You know what I’m talking about.

Normally, when something terrible happens, I wait for a while before I talk about it so I have time to sort through my feelings and figure out what I want to say.

But this election bullshit is too big for me to wait. I have to jump in on my feelings about it right away before the darkness of it all becomes too big for me to handle. Maybe that sounds like I am being melodramatic, I don’t know, but I don’t care.

I can tell the whole thing will take me a long time to process. So might as well get started.

So. Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States of America. There, I’ve said it. It’s true and it’s going to stay true for four fucking years. America stood at the biggest crossroads it has faced in my lifetime and it chose the unthinkable over the unlikable. Trump is going to be President and Mike Pence will be his Cheney. And God only knows what they will get up to.

And I mean that. Like I said before, we honestly have no idea what a Trump/Pence (or “Truppence”) presidency will be like. Sure, Trump said a lot of horrible shit, but he’s a sociopath, and that means he feels absolutely no reason to mean what he says or to do what he said he would do. Literally anything could happen now.

What is worse is that the Republicans still control the House and the Senate, too, which means that, in theory, there is no resistance to Trump’s agenda. In theory. In practice, it may well be that at least some of the Republican politicians who were cussing him out will stick to their guns and keep right on hating him and fighting him tooth and nail.

After all, they are quite used to fighting the President on every little thing. They’ve been doing it to Obama for eight fucking years. It’s nice to think they will keep doing it.

But conservatives are very susceptible to herd-think, and it might just be that they will not be able to resist the momentum of Trump’s ascendancy, being worshipers of power, and even the most virulently anti-Trump of them will be eager to roll over and beg and present their asses to be ritually mounted by the New Alpha in order to avoid the impossible task of actually deciding for themselves what to think.

I keep thinking about Brexit, and wondering how many Trump voters are feeling intense voter’s remorse right now because theirs was a protest vote and they, like a lot of people, never thought Trump could actually win.

And now that he has, these people are waking up to the consequences of what they have done and realizing they never actually wanted the guy to be President, they just liked the idea of voting for him as a way of raising a mighty middle finger to the world they feel has turned against them and shit all over them.

Only now are they thinking about whether that was a smart move or not. That’s what happens when people get angry enough, though. They lose all ability to ponder the consequences of their actions because of their burning need to express their rage in the most potent form available to them.

Bernie understood that rage, and knew how to articulate it for people. Hillary never got it,. not even slightly. Like a lot of liberals, she can’t handle actual strong emotion, and reflexively rejects things like anger and passion out of some wrongheaded desire to be “above” all that.

And that would be fine in an era of peace and prosperity, because the people will be on your side in that case. People who try to stir up anger amongst the contented, rightly or wrongly, will always be doomed to failure. But in a time of anger, when people have a lot of very good reasons for being upset with how things are going, the people need someone who will express that anger not just in words but in emotion as well.

An ice queen like Hillary was never going to get the job done. I am absolutely convinced that there are millions of people who would have voted for Bernie but voted for Trump again because at least Trump spoke to their anger.

Hillary could have done it. She could have used her reputation for being ruthless and cold to transform herself into an Elizabeth Warren writ large. She could have scared the shit out of the forces of evil if she had quit pretending to be a warm human being and instead gone for the fucking jugular like the bitch she is.

But no, she kept on trying to convince us she’s regular folk. And she lost. She lost because she was incapable of inspiring people like Bernie could, and so all she had going for her was Not Being Trump.

And that’s not enough, apparently.

I can only assume that Trump is having a sober awakening right now too as he realizes he actually has the job now and faces four years of having to do what he is told and take it seriously to boot. That he has to leave the bubble of his wealth and actually deal with reality. We saw what they did to Dubya, and he was not nearly as senile and spoiled as Trump. I get the feeling that the White House will become a battlefield the minute he takes office, and he will fire a lot of advisers before they finally get a team in there that can handle him right.

Or maybe that’s already happened. Trump was very well behaved in the last four days of the election. It could be that now that he has won, Trump will be all too happy to go the Reagan route and do whatever the people around him want him to do as long as he gets to pretend to be President in public.

That would, of course, leave Mike Pence, America’s Angry Punishing Dad, in charge.

And quite frankly, I am a lot more worried about him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.