This Sucks. Dear God Does It Ever Suck
You and me both, Sartre!
I am not surprised that Donald Trump became the first president since Grover Cleveland to be elected to non-consecutive terms. Incidentally, when I was a boy, my father told me that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock, Dave Grohl-style, so the competition taunted him with the lascivious rhyme, “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”
That is a good illustration of my father’s parenting style. It also helps explain why I have a broken brain full of meaningless trivia, no useful skills, and the world’s lowest credit score.
When Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, I did something disastrous and utterly out of character. I felt hope.
I was never deluded enough to think that Harris definitely would win because she was a much stronger candidate than her boss. The most I would allow myself was the possibility that Harris might win.
This delusional optimism was strengthened by a debate in which Harris utterly destroyed Trump. It felt like Harris was doing everything right while her adversary was doing everything wrong.
I even wrote a blog post fretting, “How Can a Race Between a Groundbreaking, Inspirational Woman Who Has Done Everything Right and an Inhuman Ghoul Who Has Done Everything Wrong Be So Close? Why Isn't It a Democratic Blowout?” that expressed shock and bewilderment that the race was too close to call despite Trump’s endless mistakes.
How all the right wing sickos are feeling right now.
Harris did not win in a blowout, sacred or otherwise. The Democrats did not win in a blowout. Rather, the Republican Party won in a blowout.
Throughout that crazy-making final month, we were told that Trump and Harris were even in the polls and had a roughly fifty percent chance of being elected president.
It turns out that Harris never had a chance. It didn’t matter what Trump said or did. It didn’t matter if he told people that Haitian immigrants were eating their pet cats and dogs. It didn’t matter how badly Trump performed in the debate against Harris. It didn’t matter if Trump transformed a town hall into a music party with a funereal vibe in a way that made it impossible to deny his steep mental decline. It didn’t matter how many massive celebrities enthusiastically endorsed Harris.
It didn’t matter how condescending and creepy Trump was toward women and minorities and anyone he didn’t like. It didn’t matter how flagrant and constant Trump's lies were.
It was never close. Trump was always going to win. Trump might be a twice-impeached thirty-four-time felon who was caught on tape on record bragging about grabbing women by the genitalia and palled around with Jeffrey Epstein, but that somehow did not matter to voters as much as inflation, the border, disgust over identity politics, and Trump’s inexplicable connection to the American people.
I am in mourning. It feels like someone, or rather, something, has died. My already wavering faith in the goodness and judgment of the American people died conclusively on November 5th, 2024.
A vision of America where a fundamentally decent and honorable public forcefully rejected hatred, bigotry, and xenophobia died on Tuesday.
This doesn’t just feel bad; it feels apocalyptic. It doesn’t just feel like we lost an election. It felt like we lost our country.
I feel exhausted. It feels like we just finished a long, grueling marathon wearing ill-fitting shoes and carrying around a backpack full of rocks, only to find out that we’d have to run another marathon in fifteen minutes, only this time there would be twice as many rocks in the metaphorical backpack and also would have to run barefoot.
I’m tired from nine solid years of Donald Trump dominating American politics and American culture.
I’m exhausted by a second Trump term that hasn’t even begun.
Trump is a profoundly exhausting figure because he angrily demands attention that a press he derides as Fake News and the enemy of the people consistently, if ambivalently, gives him.
None of us on the left has the bandwidth to deal with Trump and the problems he has created and will create.
It feels like a massive black cloud is hovering directly over the American people, and it will stay there for at least four years.
There is also a very good chance that a 78-year-old man who never exercises, eats only fast food, and is seemingly kept alive solely through anger, caffeine, hamburger grease, and Adderall will die in office and be replaced by a dead-eyed sociopath in his early forties.
If only!
I feel confused. I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel utterly disillusioned, although it's remarkable that I had any illusions about the American people left.
I foolishly thought that voters would be turned off by the over-the-top cartoonishness of Trump's racism, that they'd see a man who is clearly unwell shouting about brown people coming after their cats and dogs and be disgusted by what was widely if universally, dismissed as an ugly lie and hold it against the Trump/Vance ticket.
I was wrong. In a sense, it doesn't matter whether voters believed the specifics of Ohio's pet-eating migrant kerfuffle; what mattered was that it fed into a narrative they embraced about foreigners invading our country and poisoning our bloodline.
Here's the thing about calling a fascist leader a fascist: it hurts the feelings of their supporters. If Donald Trump is a fascist, which he is, then by definition, the people who voted for him supported a fascist.
This election came down to three things, essentially: inflation, the border, and the fragile feelings of white people. Calling Trump's followers deplorables or garbage or fascist hurt their feelings and made them more likely to vote for Trump.
Trump could say that "radical left lunatics" hate our country and are mentally ill and not lose any votes because the far left was never going to vote Democratic anyway.
The public didn't vote for Trump despite the racism, sexism, transphobia, anti-Semitism, bullying, name-calling, and cruelty; they voted for him because they share those qualities and live vicariously through a man who can say all the hateful things they feel deep down in their soul and get away with it.
Bigots felt empowered by Trump. Bigots FEEL empowered by Trump. He has been the eternal exception, a man who could say and do things that would single-handedly end other careers without suffering consequences.
Americans hate being told what to do. That's what the massive backlash against #MeToo, Cancel Culture, and "Woke" is all about: a reactionary rage over being told what language they can use and which ideas are acceptable and which are radioactive.
The left says that racism is an insidious and destructive cultural force with myriad permutations, from microaggressions to hate crimes. Trump says that anti-black racism was wiped out long ago, and the only racism now is anti-white racism promoted by race hustlers who are only out for money, fame, and attention.
Trump played to anti-trans bigotry by saying that he was looking out for you while the Democrats were looking out for "they/them." It was a nakedly anti-trans, anti-non-binary move, but it also highlighted that the Democrats were collectivists who use hateful phrases like "cishet" while Republicans are individualists specifically looking out for you, a patriot terrified of losing their country to a horde of killer illegal aliens.
I dread the dozens of blog posts I will undoubtedly write about Donald Trump. I wish I had the luxury of being able to ignore him. I do not. You cannot ignore the most powerful man in the world, particularly when he angrily demands the spotlight at all times. I wish I could ignore Elon Musk as well, but you cannot ignore the world's richest man, particularly since, like Trump, he angrily demands attention at all times.
I would love to never have to look at Trump’s stupid face ever again. That’s just not possible on account of him literally being the most famous person in the world.
Fuck you and your grindset mindset!
This is going to suck. It's probably going to suck worse than anything I've experienced in my excessively eventful existence.
Things are going to get grim. This is going to be tough. It's already tough but we're going to get through this together. We don't have the luxury of giving up. We don't have the luxury of not caring. We've got to stay together for our children and each other.
This is particularly going to suck for neurodivergent parents of neurodivergent children because Trump has lazily vowed to give massive power to RFK Jr, a brain-worm-riddled conspiracy theorist who thinks that vaccines cause autism and that autism is a recent development.
In an interview with radio and TV host Michael Smerconish, the Kennedy family's enduring shame said of his bizarre belief that autistic adults do not exist, “I have never in my life seen a man my age with full-blown autism, not once. Where are these men? One out of every 22 men who are walking around the mall with helmets on are non-toilet-trained, nonverbal, stimming, toe-walking, and hand-flapping. I’ve never seen it.”
from the wisenheimers at Obvious Plant
I don't need to tell you how repellent the conspiracy theorist's conception of autism is. I am disgusted that Trump vowed to give seemingly limitless power to a man who sees me and my children that way.
To paraphrase the words of a jackass who hopefully will not finish the job of ruining the country, we've got to fight, fight, fight, or we won't have a country anymore, or at least a country we can be proud of, or at least not deeply ashamed of.
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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