The election is over and I am still asking, "Who won?"

Dear Editor,

Trump won the Presidency, but did the American people win as a result? We won't know the answer to that for some time. There are things, however, that disturb me.

There are men and boys chanting "Your body, my choice." There is a juvenile "na, na, na, na, na" trolling appearing on multiple Facebook sites. That is not encouraging.

Trump talked about doing lots of thing during the campaign. He talked about prosecuting his opponents, calling them his enemies. These are fellow Americans. Do the American people believe that those who see the world differently should be punished for doing so?

He has talked about mass deportations of essential workers, besides the inhumanity of that, during a time of low unemployment, how does that improve our economy and bring down the price of essentials?

He has talked about replacing subject field experts in our bureaucracy with people whose only qualifications for the jobs are loyalty to him. Will that serve us and our communities if as a result our food and drugs become less safe and toxic chemicals are allowed to be dumped into our environment?

Will we be well-served when the cost of promised tariffs is passed on to consumers as they almost always are?

These are things to be concerned about, but we don't know if any of them will happen. We can't know because Trump has said many things that never came to be.

Remember "infrastructure week," Trump's repeated promise over 4 years of an infrastructure bill that never happened? It looks like I have broadband in my near future based on the cable sitting at the end of my driveway, but it is a result of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Will Trump's promises made during this campaign be different than the last time?

Trump has a record of lying about a lot of things, maybe he really doesn't plan on implementing many of those awful things in Project 2025, we have to wait and see. Maybe he will actually do something for us this time, but he didn't give us any details during the campaign of what he might do for us. I don't hold out much hope, but I hope I am wrong.

On the State front, who won?

Democrats now have ten more seats in the Assembly and four more seat in the State Senate. That is a win for the Democrats, but is it a win for us? Does this mean that there is a greater possibility of the Legislature getting serious about funding some of our local needs? Might we have increased school funding in our future, maybe affordable childcare, affordable housing, paid family leave? Does it mean that our local county government may have more funds to address our local infrastructure needs?

We don't know. Republican representatives who have resisted putting these things in the state budget are still in the majority, but might the change in overall representation lead to a greater acknowledgement of our needs and a priority to meet them? Let's hope so.

For the time being we don't know what to celebrate and what to grieve. We just need to wait.

Beverly Pestel

Richland Center, WI