The entire world looked to the United States for an answer last week: who would we elect to the presidency? It seemed the entire nation, and the entire world, sat on the edge of their seats, biting their nails, waiting to breathe a sigh of relief.

Nobody believed Trump would win. News sources like The New York Times and CNN predicted Hillary Clinton had over an 80 percent chance of winning. The Trump campaign even pushed the idea that they would lose, claiming the election was rigged in Clinton’s favor.

What now? The election was never rigged. Trump won. He held the lead for the entire night. Come January, America is his. An America that was built by the exact people and on the exact ideology that he shuns.

Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is insulting to everyone alive today in this country and to everyone in American history who worked for the progress of our nation.

Our nation is built on the very foundation of progress. Without leaders pushing us forward, we never would be where we are.

Without our best and most progressive leaders, America may not have abolished slavery or passed the Civil Rights Act. We may never have passed equal workers’ rights, or survived the Great Depression. We may not have led the world in space exploration or minimized global nuclear threat. We may not have built a nation in which peoples of all races, genders or creeds could live equal lives.

To say that our nation is not a great one minimizes all the progress made by every president, every activist and every American who came before the newest president-elect started his campaign.

Mr. Trump wants to undo the legacy that presidents before him worked so hard to accomplish. Lincoln, Kennedy, FDR and Reagan were men who truly wanted a greater America. They wanted a country that sets an example for the rest of the world.

America, a nation built on the backs of slaves, elected its first African-American president eight years ago. Now, we follow that historic period with a president openly endorsed by the KKK.

America, a nation created by immigrants, by people seeking religious freedom and economic prosperity, has now elected a man who wants to ban people of an entire faith from entering the country and wants to make it harder for immigrants to start lives here after first trying to deport somewhere around three million of them.

Donald Trump’s America is one of hatred, division and fear. That is not the America I grew up in. This is not the America our ancestors envisioned. There is nothing American about Donald Trump’s America.

Contact the writer: [email protected]

Twitter: @WeidnerTWW