Sixty-plus percent of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump’s presidency.
It should be 100%, but in a divided country like ours 60% is very good. On individual issues his disapproval rate goes higher, with all of them having him under water. In short, the 38% who still back him are a decided minority.
Obviously, most Americans don’t like what Trump is doing, whether it has to do with the economy, ignoring the rule of law, using ICE as the American version of Gestapo police, demonizing all immigrates, using the Justice Department to go after political enemies, damaging international relations, violating international law, using his office to enrich himself and his family, to name a few of the things we hate.
What is noteworthy, though, is the fact that none of us should be surprised we don’t like what Trump is doing. On January 20, 2025, Inauguration Day of his second term, he made it clear that he planned to replace the values by which we have been trying to live as a nation with his own.
He did so when he issued Executive Order 14151, entitled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.” In other words, Trump said he would be a president who rejected America being a nation that believed diversity, inclusion, and equity were qualities that made life better for everyone, values that served the common good.
DEI went far beyond diversity, inclusion, and equity to encompass our being a nation where freedom belonged to everyone, where the rule of law applied to everyone, where unity did not require uniformity and differences did not have to become divisions.
Neither DEI nor the values on which they rested and to which they pointed mattered to Trump because they got in the way of his desire to use and abuse the power of his office in seeking revenge against his critics and opponents while enriching himself and his family in the process.
None of this is disputable, even if it is deniable by die hard Trumpers. The reason it feels as if Trump is destroying America is because he is. He is at war with traditional American values. He is by trying to shape and form the office of the presidency into his own business, his own company, that he runs whatever way he wants to run it as if it belongs to him, not us.
He told us this is what was going to happen his first day in office, and strangely the nation responded with what I would describe as a collective shrug, as if what he was saying he planned to do was no big thing, that his executive order was another meaningless act of no consequence.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course, which is why most of us don’t like what he doing. Turns out, most of us still want the government we’ve had, inadequate as it often is, rather than a despotic king or a crooked autocrat who is accountable to no one.
As much as America has failed to do justice, show kindness, and be humbled before God, Trump was wrong to think we had given up on wanting to do better.
To further his aim, he did what he always does. He lied about what DEI represented. It was never a program for admitting inferior minority students to colleges and universities in place of more qualified white students, or doing the same with jobs and job advancements.
Instead, DEI programs helped qualified minority students, qualified handicapped workers, qualified disadvantaged kids to be included when it was likely they wouldn’t be.
Of course, DEI programs were not a perfect solution to social, racial, mental, and economic discrimination, but they were a well intentioned process whereby our nation could make up lost ground for years and years of intentional discrimination that put generations of minorities behind the eight ball.
When DEI programs intended to reward hard work by making access to success more fair than it had ever been caused intended consequences, the answer should have been to improve them. Instead, Trump chose to attack them, lie about them, and finally to eliminate them to score political points with those in his base who fed on white grievances.
They don’t believe in fairness so they are opposed to efforts to create more diversity in America life, greater inclusion of more and more people that makes a greater degree of economic, social, racial, and gender equity possible.
The majority of us knew we were on the right road as a nation, but too many of us took it for granted. Then Trump got elected again and now most of us see that we’re stuck with a deeply troubled, hopelessly incompetent, and value-less man who as President is breaking everything he touches and is poisoning the spirit of America that once inspired all us with a sense of rightful pride for the nation we were.
That we see what damage he is doing is what matters now, and that the majority of us still believe in the values diversity, inclusion, and equity programs offered that were a practical way to become a better society.
They are now gone, but we are still here, Our beliefs and values are still here. We are the best of America, not Trump, and certainly not Trumpism. That’s what the polls are saying, which is why we who oppose Trump will determine the future of our nation, not him and not his followers.
We’ve had voices like his in the past. In his inaugural speech in 1963, for example, Alabama Governor George Wallace stated what he thought was the future of the South when he declared, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
He was wrong, and he failed. So will Trump. His shadow over the nation is temporary. We are the light we are looking for. The more we let the light of our values shine, the more we push Trump to the sideliness.
And what a perfect time of the year to do so. Christmas and Hanukkah are the seasons of light that remind us that throughout history light has always shined in dark times and no darkness has ever put it out.
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