We are pleased that our take on many of the issues that separated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the course of the presidential campaign seems to have resonated with voter sentiment in Jewish population clusters served by The Jewish Press, particularly so in Florida, whose 29 electoral votes helped propel Mr. Trump to the presidency.
We had sensed something in play – people were just fed up in every which way – that we thought was eluding pollsters, political strategists, pundits, journalists, and network talking heads. And while the election was a close one, there were lessons in it for both political parties. Yet it appears from the widespread protests greeting Mr. Trump’s victory that the response of many Democrats, at least for a time, will be to act as if the campaign is still continuing, with the results offering no closure after all.
We find this most curious. In the last of the presidential debates, Donald Trump drew widespread ire when he refused to give a full-throated commitment to accept the results of the election, then three weeks away. How then do we reconcile this with the demonstrations of so many Clintonites against Mr. Trump’s victory generally, as well as to specific policy statements and appointments?
Indeed, given the widespread protests, even President Obama was moved to say of the president-elect, “I think it is important for us to let him make his decisions. The American people will judge over the course of the next couple of years whether they like what they see…. [The presidency] has a way of waking you up. Those aspects of his positions or his dispositions that don’t match up with reality, he will find shaken up pretty quick because reality has a way of asserting itself.”
But again, there are those who simply refuse to concede the campaign is over. To them, the aftermath of the election is simply the continuation of politics as usual. Thus, the ADL, through its president, Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Obama staffer, has criticized a senior Trump appointment on the grounds the appointee has problems with Jews – something adamantly refuted by Zionist Organization of America president Mort Klein and the many Jews on the Trump team.
But the ADL has said nothing about the nomination by the highest ranking Democrat in the Senate, New York’s own Chuck Schumer, of outspokenly anti-Zionist Muslim congressman and former Louis Farrakhan staff member Keith Ellison to be the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Attention, diehard Clinton partisans: this is still a democracy and we choose our leaders through elections. So give it a rest, at least for now, and, as prominent Democrats such as President Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Mrs. Clinton herself have urged, give the incoming president a chance. Or perhaps you agree with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who greeted the Trump win by declaring “It’s movement time.” We hope not.