There’s a well-proven theory that America elects presidents that reflect who we are. In the Gilded Age, America felt powerful and invincible and elected Theodore Roosevelt, a man who exuded strength and vitality.

Thirty years later, America was ravaged by a depression, and we elected a president ravaged by polio when we elected Franklin Roosevelt. In 1952, America was booming again. We were commanding. We had won a war and elected the redoubtable Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

In 1976, after the saga and stain of Watergate, we yearned to be thought simple and wholesome and elected the kind and unassuming Jimmy Carter. When Carter told us we were suffering from a “crisis of confidence,” we elected an assertive optimist in Ronald Reagan to prove him wrong.

And in 2024, we elected arguably the most selfish person on the planet, validating that America has become an inherently selfish nation. Like Donald Trump, we are only out for ourselves.

Trump’s phony nationalism and “America First” appeal is a metaphor for “me first.” We care more about our cell phones than we do each other. We manage our social media platforms. We offer only our thoughts and prayers in a comment section and call it a day. We listen to our podcasts. We like our cable news network. We read our news curated personally for us. If you are different, you are not me, and I don’t have the time or fortitude to help you.

It’s all about me, about I, 24/7, and to hell with you. If it doesn’t affect me, I don’t give a damn. 

If you want proof of how we’ve become locked in our worlds, try walking down a street while everyone is on their phone. Or watching a car fly by you on the interstate as the driver fumbles with their phone. The implication? I might run into you or run you off the road, but this text, comment, or call is way more important than you are.

Virtually everyone I see walking their dog is on their phone. Mothers with baby carriages? On their phone. I think, Surely, you can go without your phone to walk your dog or baby.

Trump spends more than half his life hunched over his phone, morning, noon and the middle of the night, posting his thoughts, his invective, his grievances, hisissues. That is a reflection of what we do. And that’s why he won.

All the punditry is busy placing the blame for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss on myriad reasons: Black men, Hispanic men, white women, Joe Biden, Gaza protests, the middle class, and the East Coast elites. On MSNBC’s Morning Joethis week, the panel had the audacity to talk about how the GOP attack on transkids worked. That was the tipping point for me.

The Trump campaign ran disgusting ads — blatant lies — about trans kids as if they were part of a problem in America. The reaction proved that we are more selfish than I ever imagined. We are talking about children. Young lives. How can we be so callous as to ignore their pain? To shrug? To say, “They’re freaks.” “I don’t like that.” O, “So sad, but it’s not my child.”

These are children. And it’s criminal what happened to them, and America just puts their heads back in the phones. What else can distract me from these trans kids?

If everything we do is to help prepare our children for a better world, we failed miserably on Tuesday. If you are a parent and you voted for Trump thinking you were helping your kids, you are more selfish than you realize. “I want my taxes lower.” “I want my grocery prices to be lower.” “I know he’s better for the economy.”

First, factually, if you took any time to look at what his policies would do to the U.S. economy — 14 Nobel laureates said Trump’s policies would be disastrous — you would realize you were ill-informed. 

But this is not about policy. Presidents are role models. They are our leaders. Children look up to them. Presidents have an outsized effect on kids. In Trump, we have the antithesis of a role model. We have a felon, a sex abuser, someone who uses expletives freely, who talks about the size of penises, who talks about people getting shot in the face, and too many other examples of debauchery to fit in this column.

If you opted for this person to be an example to your children, your selfishness knows no bounds.

Presidents can enlighten children and they can scare them too – at least Trump does. As we reported, The Trevor Project, LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention network saw a 200 percent increase in calls to their hotline from kids scared out of their minds about Trump. But parents who think that their children aren’t queer, aren’t thinking about suicide, are normal, could care less that voting for Trump troubles children. 

If you portend to be Christian and you voted for Trump … I have no words. Hide behind Jesus all you want. “I like babies,” someone who was voting for Trump said to me. Trump’s abortion and immigration policies. Trump’s agenda will ruin and shred millions of families. 

Love thy neighbor? Hardly. Love myself more than my neighbor? Exactly.

One of the biggest character traits that goes with being transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, and bigoted is selfishness. You give no thought to what it’s like to walk in other people’s shoes. You are better than they are. You donate old clothes to a shelter and you go to the mall and replace them with new ones so that you can dress to impress.

You only care that the public sees your shoes as nice and shiny, turning your back on anyone who doesn’t wear shoes. “So, sad.” Or a man who wears heels, “So sick.”

If you know anything about history, selfishness is the smoldering undercurrent of an autocracy. Look at any of them, and you’ll see the role of only looking out for yourself. In Nazi Germany, citizens turned their back on Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, women, and people with disabilities to save themselves. Only a brave, selfless few tried to help.

When Trump’s Gestapo tries to hunt down undocumented immigrants, will people rush to turn them in?

I spent over 30 years in PR, and a large part of my job was measuring public mood and sentiment. You had to understand what messages the public would be receptive to before starting a campaign for a brand. Trump’s undercurrent of selfishness, of constantly talking about himself, worked because people only care about themselves. 

Yes, people have always voted for their self-interests, but they also considered — heavily — the character of the person they voted for, and that character reflected the way they thought about themselves or the way they wanted to be seen. 

Before the election, putting my heart above my head, I wrote that America’s better angels, as Lincoln called them, would come through and vote for Harris. I told people that was a wish more than a reality. Because deep down, I knew that America had become too selfish to vote for Harris. 

But we can fix this if we pull our heads up from our phones, put our feet in others’ shoes, and extend our hands to lift someone up. We need to start thinking more about each other and less about ourselves. But I fear that we’re beyond that point, and if we are, God help us.

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