[Note by Tom Gross]
This is the second of two dispatches today about the American elections. I have split this into two emails for space reasons.
I attach a number of articles. I don’t agree with all points in them.
Regarding the fifth article, only Turkey’s despotic President Erdogan would come up with something so uncalled for as issuing an official travel warning to the U.S. after the anti-Trump protests.
CONTENTS
1. “I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump.” (By Asra Nomani, Washington Post, Nov. 10, 2016)
2. “The unbearable smugness of the press” (By Will Rahn, CBS News, Nov. 10, 2016)
3. “NY Times: We blew it on Trump” (By Michael Goodwin, NY Post, Nov. 11, 2016)
4. “NeverTrumpers should not shun Trump” (By Max Boot, USA Today, Nov. 13, 2016)
5. “Turkey issues warning over travel to U.S. after Trump protests” (Reuters, Nov. 12, 2016)
6. “Celebs who said they’d leave country if Trump won” (By Melanie Zanona, The Hill, Nov. 9, 2016)
7. “Ivana wants to be Trump’s ambassador to Czech Republic” (NY Post, Nov. 13, 2016)
I’M A MUSLIM, A WOMAN AND AN IMMIGRANT. I VOTED FOR TRUMP
I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump.
By Asra Q. Nomani
Washington Post
November 10, 2016
(Also video here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2016/11/10/im-a-muslim-a-woman-and-an-immigrant-i-voted-for-trump/)
A lot is being said now about the “silent secret Trump supporters.”
This is my confession – and explanation: I – a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” – am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”
In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.
But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Tuesday evening, just minutes before the polls closed at Forestville Elementary School in mostly Democratic Fairfax County, I slipped between the cardboard partitions in the polling booth, a pen balanced carefully between my fingers, to mark my ballot for president, coloring in the circle beside the names of Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence.
After Hillary Clinton called Trump to concede, making him America’s president-elect, a friend on Twitter wrote a message of apology to the world, saying there are millions of Americans who don’t share Trump’s “hatred/division/ignorance.” She ended: “Ashamed of millions that do.”
That would presumably include me – but it doesn’t, and that is where the dismissal of voter concerns about Clinton led to her defeat. I most certainly reject the trifecta of “hatred/division/ignorance.” I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change.
But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.
Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
In mid-June, after the tragic shooting at Pulse, Trump tweeted out a message, delivered in his typical subtle style: “Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn’t he should immediately resign in disgrace!”
Around then, on CNN’s “New Day,” Democratic candidate Clinton seemed to do the Obama dance, saying, “From my perspective, it matters what we do more than what we say. And it mattered we got bin Laden, not what name we called him. I have clearly said we – whether you call it radical jihadism or radical Islamism, I’m happy to say either. I think they mean the same thing.”
By mid-October, it was one Aug. 17, 2014, email from the WikiLeaks treasure trove of Clinton emails that poisoned the well for me. In it, Clinton told aide John Podesta: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL,” the politically correct name for the Islamic State, “and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton. Yes, I want equal pay. No, I reject Trump’s “locker room” banter, the idea of a “wall” between the United States and Mexico and a plan to “ban” Muslims. But I trust the United States and don’t buy the political hyperbole – agenda-driven identity politics of its own – that demonized Trump and his supporters.
I gently tried to express my thoughts on Twitter but the “Pantsuit revolution” was like a steamroller to any nuanced discourse. If you supported Trump, you had to be a redneck.
Days before the election, a journalist from India emailed me, asking: What are your thoughts being a Muslim in “Trump’s America”?
I wrote that as a child of India, arriving in the United States at the age of 4 in the summer of 1969, I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a “Trump America.” The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition.
What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships.
We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind, I finished in my reflections to the journalist in India.
He didn’t get the email. I didn’t resend it, afraid of the wrath I’d receive. But, then, I voted.
THE UNBEARABLE SMUGNESS OF THE PRESS
Commentary: The unbearable smugness of the press
By Will Rahn, CBS News political correspondent
CBS News
November 10, 2016
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!
That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.
Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.
That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.
As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions. We can’t even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too certain that what we find will serve to justify our biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further -- fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup -- which starts the cycle anew.
There’s a place for opinionated journalism; in fact, it’s vital. But our causal, profession-wide smugness and protestations of superiority are making us unable to do it well.
Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.
What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.
We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.
NEW YORK TIMES: WE BLEW IT ON TRUMP
New York Times: We blew it on Trump
By Michael Goodwin
New York Post
November 11, 2016
The Gray Lady feels the agony of political defeat – in her reputation and in her wallet.
After taking a beating almost as brutal as Hillary Clinton’s, the New York Times on Friday made an extraordinary appeal to its readers to stand by her. The publisher’s letter to subscribers was part apology and part defense of its campaign coverage, but the key takeaway was a pledge to do better.
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. admitted the paper failed to appreciate Donald Trump’s appeal.
“After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?”
While insisting his staff had “reported on both candidates fairly,” he also vowed that the paper would “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor.”
Ah, there’s the rub. Had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it wouldn’t need to rededicate itself to honest reporting. And it wouldn’t have been totally blindsided by Trump’s victory.
Instead, because it demonized Trump from start to finish, it failed to realize he was onto something. And because the paper decided that Trump’s supporters were a rabble of racist rednecks and homophobes, it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president.
Sulzberger’s letter alludes to this, promising that the paper will “striv[e] always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.”
But bad or sloppy journalism doesn’t fully capture the Times sins. Not after it announced that it was breaking its rules of coverage because Trump didn’t deserve fairness.
As media columnist Jim Rutenberg put it in August, most Times reporters saw Trump “as an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate” and thus couldn’t be even-handed.
That wasn’t one reporter talking – it was policy. The standards, developed over decades to force reporters and editors to be fair and to build public trust, were effectively eliminated as too restrictive for the Trump phenomenon.
The man responsible for that rash decision, top editor Dean Baquet, later said the Rutenberg piece “nailed” his thinking, and went on to insist that Trump “challenged our language” and that, “He will have changed journalism.”
Baquet also said of the struggle for fairness, “I think that Trump has ended that struggle,” adding: “we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.”
Baquet was wrong. Trump indeed was challenging, but it was Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be broken without consequence.
After that, the floodgates opened, and virtually every so-called news article reflected a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton. Stories, photos, headlines, placement in the paper – all the tools were used to pick a president, the facts be damned.
Now the bill is coming due. Shocked by Trump’s victory and mocked even by liberals for its bias, the paper is also apparently bleeding readers – and money.
I’ve gotten letters from people who say they cancelled their Times subscriptions and, to judge from a cryptic line in a Thursday article, the problem is more than anecdotal.
Citing reader anger over election coverage, Rutenberg wrote that, “Most ominously, it came in the form of canceled subscriptions.”
Having grown up at The Times, I am pained by its decline. More troubling, as the flagship of American journalism, it is giving all reporters a black eye. Its standards were the source of its credibility, and eliminating them has made it less than ordinary.
It is because of those concerns that I repeat a suggestion about how to fix the mess. Because he now concedes a problem, perhaps Sulzberger will consider taking action.
Using an outside law firm or even in-house reporters, he must assess how and why Baquet made the decision to sever the paper from its roots. He must assess the impact on reporters and editors, and whether they felt pressure to conform their stories to Baquet’s political bias.
Whatever the findings, the publisher must insist that the standards of fairness again become a fundamental tenet in the news room. As an added guarantee, he must insist that the paper enlarge its thinking about diversity to include journalists who disagree with the Times embedded liberal slant. There has to be a difference of perspective to judge where fairness lies.
Readers, and former readers, should be part of the process. Many already know that the paper must get its head out of parochial New York and into the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere.
This is about survival. If it doesn’t change now, the Gray Lady’s days surely are numbered.
To our readers,
When the biggest political story of the year reached a dramatic and unexpected climax late Tuesday night, our newsroom turned on a dime and did what it has done for nearly two years – cover the 2016 election with agility and creativity.
After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters? What forces and strains in America drove this divisive election and outcome? Most important, how will a president who remains a largely enigmatic figure actually govern when he takes office?
As we reflect on this week’s momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.
We cannot deliver the independent, original journalism for which we are known without the loyalty of our subscribers. We want to take this opportunity, on behalf of all Times journalists, to thank you for that loyalty.
Sincerely,
Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.
Publisher
Dean Baquet
Executive Editor
New York Times
NEVERTRUMPERS (LIKE MAX BOOT) SHOULD NOT SHUN TRUMP
NeverTrumpers should not shun Trump
Checks and balances on a president’s national security powers have never been more important.
By Max Boot
USA Today
November 13, 2016
The president of the United States has vast power – nearly unlimited in the realm of foreign affairs. He can order U.S. troops into combat. He can bomb any country he wants. He can round up illegal immigrants. He can spy on millions of people. Soon all that power will be in the hands of Donald J. Trump, hardly the most sober and restrained individual ever to occupy the Oval Office.
The checks and balances in our system will be more important in his administration than in any other. If Trump truly misbehaves, there is always the possibility he could be impeached. But let’s hope it never comes to that because it would be a terrible ordeal. The courts can also provide a check on some of his executive orders, but they seldom interfere in foreign affairs. Eventually, the voters will get another say. In the short term, however, the most important checks are political appointees, career professionals and legislators.
Trump’s appointees to high-level positions will be of immense importance especially in the realm of national security, where he knows little. The top three layers of jobs at the State Department, the Department of Defense and the National Security Council are the key ones: the secretaries of State and Defense, the deputy secretaries and the assistant secretaries, or at the NSC, the national security adviser, the deputy adviser and the senior directors.
By now, most presidential campaigns would have signed up multiple contenders for every position. That hasn’t been true with Trump, who confronts a schism the likes of which we have never seen before within the national security community.
I was one of 122 national security experts who signed a letter opposing Trump. The temptation now for me and my fellow #NeverTrumpers is to want nothing to do with a candidate we considered unfit for office. The temptation for Trump is to want nothing to do with people who considered him unfit. For the good of the country, I hope the two sides can come together.
Trump could learn something from Richard Nixon who, after winning the 1968 election, appointed as his national security adviser a Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger, whom he barely knew and who had spent the previous decade working for his opponent, Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon was famous for holding grudges, but even he realized the importance of reaching across the intra-Republican divide to get the best minds into his administration rather than simply rewarding his campaign loyalists. If Trump is half as smart as he thinks he is, he will emulate Nixon’s example, and he will not be threatened by the prospect that some of his nominees will disagree with him.
It is vitally important that a president get a full range of views, and that he appoint people who are willing to stand up to him when he’s wrong. Kissinger wrote that those close to Nixon “were expected, we believed, to delay implementing more exuberant directives, giving our president the opportunity to live out his fantasies and yet to act, through us, with the calculation that his other image of himself prescribed.” Trump’s appointees will need to perform a similar function – if he will let them.
That is true as well for the professional government employees who stay on regardless of administration. There are 2.6 million civilian employees of the executive branch and 1.5 million uniformed military personnel. Many of them, especially in agencies such as the State Department and the CIA, where the general political outlook is liberal, will be tempted to quit in disgust because they cannot fathom working for a man like Trump.
As a #NeverTrumper I sympathize with their concerns, but I hope that they will hold their noses and continue to do their jobs as long as they are not asked to do anything unethical or illegal. And if they are asked to take such steps – for instance if Trump carries out his threats to order torture “worse than waterboarding” or to kill relatives of terrorists – their refusal to act will safeguard the rule of law.
The third important check on Trump will be Congress and especially the Senate, which must confirm his top nominees. There are only 51 Republicans, 52 if they win a December runoff in Louisiana – not enough to stop a filibuster. And if even two or three of them defect, that should be enough to defeat any Trump initiative or nominee. That will place huge potential power in the hands of a small number of principled #NeverTrump Republicans such as Sens. Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake. They should not and will not act to block Trump indiscriminately, but they can and should try to stop him if he acts recklessly. They should begin to exercise their power now by quietly urging the president-elect to appoint people of unimpeachable judgment and integrity to top-level jobs.
Trump can be a successful president if he behaves less erratically than he did during the campaign. It will be up to those who work with him on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to save him from himself.
BERNIE SANDERS STATEMENT ON TRUMP
Senator Sanders Statement on Trump
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-trump
BURLINGTON, Vt., Nov. 9 – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement Wednesday after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States:
“Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer.
“To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.”
TURKEY ISSUES WARNING OVER TRAVEL TO U.S. AFTER TRUMP PROTESTS
Turkey issues warning over travel to U.S. after Trump protests
Reuters
November 12, 2016
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey warned its citizens about travel to the United States on Saturday in response to what the foreign ministry called increasingly violent protests against President-elect Donald Trump.
“Within the context of risks caused by the incidents and of social tension, our citizens who live in the U.S., or who are considering traveling there, should be cautious,” the ministry said in a statement.
Demonstrators planned to gather again on Saturday in U.S. cities nationwide to protest against Trump, whose election they say poses a threat to their civil and human rights, a day after a protester was shot in Portland, Oregon.
Last month, the U.S. State Department updated its travel warning on Turkey, ordering family members of consulate employees in Istanbul to leave the country, citing threats against U.S. citizens.
There has been growing tension between the two NATO allies after repeated calls from Turkey to extradite U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara blames for a failed coup in July.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Wednesday he hoped for an improvement in bilateral ties after Trump’s victory, and again called for Gulen’s extradition.
CELEBS WHO SAID THEY’D LEAVE COUNTRY IF TRUMP WON
Celebs who said they’d leave country if Trump won
By Melanie Zanona
The Hill
November 9, 2016
Dozens of celebrities vowed to leave the country if Donald Trump won the White House, saying they’d flee to everywhere from Canada to Jupiter.
The threat is a common one after any election outcome: Canada’s immigration website crashed from heavy traffic as it looked increasingly likely that Trump would win.
But after the real estate mogul clinched the presidency in a stunning victory early Wednesday morning, some of those stars will face questions about making good on their promise.
Here is a list of some of the celebs who claimed they would move out of the U.S. under a Trump administration.
ACTORS
Bryan Cranston said he hopes he doesn’t have to pack his bags, but would “definitely move” if Trump won. “Absolutely, I would definitely move,” the “Breaking Bad” star said on “The Bestseller Experiment” podcast. “It’s not real to me that that would happen. I hope to God it won’t.”
Samuel L. Jackson slammed Trump for running a “hate”-filled campaign and said he would move to South Africa if he wins. “If that motherf---er becomes president, I’m moving my black ass to South Africa,” the movie star quipped to Jimmy Kimmel.
Lena Dunham told Andy Cohen at the Matrix Awards that “I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this, but I really will. I know a lovely place in Vancouver.” The star and creator of HBO’s “Girls” has been a vocal advocate for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
Neve Campbell, an actress on the political drama “House of Cards,” vowed to move back home to Canada, while “Orange is the New Black” actress Natasha Lyonne said she would hightail it to a mental hospital.
SINGERS
Cher tweeted this summer that if Trump gets elected, “I’m moving to Jupiter.”
Miley Cyrus wrote in an emotional Instagram post in March that tears were running down her cheek and she was unbelievably scared and sad. “I am moving if he is president,” the young pop star said. “I don’t say things I don’t mean!”
Barbara Streisand, a vocal Clinton supporter, told “60 Minutes” that “I’m either coming to your country if you’ll let me in, or Canada.”
Ne-Yo told TMZ last month that he’d move to Canada and be neighbors with fellow R&B singer Drake if the country elected Trump.
COMEDIANS
Comedian Amy Schumer said in September that Spain would be her destination of choice.
“My act will change because I will need to learn to speak Spanish,” Schumer said in an appearance on the BBC’s “Newsnight.” “Because I will move to Spain or somewhere. It’s beyond my comprehension if Trump won. It’s just too crazy.”
Chelsea Handler said she already made contingency plans months ago.
“I did buy a house in another country just in case,” the comedian and talk show host said during an appearance on “Live with Kelly and Michael” in May. “So all these people that threaten to leave the country and then don’t – I actually will leave that country.”
Former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart said he would consider “getting in a rocket and going to another planet, because clearly this planet’s gone bonkers” if the real estate mogul wins.
Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of the “The View”, said on an episode of the talk show earlier this year that if the country elects Trump, “maybe it’s time for me to move, you know. I can afford to go.”
Keegan-Michael Key said he would flee north to Canada. “It’s like, 10 minutes from Detroit,” the comedian told TMZ in January. “That’s where I’m from; my mom lives there. It’d make her happy too.”
Hispanic comedian George Lopez said Trump “won’t have to worry about immigration” if he takes the White House because “we’ll all go back.”
POLITICAL FIGURES
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joked in an interview with The New York Times in July that it’d be time to move to New Zealand if Trump were to win.
“Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,” she said quoting her husband who died in 2010. “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be – I don’t even want to contemplate that.”
Ginsburg later apologized for her comments, calling them “ill-advised.”
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton told a reporter earlier this year that he’s “reserving my ticket out of here if [Trump] wins.”
See also:
New York Post: Ivana wants to be Trump’s ambassador to Czech Republic
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