Talking Trump in Marrakech

December 5, 2016

We had been planning our trip to Morocco for months, ever since the day my group of eight friends and I received our acceptances into various study abroad programs. But when the day came to depart for Morocco there was a cloud over our trip. Coincidentally, we had scheduled to leave the day after the presidential election, a thought that hadn’t even crossed my mind back in May when I booked the flight. But as we boarded our plane to Marrakech, I, like many other people, was in a state of minor shock. My parents had called me that morning to ask if I thought it would still be safe to go, in light of Trump’s victory. Canada had already issued a travel advisory for Marrakech earlier, on account of the international climate change conference the UN was holding there that weekend. It seemed like a confluence of unfortunate—and perhaps unsafe—circumstances, but we were committed. More than that, I was excited to get a look at what the response to Trump’s victory would be in a Muslim country, and whether or not there would be any animosity toward Americans.


Upon our arrival, we were picked up by a car service, driven by a man named Rachid. He and I struck up a casual conversation, switching between my high school French and his broken English. The first question he asked me, after warmly greeting my friends and I, was whether I was in favor of Trump or Clinton. The way he asked it was not in a confrontational or hostile way, but rather in a manner that conveyed mild curiosity and amusement. After talking to him for a little while longer, I realized the reason he asked was that to him, America was almost another world. The United States presidential election was very unlikely to affect his daily life in the slightest. If anything, he appeared to enjoy America being taken down a peg.

This was one of the three attitudes we encountered while in Morocco. As we walked through the souks, the markets where hundreds of locals hawk everything from leather wares to chessboards, we continued to find instances of this same sentiment. Almost everyone there asked who I had voted for, but no one seemed to particularly care about my answer.

The second attitude was more what I had expected, and it came from people who had relatives or friends living in America. These people, upon realizing I was American, would desperately ask if I thought their father, sister, daughter, brother, or cousin would be safe, or whether Donald Trump would expel them from their adopted home. It was much harder to respond to these people. How could I reassure them that nothing would happen, when I wasn’t sure of that myself? I did my best to assuage their fears, but I’m sure I wasn’t nearly as convincing as I would like to have been.

Morocco is by no means a perfect country; it has one of the strictest Internet censorship policies in the world, a high level of poverty, and constant tension between secularism and Islamism, highlighted by its closed border with Algeria. When we first landed, we were offered free SIM cards, with data. At first, we were confused and couldn’t figure out what the catch was. We eventually realized that it was a government program so that it could monitor our locations and Internet usage. And yet, even with all of these problems, the third reaction I encountered was sympathy.

While I stood in a little sandwich shop, a man in his mid-thirties heard me struggling to order what I wanted. He approached me, and after ordering for me in Arabic, he asked me in perfect English whom I had voted for. I told him, and he began to tell me a little about the history of his country. He gave me a quick synopsis of the brutal wars in the Western Sahara, and of Hassan II, who had committed a number of blatant human rights violations during his time as king. But mainly, he told me that eventually, no matter what, whether a king, a president, or a dictator, rulers move on. He told me that our country would be fine either way, and that no single person can ever decide a country’s future. I thanked him for his kind words, and the sandwich, and walked away a little wiser, a little happier, and with a great deal more respect for Morocco, and the people who live there.
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