My sad day with President Trump

Donald Trump might as well have ripped the head off the Statue of Liberty and thrown it in New York Harbor in terms of what he did to us on Election Day.

This election was for the soul of the country and the country proved it has lost its soul. To recall the words at the base of Lady Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

The words told immigrants that anybody could come to America, and live here as a free citizen. However, the words no longer fit the country that elected Trump to be President. 

I recently wrote a book about how we’re sold consumer products based on illusions which often give the buyer the exact opposite result of what effect they were seeking. I fear this is the case with Trump.

Trump reminds me of Coca-Cola.  Coke sells you the dream of adventure and romance in a bottle of soda.  What you usually end up with is cavities and obesity.

Trump is selling us prosperity. Forgive me if I am skeptical.  Where is his plan to get us back good paying jobs in manufacturing?  The fact is, those jobs were unionized and the unions were instrumental in helping make those jobs pay well. Republicans don’t like unions. Republicans like low-wage labor. 

Going back to post-war America, labor scarcity and pent-up consumer demand helped push wages up after a long Depression and World War Two. After the war, Europe’s manufacturing capacity was decimated. Asia did not have much of an industrial base either.  

The conditions that created the post-war boom are long gone.  How does Trump plan to compete with manufacturing powers Germany, China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, not to mention textile companies making cheap clothes all over Asia?  Asian manufacturers pay workers pennies per hour, money no American would accept. Another factor here is that much of industrial manufacturing is automated.  In a new factory, you might have 10 employees and 100 robots.  

If Trump implements tariffs on imported goods, he’ll start a trade war and who knows where that will take us? Also, he’ll destroy climate regulations to burn more fossil fuels because he thinks that will stimulate the economy. Climate change is a hoax, he said.

Then, let’s talk about hatred.  The rhetorical knives were out in Trump’s campaign, for Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, African-Americans and any immigrants of color.  What are the chances that Trump’s campaign of prejudice and bigotry may turn into violence against these groups?  

The day after the election was one of the saddest days of my life.  I felt as if my country had been stolen from me.

As my daughter said to me, “We’re in Trump World now,” a world where everyone who is not white and Christian is suspect and where climate change doesn’t exist because Trump said so.

Now I have a yearning to breathe free, a feeling I never needed before. 

Michael Gold,the  author of “Consumer Culture is Consuming Us,” lives and works in the Bronx.