The case of the Trump regime: The need for resistance in international nurse education

Abstract

Introduction. In July 2016 doctors and nurses protested against Candidate Trump in Cleveland, Ohio (Cleveland.com), and more recently the US Facebook group ‘Nurses Resisting Trump’ is building up its members. Why should this trouble or be of interest to nurses and nurse academics in the rest of the world? If the answer is not immediately obvious, this signals a problem. The issue is not one of conventional political differences between health care professionals based on old differences between republican and democrats, or conservatives versus progressives. The fact that nurses in the US protested against a candidate and now against the President, and what he stands for, is pivotal. We saw that the inauguration of Donald Trump was greeted with mass citizen protest internationally. Yet, despite losing the popular vote, he gained office because enough American citizens believed his narrative. Clearly, those citizens are not all racists, homophobes, misogynists, or climate change deniers, and that fact has to be remembered when we critique and call for international resistance of nurse educators to the Trump Presidency.