Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday urged Americans who share her views not to “despair” at the election of Donald Trump and instead help the incoming president reach “the right decisions.”

Bill Press, a liberal radio host who interviewed Justice Sotomayor before a small audience, asked if she felt “apprehensive” over Mr. Trump’s victory in last week’s presidential election.

“I’m going to demur from answering that question that way,” she said. “I will answer it in a different way, which is I think that this is the time where every good person has an obligation to both to continue being heard and to continue doing the right thing,” she said.

“We can’t afford for a president to fail,” she said, speaking at the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital, a community forum in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. “We have to support that which he does which is right and help guide him to those right decisions.”

“We can’t afford to despair and we can’t afford to give up our pursuing of values that we and others have fought so hard to achieve,” she said. “And so for me, this is a challenge. So I’m going to continue doing what I think is the right thing. That’s the challenge we all have to face. “