Dear DNC,

The thing you feared most has come to fruition. Your hopes of electing America’s first female president have gone up in ashes. The xenophobe bigot you kept railing against is America’s choice.

How cartoonists around the world have reacted to Donald Trump's victory https://t.co/44tydQm8Ba pic.twitter.com/j02q7XAczb — The Independent (@Independent) November 9, 2016

With Trump’s election, Barack Obama’s legacy stands to not only be diminished, but obliterated. And while I saw some of your stooges happily blaming third-party voters for the debacle that is Donald Trump, it is actually you who must hang your head in embarrassment.

First, because you refused to listen to your own people. You refused to listen to lifelong Democrats who had warned you that Hillary’s coronation will be the death of DNC. Don’t tell us we had not warned you.

You did not give Bernie a fair chance, and you know as much. You colluded with the mainstream media to disparage Sanders, and you underestimated the strength of seven million people who had donated individually to see the Vermont senator’s campaign take on the Goliath that was Hillary. Wikileaks proved that not once but many times.

You knew that Americans were sick and tired of establishment politicians, and yet you stuck with a candidate who represented the worst among them. If there was a choice that Americans had to make, it should have been one insurgent candidate against the other. Not Hillary vs. Trump. That was a foregone conclusion.

You disregarded ordinary Americans and the wave of populism that was taking over the country. You disregarded the voice of the people and went ahead with the coronation of Hillary. You believed that Democrats would suddenly rally behind Hillary because that is what the DNC wanted them to do. You thought inducting Bernie to spread Hillary’s message would somehow make his supporters follow suit. But you were so wrong. Your vanity undid you.

You forgot that we were not rallying behind the messenger but behind the message.

Any sane person who had followed the two campaigns would tell you who between Bernie and Hillary stood a better chance of defeating Trump. The Vermont senator had himself repeated countless times that he would beat Trump hands down. All the polls said so. But despite witnessing the populist wave was completely on Bernie’s side, you bowed your head to the establishment.

Dear DNC, your chair openly scoffed at your own candidate and mocked his supporters. Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused Bernie’s supporters of vandalism and violence at Nevada when you very well knew that was not the case. In fact, it was a Hillary supporter who was later apprehended for violence. You spread lies and mistrust, just so Hillary could be coronated. Schultz ripped into Sanders because he was challenging Hillary. She said he was adding “fuel to the fire” when indeed it was the DNC which was trying to intimidate him into submission.

You distanced a major chunk of Democratic voters with your heavy-handedness. You had Sarah Silverman go on stage during the convention and call Bernie’s supporters “ridiculous” for having a spine. You patronized us time and again, and then asked us to vote for Hillary.

You tore into millennials for backing Bernie. You never understood the reasons why they did so. You deliberately ignored their voices. You somehow assumed that all of them would come to vote for Hillary to stop Trump taking over. Well, I suppose a chunk of them listened to CK Louis’ advice and just thought it was better to “get it over with” than rally behind a status quoist, war-mongering career politician.

Calls are growing for Bernie Sanders to run for president in 2020 https://t.co/NG2xCfL6Wx pic.twitter.com/uf5Tbp46he — The Independent (@Independent) November 9, 2016

Now it is too late, but we hope you have learned your lesson. We hope you understand that if you stiff your voters, your voters will stiff you. We hope you don’t ignore the millions of voices who tell you to elect a candidate who they trust in. We hope you understand that democracy is not an oligarchy.

This is not a “told you so” moment, although the heading of this piece certainly suggests so. We are not wallowing in grief like you, but we are telling you to take stock of where you are going wrong.

But I doubt that you will. You will probably once again blame the likes of us for this unprecedented catastrophe, and that is fine by us. Because that is what we have heard all along. But if you have even the remotest bit of shame left in you, dear DNC, have a long and hard look at yourself and maybe you will find a way to slither out of this mess you have created for yourself.

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