Good Luck, Trump

The following article was what I wrote immediately after the election of Donald J. Trump as the next President of the United States. I wanted to sit on it until after the inauguration to see if I thought differently after the stark reality of a Trump presidency finally settled in my mind.

Now that I’ve had a few days to digest the results of the election…

I’m still outraged.

How did the United States of America elect the misogynistic, racist, lying, cheating, anti-intellectual, never-held-public-office, reality TV star Donald Trump as leader of the free world?

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

We were supposed to smash him into bits. Make sure everybody knew bigotry and intolerance are not welcome in this country.

Instead, we handed the presidency to a man endorsed by the KKK.

To be honest, none of this should matter to me.

I’m a straight, white, upwardly mobile, middle class, cisgendered, married man with no student loans, a great wife and an adorable dog. I work for a company that provides incredible health care. I make enough money that the Republican cry of “lower taxes” is starting to sound pretty appealing.

I’m in no danger from a Trump presidency. But millions of others are. Trump seeks to undo everything President Obama did to protect people from all walks of life. Marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act in particular suddenly seem to be endangered. Not to mention the Supreme Court seats that could halt progress (or reverse it outright) for decades to come, depending on how many justices Trump ends up replacing.

That’s why I’m outraged.

The blue collar white voting bloc is a large part of why Trump won the White House. They came out in full force, falling for the easily disprovable bundle of lies that spilled out of Trump’s mouth on a daily basis while Democrats stayed home because Hillary was an uninspiring moderate who had been attacked by Republicans for decades to the point where nobody liked her.

We were in the perfect storm of nationalism that managed to snag the White House by just a few thousand votes in some key states. That’s just how it works.

All that said, I hope for the best. I genuinely want to be surprised. I want to be excited to vote for Trump in 2020. I’m giving him a chance, but it’s up to him to be a good president.

We’ll see how I feel in four years.

Needless to say, what I wrote three months ago is still a perfect representation of my thoughts today. He’s now the President and Trump hasn’t changed his tune. People were hopeful that he would calm down and become more presidential once in office, but that doesn’t look to be the case.

He’s waging a war against facts. He’s been gaslighting the nation for over a year now, and continued to do so even on his first full day in office by presenting “alternate facts” when his press secretary berated the media for “lying” about how many people attended the inauguration.

We get four years of this. It doesn’t look like he’s going to change.

At least all my favorite comedy shows will always have amazing material to work with.