Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat, denounced president-elect Donald Trump’s win Friday in a statement. In it Reid called Trump a “sexual predator who lost the popular vote” and whose impending presidency has “emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.”
Reid, who was first elected to the Senate in 1986, said he had never seen anything like the reactions to Trump’s election. The statement read, “I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics. Hispanic Americans who fear their families will be torn apart, African Americans being heckled on the street, Muslim Americans afraid to wear a headscarf, gay and lesbian couples having slurs hurled at them and feeling afraid to walk down the street holding hands. American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president.”
The day after the election, all kinds of people all over the country posted stories about facing hate speech, including being called racial slurs, being met with Confederate flags, and more.
In his statement, Reid reminded people of Trump’s platform, including his calls to ban Muslims and deport undocumented immigrants. Reid repudiated normalizing Trump, as People magazine seemed to do, despite one of its writers accusing the president-elect of sexual assault.
“Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try,” said Reid. “If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.”
