Forget Halloween: November 5th is the Scariest Day of This Year
Halloween is right around the corner. I am scared. I’m more than scared: I’m fucking terrified. I’m so frightened that I can have a hard time focusing on anything other than the source of my terror.
I’m not afraid of Halloween. It's harmless make-believe, a good-natured goof. I am petrified of November 5th. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to get through election day.
It’s all just too goddamned stressful for me. I can barely stand it. I know I’m not alone. I still have traumatic memories of election night in 2016, when I watched in horror as Donald Trump, an Adderall-addled reality TV clown, defied all odds and was elected president over Hillary Clinton, a woman who might just have been too qualified for the job she was seeking.
Not sure if this is super offensive, or just regular offensive.
I remember going to bed that night in a fog of despair and confusion. I lost a lot of respect for my fellow Americans. Proud proponents of American exceptionalism voted for a deluded bozo whose election ensured that we would be an international laughingstock for at least four years.
I went to bed that awful night, hoping against hope that things weren’t as bleak as they seemed, that common sense would prevail, and that Hillary Clinton would eke out a victory.
The overwhelming feeling of dread that consumed me that night has never gone away. By electing Donald Trump as president, we opened Pandora’s Box. His victory unleashed a wave of ugliness and division, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.
I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from election night, 2016, and everything that followed. I lost what was left of my illusions about the fundamental goodness of the American people that night. It was shattering. It remains shattering. Eight years later, my brain still has trouble accepting that Trump was elected president. It didn’t make sense then. It makes even less sense now.
Donald Trump is famous for how well his clothes fit. He’s like a supermodel or something!
I still have intense cognitive dissonance when it comes to Donald Trump being elected to an office previously held by the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Barack Obama.
I feel like I’m going to have a panic attack when I see articles about how the presidential election, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, is too close to call.
We do not know who will win the 2024 presidential election. What we do know, with one hundred percent certainty, is that Donald Trump will proclaim himself the winner by a sacred landslide at the very opportunity. He won’t wait for the day to end or for all of the ballots to be counted: he’ll insist that he won by a massive amount and that if anyone has the audacity to suggest otherwise, it’s only because the Democrats are cheating flagrantly, the way they always do in every election.
It’s been four years, and Trump has never acknowledged that he lost the 2020 presidential election. He complained so loudly and often that his brainwashed minions in the Republican Party believe Trump’s blatant, constantly disproven lies as adamantly as he does.
Why yes, I will be going as sexy Donald Trump this Halloween and every other Halloween as well.
Trump isn’t waiting until November 5th to declare himself the winner and accuse the Democrats of cheating. He’s already promoting the fiction that he’s so far ahead that there’s no way he could possibly lose a fair election, so the Democrats are already in the process of stealing his sacred landslide victory.
I hate that I cannot avoid political ads for Trump or Harris. I hate Trump’s odious ads for understandable reasons, but I also get stressed out by Harris’ commercials because they serve as a constant, unwanted reminder that she’s running against a lunatic with a horrifyingly real chance of getting re-elected president despite clearly losing what’s left of his mind.
Trump was never too sharp, but he’s showing unmistakable signs of decompensation. Trump can barely string together a coherent sentence now. I can’t even imagine the state he'll be in should he spend four more years in the hardest, most important job in the world.
It’s like a horror movie except that horror movies end, generally with the villain dead (for the time being, at least) and the final girl triumphant. I’d like to think that preeminent real-life villain Donald Trump’s life will end at some point, but part of me is convinced that his deal with the devil (no doubt brokered by his mentor Roy Cohn) included immortality. The man should have died at least a half dozen times by now, but Satan keeps protecting him because he knows just how much damage Trump can cause.
Unfortunately, there is no escaping the Donald Trump horror show. It’s not make-believe; it’s real. Trump might come off like a pathetic caricature of a pompous, self-obsessed businessman, but there are tens of millions of people ready to follow the demented clown into the gates of hell.
I’m dreading both a possible Trump win and a narrow Harris victory that Trump would do anything to steal. Trump loves to talk about stopping the steal.
As always, Trump and his cult are engaging in shameless and blatant projection: it’s the Republicans, specifically Trump, who tried to steal the election from its rightful winner. They will try to do it again, in an even more aggressive fashion, if Harris wins by any margin.
I do not have the luxury of falling apart if Trump wins. I don't have the luxury of giving up because I am a father and a husband, and I must be as strong as possible for my family.
I need to hang in there for you. This blog allowed me to survive Trump’s time in office. I probably write about Trump too often, but it’s cathartic. Honestly, it’s for my own sake as much as my audience’s. Writing is my way of trying to make sense of a world that often seems insane and cruel, particularly if you’re autistic like me and have a poignant delusion that the world should make sense and people should behave rationally.
If Trump wins, I will be here processing the trauma with you. I’ll be doing my tiny, seemingly insignificant part to fight back the way I have since this website and blog began in 2017, in the vast, horrifying shadow of Trump’s inexplicable, tragic victory. It was a victory for Trump but a loss for our country and humanity as a whole.
To help me survive November 5th, I have a self-care plan in place. I have a decent supply of Ativan, some top-notch edibles (I particularly like making myself a root beer float with THC root beer), and a new collection of E.C. horror comics to distract me from all of the craziness.
I hope that Harris wins. But we have to be prepared for the horrifying possibility of a Trump victory.
As always, I will be hoping for the best and expecting the worst, and Donald Trump is the worst in so many ways.
I’m less than cautiously optimistic, but if the worst-case scenario happens, we’ll get through this together.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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