I think it’s time to address the spray-tanned elephant in the room. This Friday Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.
Faith in the legitimacy of our government is at an all-time low, and with declarations of “Not my president” becoming all too common, political discourse doesn’t look like it will improve in our fair nation. Regardless of who you voted for, it’s time for us to all root for the United States, which will be led by Trump.
And that means we need to hope for his success.
First, let’s get a few things out of the way: I voted for Donald Trump on Election Day. But don’t get me wrong — as someone who identifies as a conservative, I definitely did not vote for him in the Republican primary. In fact, I could not stand the man during that time, and was very vocal about it. I was disappointed with him winning the Republican nomination. Yet Hillary Clinton clearly represented a much bigger threat to my ideology and beliefs than Donald Trump did, and so he won my support easily for the general election.
Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote. But that doesn’t matter, and never has. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote by over 10 percent in 1824 but lost to John Quincy Adams, and Samuel Tilden won the popular vote by 3 percent but lost to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Both of those margins are greater than the margin of 2.1 percent Hillary Clinton obtained.
Our country has intentionally chosen to not use the popular vote to decide the winner of the presidency, in order to ensure that the president has the support of not just the large and powerful states, but most of the states. Is the Electoral College a perfect way of doing this? Of course not, but for now it is the best we have. Besides, if the popular vote was what mattered, the candidates would have campaigned accordingly and the results probably would have been the same.
Now to Russia. Russia did hack the Democratic Party Committee, and revealed information harmful to Clinton’s campaign. But it would be immature to focus on Russia. The thing to focus on is the corruption in the Democratic Party leadership, essentially handing Clinton the Democratic nomination.
I am sure I don’t need to remind anyone about the recording of Trump talking with Billy Bush, with all of its lewd bragging about grabbing genitalia. It is illegal in many states, including California where the recording took place, to record someone without their permission. That tape, illegally obtained, was used by an unknown source to sabotage Trump’s campaign. But we rightly chose to not focus on the questionable means by which that tape was made public, but instead on Trump’s shameful bawdiness in it.
I urge my Democratic friends to do something similar. It has been revealed by intelligence organizations including the Department of Defense and National Security Administration that Russia ordered these hackings to reduce our faith in our institutions. Let’s not let them succeed.
Democracy is hard. It requires standing by the process even when you lose. Conservatives acted up similarly with the election of president Obama, so we aren’t strangers to this issue. Donald Trump is our president. By all means, stand up to the man when you disagree with him. I very well might have to as well, but let us not forget to respect the office into which we elected him.  
Matt Jacobs is a political science senior and news reporter for The Battalion.