Harper's Weekly "Notes"

November 17, 2016

By Joe Kloc

   

Donald Trump, a real-estate developer endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, was elected president of the United States. Following the election, the Canadian government's immigration website crashed, the Dow Jones temporarily plummeted, two LGBT suicide hotlines reported a spike in call volume, and more than 4.3 million Americans signed a petition asking state electors to pick as president former candidate Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by a margin of at least a million but failed to win a majority in the Electoral College. "The Electoral College is a disaster for democracy," Trump tweeted in 2012. Trump appointed the editor of an alt-right news site as his chief strategist, and more than 400 hate crimes were reported across the country. The mayor of Clay, West Virginia, resigned after commenting favorably on a Facebook post that compared First Lady Michelle Obama to an "Ape in heels"; the deputy director of a corrections center in Memphis, Tennessee, resigned after writing on Facebook that "the KKK is more American" than Barack Obama; a school-board member in Little Rock, Arkansas, was investigated by the superintendent for wearing blackface; students in Indiana, Michigan, and Texas chanted variations of "Build a wall!" during their lunch periods; middle-schoolers in Oregon shouted "Go back to Mexico!" at an 11-year-old Colombian American; a banner that read "Death to Diversity" was hung in a Colorado library; a high-school student in Redding, California, handed out fake "deportation orders" to his minority classmates; a Maryland elementary-school bathroom was vandalized with the message "KILL KILL KILL BLACKS"; a Maryland Episcopal church sign advertising Spanish services was vandalized with the message "Trump Nation Whites Only"; an LGBT-friendly Episcopal church in Indiana was vandalized with a swastika and the words "Heil Trump"; a note reading "You can all go home now" was posted on a Muslim family's front door in Iowa City; a Muslim teacher in Atlanta found a note in her classroom telling her to hang herself with her headscarf; Muslim girls in San Jose and Albuquerque reported having their hijabs forcibly removed from their heads; a Muslim student at the University of Michigan was threatened with immolation; swastikas were drawn on the dorm-room doors of Jewish students at the New School in New York City; "Trump!" was written on the door of a Muslim prayer room at New York University; a college student in Oklahoma threatened in a group messaging app to lynch black students at the University of Pennsylvania; a boy in Pennsylvania carried a Trump sign through the halls of his high school shouting "White power!"; signs advising white women not to date black men appeared on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas; a teacher in a Tampa Bay high school was placed on leave for allegedly threatening to "call Donald Trump and get you sent back to Africa"; a neo-Nazi blogger declared New Balance the "official shoes of white people"; and a neo-Nazi leader of the alt-right movement enjoined his followers to make "brown people ... feel that everything around them is against them." In Orlando, a bald eagle flew into a sewer and died.