“You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country’s about.”

Alright, I will let you guess who said this quote. Easy, Donald Trump, right? Well actually, this is a quote from President Barack Obama from back in 2013.

Whether or not you support president-elect Donald Trump, he will be the next president of the United States. Protesting the election is not only hypocritical, but it is also disrespectful to the Constitution; even President Obama agrees.

The entire base of this country’s government was founded on having the people vote for their candidate and giving them the say on who runs their government.  And even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, that is irrelevant because Trump had the required votes from the electoral college. Protesting the election because you disagree with the views of who won will only make us more divided as a nation. Even though this election has been labeled as unusual, that does not make protesting the election justifiable.

Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak agreed “Donald Trump is going to be our president. And saying #notmypresident is the same as saying #notmyconstitution or #notmycountry or #notmyAmerica.”

Dvorak strongly voiced her opinion against the protests, regardless of her stance on the candidates. It does not matter who you support in the election, violent protests, such as the ones in Berkeley and Portland, that disrupt the daily lives of others are unacceptable.

Earlier this year, while both Clinton and Trump were still campaigning for the election, Trump said that he felt that the media was against him and that he may not accept the election results. Instantly after that, Clinton supporters responded by calling him out for being unconstitutional for potentially not accepting the election results. Since Trump won the election, the Clinton supporters are doing exactly the opposite of what they have been preaching ever since 2013 by protesting the winner of the election. The protests in reality change nothing; all they do is make Americans more divided.

“These people, they lose an election. I don’t know, maybe they want to get a participation trophy. This type of demonstrating sends a wrong signal to the world…It’s childish, it’s immature and it’s stupid,” stated U.S. Representative Peter King (a Republican from New York).

Not only are the protesters being hypocritical by changing their stance on protesting election results, many of the protesters did not even do their part in the election process.

The top newspaper in Oregon, The Oregonian, reported that “roughly a third of the people arrested in the past week of anti-Trump demonstrations in Portland apparently didn’t vote in the election they were protesting.”

If you are unhappy with the results of the election, then do your part as an American citizen and exercise your right to vote rather than protesting after your candidate lost.

The bottom line is, the hypocrisy needs to end and in order to make things better, we need to come together as a nation and truly become united, as the United States of America, instead of being divided by political parties.