By Jen Soriano
There’s a lot of chaos surrounding the 2020 elections. But Filipino Americans understand chaos, don’t we? Many of us work in fields where we cut through crisis and confusion to get the job done: the military, health care, education, government, small businesses, domestic work and more.
So let’s cut through the confusion of the electoral season and get the job done. Let’s vote by mail (it works—take it from a Washingtonian where state residents have been voting exclusively by mail for almost 10 years) or vote in person, and exercise our democratic right to vote Trump out of office. Why?
Well, for starters, we have electoral power and we should use it. Trump’s strategy is to suppress the vote, while ours should be to exercise it.
There are almost 2 million Filipino American eligible voters, making us the second largest group of eligible Asian American voters after Chinese Americans. Only 50% of eligible Fil-Ams actually voted in 2016, so what if we drastically increased that turnout rate in 2020?
According to a 2018 Positively Filipino article by Amarjot Aulakh, Filipino Americans have one of the highest rates of Republican Party registration among Asian Americans, second only to Vietnamese Americans. But there are twice as many of us registered as Democrats (52%), and more who are unaffiliated or registered with a third party (25%) than are registered as Republican (23%).
In 2016, 71% of Fil-Am voters chose Hilary Clinton. I would love to see us grow to a 75% voting rate with more than 80% of eligible voters choosing the logical alternative to another four years of Trump.
Full disclosure, I am an independent voter not registered under any political party. And from this non-partisan perspective, I am here to offer 5 reasons why anyone who takes pride in being Filipino American (yes, even registered Republicans) should exercise their vote against Donald Trump.
Trump doesn’t care about Filipino people.
To remix a moment from when Kanye West made sense, Donald Trump doesn’t care about Filipino people. According to a survey by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, almost 2/3 of 2016 Filipino Americans voters polled were immigrants. Despite being married to an immigrant, Donald Trump shows little empathy for people who come to this country in the hopes for a better life; he had money and luxury handed to him by his father, who routinely had to bail him out of Trump’s bad business decisions, and apparently can’t identify with what it’s like to struggle and be an underdog.
If Trump really cared about Filipinos, he wouldn’t use racist language about foreigners coming from “shithole countries” or call Filipinos “animals” from a “terrorist” nation (yes, he did).
If Trump really cared about Filipino-Americans he would have been a coronavirus fighter instead of a coronavirus denier and now, a coronavirus spreader. According to Pro Publica, Filipino-Americans are four times as likely to be nurses as any other ethnic group. If Trump cared about us, he would have made sure that all nurses and doctors got PPE as soon as possible to protect themselves and their patients in the line of duty. Instead, eight months into the pandemic, nurses are still working without proper PPE and are facing sickness, death and trauma “similar to times of war.”
If Trump really cared about Filipino-Americans he would stop calling the coronavirus the “China Virus,” which has led to a spike in bias and violence against Asian Americans, including Filipinos. He would also disavow white supremacist hate groups. Instead, during the first debate with Biden he told them to “stand back and stand by.” White militias took this as a rallying cry, which was likely his intention all along, because Trump knows he needs these hate groups to stay in power.
By pandering to these violent racists, Trump would have us go back to the days of the Watsonville riots when a white mob 500-strong dragged Filipinos out of their homes and beat them, injuring many and killing a 22-year old farmworker. Trump would have us go back to the days when businesses had signs that said “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.”
Trump doesn’t care about families
Just look at his own family. Reports show that Trump has violated the supposed sanctity of his three marriages with multiple affairs, from Marla Maples to porn star Stormy Daniels. He’s been accused of sexual harassment by at least 19 women, and was caught on tape saying he could get away with grabbing women by the “p—-” and that he “tried to f—” a married woman. Is this the behavior of a family man?
Meanwhile, Joe and Jill Biden have celebrated more than 42 years of a loving marriage.
In Trump’s family kindness is practically a sin. He treats his own children like apprentices, not like people to love (except for his sexually inappropriate infatuation with daughter Ivanka).
Trump is anti-family migration, supporting a plan that prohibits parents, siblings and adult children of U.S. citizens from coming to the country. Many Filipino Americans are here today because of the 1965 immigration policy that eliminated national origin quotas from non-European countries and allowed for family reunification. This is a large part of why many of us are able to be here so-called “legally.” Trump supports an immigration system that bans most family members from citizenship (and would have banned his own family from coming to the U.S.), and turns them into criminals for wanting to reunite as intergenerational families in America.
We know our family members are not criminals. Let’s elect a president who sees our family members as what they are: human beings, who deserve reasonable and not racist immigration policy.
Trump doesn’t actually care about the issues you care about
Trump does not respect the military. He has called fallen soldiers and marines “losers” and “suckers.” He has routinely mocked the military for most of his life because his narcissism doesn’t allow him to comprehend dignified service or self-sacrifice. Even top military brass like retired General James Mattis and retired Admiral Mike Mullen have criticized Trump’s dangerous lack of leadership, while 55 others have declared him unfit to lead.
Trump does not respect life. Many Filipino American Republicans are pro-lifers who vote for the candidate who will restrict abortion. Catholic teachings about abortion state, “God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being.”
Trump callously reserves the right to destroy the lives of innocent children by supporting an immigration policy that separates mothers from their babies while breastfeeding and forces toddlers to appear in court crying and alone. Scientific studies have shown that this type of early childhood trauma can cause enduring suffering and prematurely end lives.
Trump is a man of little faith who belittles believers and essentially thinks he is God. Meanwhile, Biden is a devoted Irish Catholic.
Trump does not respect law and order. Trump is far better at creating confusion and chaos than he is at upholding the law. His bad decision to send in Federal agents to Portland caused more violence and chaos than the protests themselves, which is exactly what he wanted. Trump’s own track record of bending laws to benefit his greed shows just how little he respects the rule of law. Trump has exploited tax law to pay only $750 dollars in taxes in 2017, far less than most of us, and it’s probably safe to say that most of us have not inherited the $413 million dollars he was handed by his father (accumulated largely by tax dodges).
Trump doesn’t care about your health. He has regularly attacked Medicare and Medicaid which many Filipino Americans rely on for quality accessible health care. He clearly doesn’t understand the scale of unemployment we are facing during the pandemic, and how many people no longer have employer-based private healthcare to turn to. He also doesn’t care that the drugs he benefitted from while hospitalized for COVID-19 might never be affordable to the rest of us. Case in point: Trump was given doses of remdesivir to aid his recovery, but because he refused to ensure safeguards against price gouging, this same drug would cost 3,000-6,000 dollars, making it unaffordable to many and out of reach for the uninsured.
Trump hates people power
Trump would have called the 1986 People Power uprising that peacefully removed Marcos from power, “a violent mob.” He lashes out against dissent and labels much of what threatens his power “violent,” while stoking violence with his own words and actions.
Trump is already saying that if he doesn’t win the election, it’s because the election is rigged. Of course, if he does win, the election in his mind will have been fair.
Trump is against people power in the streets and he is against people power through the ballot, which means he is against democracy. He has threatened press freedom and attacked members of the media, including Fox journalists like Chris Wallace who are just trying to tell it like it is. He is trying to suppress votes, he has said he won’t stand for losing the election, and the likelihood that he himself will incite violence in order to hold on to power is high.
Is this democracy or dictatorship?
Trump only loves his own power
Trump is not taking charge of anything except consolidating his own power. Under Trump’s watch, we have topped more than 200,000 coronavirus deaths, more than the number of American soldiers who died during WWI and the Vietnam War combined. We have 1/5 of the world’s cases of the deadly disease, even though we have only 4% of the world’s population. When faced with the pandemic, the economic crisis, and climate crisis Trump’s main form of “leadership” has been compulsively sending narcissistic tweets. We need a leader who will think collectively, about those of us on main street and not just about himself and fueling his campaign for even more damaging authoritarian power.
Enough is enough. Let’s use this opportunity to vote Trump out. A vote for Trump is not a vote for the issues you care about. It’s a vote for depraved leadership, authoritarianism, and economic and climate insecurity for ourselves and our children. As the Republicans of the Lincoln Project understand, anyone is better than Trump.
Let’s celebrate Filipino American History Month by being on the right side of history. All of us Filipino Americans — and frankly, all Filipinos in the diaspora affected by Trump’s terrible foreign policies — deserve better.
Jen Soriano is a second-generation Filipina American and a freelance writer who has worked for The Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones.
