the street in the neighborhood coffee shop, we traded grave looks and tepid shrugs, not really addressing the elephant in the room. We wallowed in the haze, dousing it with drip coffees and chai lattes, falling into our respective work routines and