Deval Patrick following Trump’s election: “I will, as the kids say, ‘stay woke'”
The former Massachusetts governor says he is "sad, disturbed, embarrassed — but not surprised" that Donald Trump won.
Deval Patrick is still absorbing the fact that Donald Trump won.
In an email to supporters Monday obtained by Politico, Patrick said he was at a hotel in Detroit “dozing fitfully” on election night. When he woke up to the result, the former Massachusetts governor thought he was dreaming.
“The truth is I’m still trying to understand,” he said. “I am sad, disturbed, embarrassed — but not surprised.”
As he previously described in an interview last August, Patrick wrote that he believed Trump was “on trend” with global rises in intolerance and bully-style leadership, a national obsession with wealth and reality TV-style entertainment, and, lastly, the Republican Party.
“Trump just said out loud what they’ve been saying in code for years,” he wrote, though later adding that as “odious” as some of Trump’s behavior and positions were, he spoke to a real sense of “displacement and frustration and voicelessness of working people in all corners of the country.”
That said, Patrick pledged to not oppose everything Trump’s administration does before he takes office, calling Republican leaders’ uncompromising opposition to President Barack Obama during the Democrat’s first term “repugnant and unpatriotic.”
“I will, as the kids say, ‘stay woke,'” the 60-year-old former governor said. “I will remain vigilant and informed. And I will listen, the way Louis Pasteur admonished the educated person always to listen, without losing my temper or my self-confidence.”
Read Patrick’s full letter—which only references 19th century French chemists once—over at Politico Massachusetts.
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