A #NeverTrump'er reacts to his election

Not that I tweet so often, but I did tweet against Trump several times, using the #NeverTrump hashtag.  Why?  I agreed with him that the country was going the wrong way.  Agreed that Obama had left large swathes of the country behind.  Agreed we need a change.  However, I wanted a Free Market Conservative.  Lower taxes, less regulation, less government intrusion in our daily lives.

Trump promised some of that, but mixed it with protectionism, cronyism, and a buffoonish manner.  When he promised something I don't like (Trade war) I believed him.  When he promised things I do like (Conservative Supreme Court appointments) I didn't believe him.

Like most people, as I watched the returns last night I was expecting to see a quick and painless victory for Hilary Clinton.  Well, maybe not painless ...

Instead, the map refused to turn blue.  Early on, a solid wall of red states went up the middle, symbolically dividing the country in two.  Then the red began to spread, first East, then West.  Ohio?  North Carolina?  Florida?  What was happening?

It seemed just and right that the red states all cohered, as if rebuking my interpretation of division. No, this is what the country is, they said.  Lonely Illinois and New York are the outliers, not us.  It got later and later, I repeatedly resolved to turn it off, but I could not.  Finally when Podesta told the Democrats in the Javits center to go home and get some sleep, I thought "good idea".

Except, I couldn't sleep.  It was clear Trump had won.  Was I happy?  I was happy that Clinton had lost.  I thought it would have been a terrible precedent for her to influence peddle her way into the White House.  The Clinton Global Initiative may have been entirely legal (though we will see) but it was ugly.  It stank.  To use a charity to launder millions of dollars of bribery is disgusting.  To get away with it? Worse.  To become President on the back of it?  Intolerable.

And the emails.  People say it like, you know, everyone has emails, sometimes you delete them, no biggie.  I disagreed.  Had lunch yesterday with a friend who served in the Navy.  Told me he'd spoken to other servicemen about her server, and the way she handled email.  They were disgusted.  Would have been crucified if they'd been as careless as that.

Have you seen “The Imitation Game”?  I've been reading the book it is based on.  “Alan Turing: The Enigma”, by Andrew Hodges.  No spoiler, this is not in the movie: the Germans were reading our codes.  In Bletchley Park, they were working like crazy to break the Naval Enigma to find out where the U-boats were.  The convoys would then be re-routed to avoid them.

Bletchley started seeing that messages were being sent to the subs redirecting them to the convoy’s new position.  Fortunately the allies were not as blind to the possibility of codes being broken as the Germans were, so we changed the weak convoy codes.  However, in the months before we did, the convoy losses were horrific.  Thousands died because of the laxity, the unwillingness to take information security seriously.

Now it is true, that while our nation is currently “at war” in a sense, this is hardly WWII.  On the other hand, the lost convoys sailed more than seventy years ago; these are lessons we should have learned then and never forgotten.  To neglect them is criminal.

So I was not sad she lost.

As for President Trump?  I am praying that he does a good job. What else can I do?