The election results came in on television over a few hours – but the election reaction is still playing out on the internet. Hillary Clinton has asked her supporters to accept the election result. Their anger is spilling out across all social networks as protesters spill into the streets.
Protests in New York City, Chicago, Portland, Miami, and Washington, D.C. were organized in a matter of hours via Facebook events. The first video of those protests was distributed over Snapchat. The revolution might not be televised, but it’s all over the internet.
Several tweeters compared the election date, 11/9, to 9/11 – as if the two were equally disastrous. Others publicly asked for an assassination of Trump or Mike Pence before the pair takes office in January.
Orange is the New Black actress Lea DeLaria posted a photo of a quote about nonviolence on Instagram. She captioned it, “Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f–king republican and independent I see. #f–ktrump #f–ktheGOP #f–kstraightwhiteamerica #f–kyourprivilege.”
The movement reached the corporate world. When a New Balance representative stated his support of president-elect Trump because Trump opposes TPP, some New Balance owners became rather unbalanced. They posted photos on Twitter of their New Balance shoes being lit on fire.
For their part, Hillary’s camp tried to assuage the meltdown. Her concession speech was delayed until late the next morning, but it was worth the wait: She was gracious, grateful, and relaxed. By the time she took to the stage, #NotMyPresident had already been trending on Twitter for several hours. She sought to reverse the tide:
“We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power.”
A day later, she took a different tactic. A woman posted a photo with Hillary after supposedly randomly running into her on a hike in Chappaqua. The hiker who had a chance run-in with the former candidate? The daughter of a woman who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary years ago. The photo went viral – just, as it seemed, they had planned.
Just because the meltdown did not happen on television does not mean that television ignored it: Saturday Night Live lampooned the post-election freakout with a sketch of young New Yorkers watching the election returns and going from confident optimism to a bottle of Xanax. Their sketch ran on the fourth day of protests.
Much ink has been spilled regarding the anger felt by Trump supporters. The anger of working-class white people has been well-documented by reporters sent to Rust Belt towns to observe the people there as if they were zoo animals.
Now the nation faces a different kind of anger: The anger that brings young people into the streets to protest the outcome of a free and fair election. The anger that wants to change how the game is scored only after the game has been played.
