Donald Trump

As recently as October 2016, Mexico’s ambassador was confident Donald Trump would not be elected president. “It’s not going to happen,” Miguel Basañez told me at the time. But it did happen — and Mexico’s hope that it could work with Canada to present a united front against the Trump administration came undone when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was informed that Trump would work out “a bilateral agreement” with Canada alone to salvage the mutual benefits both countries derived from NAFTA.

If Trump really wants to speak for forgotten Americans, he would travel to the Mississippi Delta and the rural Black Belt of the American South, where conditions are so wretched and dire that even a struggling Rust Belt factory town might seem like a bountiful paradise of opportunity and wealth. Campaign events tell the real story of who’s forgotten and who isn’t, and the verdict is clear: White working-class voters in the Rust Belt are far from forgotten.

Approximately 20 million people have gotten coverage since the launch of Obamacare. Trump has yet to reveal details of what he plans to do to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, other than to say that he intends to dismantle it soon after he takes office. It’s likely that some parts of it will be left untouched – like the pre-existing condition provision – and replacement could be delayed by a couple of years.

When Donald Trump invited Carlos Slim, one the world’s richest men and the single-largest investor in the New York Times, to dinner at his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, it became clear that Trump’s admiration for Mexican “leaders” meant businessmen, not politicians. “What President-elect Trump wants to do in coming closer to the Mexican business community has an impact, not only nationally but regionally with Latin America, and opens the doors for good business relations overall,” said Larry Rubin, president of the American Society of Mexico. 

For some, the hardest part is the realization that older Americans, who will likely be hardest hit by changes to health care and discretionary spending, were among the Republican president-elect’s biggest supporters. “I have worked in gerontology since the ’80s,” said Toni Miles, MD, who heads the gerontology department at the University of Georgia. “I feel betrayed because older people voted for a guy I couldn’t stomach.”

Indeed, it is an opportunity to have an American president in the Oval Office who wants to pick up the phone and speak with Mexico’s president to talk about solving problems. It is an opportunity to invite the young, dynamic, and intelligent Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau join that conversation. It is an opportunity to speak honestly and assess, two decades after it was implemented, on what’s good about NAFTA.

How do you grieve for something you’ve always known was there and is no longer.  For make no mistake.  In its place is something rank, rotten, and speaking with a seemingly forked, barely recognizable tongue.  It spews venom—the venom of divisiveness, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia.  And, yes, ignorance.  It’s a voice that has forgotten or never learned the plain-spoken eloquence of what it means to be America the Beautiful, the land that we loved.

Trump, an unconventional candidate who was caught on tape boasting about accosting women, who advocated banning Muslims from the United States, who has championed mass deportations and building a wall (that Mexico would pay for) to keep out undocumented immigrants, is on the precipice of becoming the most powerful man in the world—backed by a Republican-controlled Congress.