Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both asked if they could be devoted to everyone in the United States if elected. A question surely based on both of their comments from throughout the 2016 campaign, possibly one candidate more than other, each party’s answer was very different from the other. While Donald Trump brought up Clinton’s “deplorables” comments from over the summer and seemed to insinuate that all black people lived in inner cities, Hillary discussed how proud she was to be re-elected as a Senator and what her constituents mean to her. A few examples of her previous devotion to the country included her work at the Children’s Defense Fund and as a lawyer fighting against discrimination:
Well, 67% of the people voted to reelect me when I ran for my second term. And I was very proud and very humbled by that. Mr. Carter, I have tried my entire life, to do what I can to support children and families. You know, right out of law school I went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund. And Donald talks a lot about, you know, the thirty years I’ve been in public service. I am proud of that. You know, I started off as a young lawyer working against discrimination against African-American children in schools and in the criminal justice system. I worked to make sure that kids with disabilities could get a public education. Something that I care very much about. I have worked with Latinos, one of my first jobs in politics was down in South Texas registering Latino citizens to be able to vote.
She also brought up a story about a small boy from Ethiopia whose mother wrote Hillary, saying that her adopted son was worried about being sent back to the country he was adopted form if Trump was elected President:
So I have a deep devotion to use your absolutely correct word. To making sure that every American feels like he or she has a place in our country. I think when you look at the letters that I get, a lot of people are worried that maybe they wouldn’t have a place in Donald Trump’s America. They write me — woman wrote me about her son Felix, he adopted him from Ethiopia when he was a toddler. He is ten years old now. This is the only country he has ever known. And he listens to Donald on TV and he said to his mother one day, will he send me back to Ethiopia if he gets elected?
While this may or may not be yet another example of a mother putting her own worries into her child’s mouth to make an important and necessary point that people will pay attention to if a child is saying it, it’s a heartbreaking theory and one that everyone should think about on Election Day. Not only will each candidate’s rhetoric affect people of voting age in drastically different ways, it will also affect the children of the country as well.
