Puja Thakkar had already planned to attend the inauguration of Kamala Harris on January 20 in Washington. A doctor in Danville (California), she managed to obtain two tickets, through an elected representative in Congress, to be present in front of the Capitol. One for her, the other for her 12-year-old daughter, who would share a moment of history and personal history too. Coming from an Indian family settled in Berkeley, like Kamala Harris' mother in the 1970s, the doctor runs a clinic which employs around fifty employees and a tear comes to her eye when she thinks of the energy that she had to deploy to establish herself in a largely male business world.
The doctor had given the employees their day to encourage them to vote. The evening of Tuesday, November 5 was a collapse. “I'm going to sound really naive and stupid, but I really thought Kamala was going to win. » Anger shows in his voice. “At the time, I said to myself that maybe a white woman would have won. But no. There was Hillary Clinton. So what this result translates is that anyone is better than a woman. A criminal is better than a woman! »
For Democratic women, the shock of Donald Trump's re-election was violent. How a “cad” how could he have won? A man who had said during the campaign that he would “protect women, whether they like it or not” ? With the support of 74 million voters? “I no longer trust the Americans. I don’t know any Trump supporters, I don’t know who they are, but I don’t want to know them,” says Holly Marie, a retiree from Washington, who just came out of two days of« hibernation » without talking to anyone or watching the news. “Why there are so many Trump supporters remains a mystery to me. »
Puja Thakkar doesn't understand either. She cannot explain how people who risk suffering from cuts in health insurance or social services voted for the billionaire. One of his employees, whose daughter was pregnant at 16, came to inform him that she had voted for Trump. “I told him, 'Congratulations.' What could I say to him? » Another, of Mexican origin, expressed regret at no longer knowing how to talk to her son, a Trump fan, when their family includes undocumented immigrants. “All this has no rationality”, regrets the clinician, showing a meme circulating on social networks. We see a young person in a t-shirt « Latinos pour Trump » who holds up a sign: « Please deport my mom ! » (“Please deport my mother!”).
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