RUTHFULLY YOURS

Perhaps they’re already packing their golden parachutes to bail out and ensure themselves a soft landing in the rocky terrain of the real world: Loretta Lynch, the purchasable Attorney General, and FBI Director James Comey, the less-than-puissant fellow who couldn’t make up his mind if Hillary was made for prison stripes or not. They certainly are not going to be in a Trump administration.

During one of the presidential debates, Donald Trump told Clinton “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation…” He then added, “because you’d be in jail.” Hillary countered that she was glad someone like him wasn’t in charge of the laws in the United States.

The “situation” is that, among her other crimes, she was found eminently indictable for having endangered the nation’s security by operating a hackable, freelance server over which she passed and received documents relating to her office as Secretary of State, many marked “confidential” and “secret,” in complete contravention of the rules of the office. FBI Director Comey, however, buggered out of the responsibility for asking the Department of Justice for a warrant. And then:

In late October, Rudy Giuliani, a Donald Trump surrogate and advisor, told Martha MacCallum of Fox News that “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days” was coming from the Trump campaign.[] Giuliani later explained he did not have insider FBI information. Later confirmed by a second law enforcement source, an unnamed government source told Fox News that the email metadata on the computer in question contained “positive hits for state.gov and HRC emails,” however, at the time Comey sent his letter to Congress, the FBI had still not obtained a warrant to review any of the e-mails in question and was not aware of the content of any of the e-mails in question.

On October 28, 2016, less than two weeks before the presidential election, Comey announced in a letter to Congress that the FBI learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s email server and the FBI will take steps to allow investigators to review these emails “to determine whether they contain classified information as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” Director Comey stated in the letter that he was writing the letter to “supplement his previous testimony” before Congress

This may come as a shock to the political left, but not everyone who opposed Donald Trump is as angry or despondent as the demonstrators who grabbed headlines nationwide over the past week or the pundits who intellectualized the Democratic hissy fit.

On Monday I took a stroll around New York City’s Harlem neighborhood and asked a couple of dozen black residents to respond to the election and subsequent protests. I didn’t come across any Trump voters—or at least any who admitted it—but many told me they had expected Hillary Clinton’s defeat. No one thought it was the end of the world.

“Hillary wasn’t strong enough. She didn’t fight enough,” said a gentleman leaving a drugstore, who introduced himself as Pace. “People saw her as weak and thought she’d be weak in the White House.” He also faulted Mrs. Clinton’s message. “She was talking about what she did in other countries as secretary of state. I can understand the situation around the world, but we live here.” Mr. Trump, in contrast, “was talking about the people who live here—the poor, the veterans.”

When I asked Pace, who retired from a job in dress manufacturing several years ago, if he thought Mr. Trump would ever win him over, he responded: “He said he’d protect Medicare. I can go along with that. He said he’d get rid of the Bloods and the Crips and the gangs—get them out of here. I like that. If he does those two things, he’s my man.”

At a nearby hair salon, the proprietor, a 30-something West African woman who asked me not to use her name, said Mrs. Clinton lost because the country “didn’t want a female president, wasn’t ready for it.” Still, she’s optimistic about a Trump administration. “I think things will be different in a good way. He might surprise us. I don’t think he’s a bad person. It’s just the way he talks. He was real and people like that. I don’t think he’ll do the really crazy things like deporting everybody.”

Derrick, an off-duty police officer, told me that he considers Mr. Trump a con artist who tricked people into voting for him and won’t come through, especially on his promise to bring back manufacturing jobs. “But I’ll give him this,” he said. “She was not talking about securing this country, and that’s what he was talking about. People are watching people get blown up by these terrorists, and they’re scared, and she was talking about an open border. She didn’t emphasize scrutinizing the people who are coming in, and he did.”

Outside a storefront church on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Bishop Gibson sat staring at his smartphone. He was eager to get some things off his chest when I approached. “First, it doesn’t bother me a bit if Trump is in there or not,” he said. “I don’t lose a minute’s sleep. My president is Jesus.” The bishop told me that some of his congregants were concerned about what the new president would do, but not enough to be demonstrating in the streets. “I don’t understand. You’re protesting, you’re rioting, but did you vote? Some did, but a lot didn’t.”

Bishop Gibson said Mr. Trump’s “law and order” message resonated with Harlemites but that ultimately “the president can’t do much about crime.” It has to start with the communities—churches, families and fathers in particular, he said.

Since last Wednesday, when Donald Trump was officially declared the winner of the U.S. presidential election, college professors across the country have been excusing their students from classes and exams to engage in a form of collective mourning not seen since the bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Psychological services were immediately made available to those young adults, who were old enough to vote for Hillary Clinton but too fragile to accept the victory of a candidate not to their liking.

No wonder these infants in adult bodies — the best and the brightest of the land of the free, whose mommies and daddies are forking out obscene sums for their higher education — had the nerve to take to social media and equate 11/9 with 9/11.

Not all students opted to stay home or stage protests with signs reading “Trump is not my president.” Some actually turned up on campus, to be coddled and embraced by like-minded teachers and administrators concerned for their mutual well-being. Tufts University in Massachusetts, for example, made an arts and crafts center available to students they thought might fare better with finger-painting than with a lecture on the Constitution and Founding Fathers.

The University of Kansas provided therapy dogs for the bereaved campus community. You know, the kind of canines that serve the war-wounded and shell-shocked who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and watched their fellow soldiers being blown to bits, while their peers back home were safe and sound in the halls of Harvard, dissecting the literary works of Bob Dylan.

To make the process of infantilization complete, the University of Michigan offered its devastated students Play-Doh, crayons and coloring books. Perhaps the instructors handing out the clay assuaged the fears of the poor darlings, who reportedly have been running out to stock up on birth control before Trump’s inauguration in January. But, given their behavior, they should probably be hoarding diapers for themselves instead.