My YA thriller, The Exclusion Wars, is about a teen Hispanic immigrant in hiding in New York after a Donald Trump character has become President. Unsurprisingly, back in 2013, when the I wrote the book, the publishing industry thought that the premise lacked credibility. So did I.

     Now that the book has been released, strangers sometimes say to me something along the lines – wow, it’s great for your book that Trump is on the up and up, bet you hope he goes all the way and becomes President.

     This makes me feel sick. No, I definitely don’t want to see Trump become President. I answer by asking them to look at me. Who am I? I’m not just pro-immigrant; I am a woman.

     Nearly twenty years ago, on May 19, 1997, The New Yorker featured a profile of Donald Trump, written by Mark Singer. A few weeks before, Singer had visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago spa resort in Palm Beach. During a tour of the exercise room, Trump introduced Singer to a beautiful young employee, “our resident physician Dr. Ginger Lea Southall.”

     Singer asked Trump where Doctor Ginger had done her medical training.

     “I’m not sure,” Trump replied. “Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her resume or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.”

     I wonder if some day soon Trump will find himself on his back in Mount Sinai in need of emergency surgery. Will he want to look at his surgeon then? But I wonder more about her, the woman who has devoted the last fifteen years of her life to developing the skill to save lives. Will she look at him? Or, given his commitment to equality, will she choose to perform his surgery blindfolded so that she doesn’t have to look at him either. I picture her cheerfully scrubbing up, the nurse blindfolding her and leading her to the operating table where Trump is waiting. Her face will be the last one he sees before he succumbs to the anesthetic. The nurse places a scalpel in her hand. “Right, let’s give this a go. Shall we Mr. Trump?”

     Almost every day I find myself scrutinizing the female Trump supporters that pop up on our screens. They don’t look anything like Dr. Ginger. They don’t look anything like Donald Trump’s wife. They are not young. They have lived-in faces and bodies. They did not marry rich old men and devote every day of the last fifteen years to highlighting their hair and injecting filler into their lips. They look  like the kind of women that Trump does not want to look at. They look like they’ve been raising families without nannies and trying to make a living. And they are struggling economically. Their grievances are real. They feel ignored. They want change. They want to be seen. But they are looking to the wrong candidate. Trump thinks that they should be invisible. Or maybe it would be enough for him if they hid their faces and bodies behind veils. Perhaps the media has been unfair to Donald Trump. Maybe he is not so anti-Muslim after all.

     Trump cannot win without these women. I hope that they will see him for who he is.