Last general election, 30% of the voters on Maui, or 22,621 people, voted for Trump for a variety of reasons. You may be one and I hope that you did not vote for Trump because you wanted a billionaire to destroy federal services or Social Security checks paused, or because you wanted Haleakala National Park to be even more understaffed, or because you wanted legal residents to be pulled off the street flown to a foreign country, head shaved, and held in prison indefinitely for the crime of wanting to be an American legally.

You certainly did not vote to crash the stock market and guarantee incredibly high inflation through tariffs, even if you did think tariffs were a good idea.

If you were a Trump voter, (or if you skipped voting) you are now realizing that you were lied to, repeatedly, and that Trump may be controlled by something other than the voters’ desires.

You may feel that the damage is done, and that there’s nothing you could do now, but you won’t make that mistake again.

That’s not good enough. You are obligated to rein in the beast you helped unleash. You don’t need to embrace “leftist” ideology, you need to help preserve democracy. You need to speak out, to reach out to friends and family in red and purple states and encourage them to contact their representatives in government to stop Trump’s excesses.

Otherwise, you may not have the opportunity to make that mistake again.

Mike Wildberger

Kihei