One of the refrains I've heard since Election Day is that Trump hasn't even had a chance to do anything, so stop freaking out and give him a chance. No, thank you, I won't be doing that.
The entirety of the campaign process is about giving the candidates a chance. How do they handle the pressure? How do they balance the need during the primaries to appeal to a very different demographic than during the general election? What are their plans and how feasible are they, given our two-party system? What kind of people do they collect around them to advise and encourage them?
Trump had lots of chances to rise to each or even one of these questions, and he failed miserably. By the end of the campaign, he was only giving interviews to Fox News, showing that he has no regard for the freedom of the press, only for winning. His message was continuously one note and was so poorly received that a majority of registered voters either voted for someone else or stayed home. He kept talking about how he was going to bring back manufacturing jobs, but he gave no indication on how he was going to do that. The people he collected around him were not only known for sexism, racism, and other -isms, but would outright lie about his past and the various accusations raised against him.
So those like me, those protesting, those expressing fear and uncertainty on social media, we feel like we gave this man a chance and he consistently and continuously disappointed and, worse, belittled us. Being asked to give this man a chance is like being told "He didn't really mean to hit you. He's really sorry. Why don't you go back to your abusive husband?"
My question for those of you giving him a chance, then, is, "When do you stop?" Where is your line in the sand? Is it when he appoints the soon-to-be-former chair of a website that pretends that it's a news source but is actually a source of white, male nationalistic trash? When he regards his integrity so little that he would rather settle a lawsuit for fraud than fight to prove the allegations were false? When he demands a group of actors apologize for asking their Vice President Elect to support unity and inclusion? When his response to the slew of hate crimes since his election is to tell people to "stop it" once and then just assume it's all fine again, even though it was the rhetoric of his campaign that unleashed this monster? Probably not, so where is it? Or are you going to appease him all the way to Poland?
