How I, a Latina immigrant, feel about America’s new president

I immigrated from Brazil to the UK six years ago with my older brother and sister, as our mother promised us a better life and better opportunities in this new place – 12 hours-on-a-plane away from the rest of our family and everything we knew. Unlike my siblings, I settled in really well. I could speak fluent English within the first year and I was always one of the highest achievers in school. I started working at 16, alongside my A-Levels, and got into university this September. I’m not here to tell you my life story – but all of this information is key for you to fully understand why this has impacted me – and millions of other people like me – so much. While the Brexit result had me feeling a little worried, it was nowhere as scary as the US election results.

What scares me about this year’s US election results is that the person taking over from President Obama, a man who did so much for the United States – from education to healthcare to LGBTQ+ rights – is an accused assaulter, an obvious racist and misogynist. It scares me that the new president of one of the most important countries in the world would see me as a piece of meat, and a bad one at that, for I am both a woman and an immigrant.

Donald Trump’s obscene and extremely sexist remarks are not news to anyone. From justifying sexual assault within the US military simply as “what did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together?” to thinking he had the right to comment on his opposer Hillary Clinton’s sex life on his Twitter account, Trump has proved again and again how little he thinks of women – especially the ugly ones.

As for his blatant racism and xenophobia, we can, once again, easily identify many instances where Trump sounded like nothing more than a good old racist. Even his campaign is built on racism. I mean come on, you seriously don’t think that wanting to build a wall in the border of the US and Mexico in plain 21st century isn’t racist?! Or how he believes all Muslims should be banned from America – for they’re all 100% with ISIS. Uh huh, seems completely legit Trump.

The sole fact that many openly – and proudly – racist entities, such as the KKK (I’m completely serious), support Trump’s campaign and have expressed their happiness over Trump’s victory should be extremely worrying to us.

Of course it’d also be unfair to say that all Trump supporters are racists or sexist; or rather I’d just like to believe that within the 46% of American voters who voted for Trump this election, at least half voted due to misinformation, lack of interest in politics or simply because they believed that Trump symbolises a change in the system. After all, poor Trump only received a very small loan of a million dollars from his dad to start off his business.

Some would consider the American electoral system itself the problem here. The Electoral College system, introduced in 1787, has allowed presidents such as Bush and, now, Trump, to become victorious despite the popular vote showing that the majority of voters actually wanted their opponent in power. Isn’t the ‘majority rule’ technically supposed to be parallel AND integral to a democracy? Not in this case. If America’s voting system was ruled by the majority, which is how a democracy should and usually works,, then Hillary Clinton would be the first female president of the United States of America.

However, I believe that it is important for us to acknowledge that Trump is indeed the new President out of respect for America’s democracy, even if the electoral system is flawed.

It’s also important to remember that Obama still has 2 months left as POTUS before Trump takes over and he seems to be doing as much as he can with his time left in the White House. Just yesterday many news websites revealed that Obama is attempting to protect Planned Parenthood, from anti-abortion, slut shaming, accused rapist Trump, who says he likes kids but “won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”

But, most importantly, we should hope that Trump turns out to be a good president. I’d rather be wrong about my views on him than right