The isolating reality of the Trump vote

We need to stick together more than ever right now.

Does anyone else feel isolated right now? Lonely? Alone?

I can’t shake this. It clings to me like a shadow. At the grocery store, while waiting in the school pickup line, and even amidst the cheers at my daughter’s soccer game — I scan the myriad of faces around me, and the same goddamn question spins the hamster wheel in my mind: how many of them voted for him?

Statistically speaking, in my town, it’s the overwhelming majority (for the third time now). So, that would mean MOST of my fellow soccer moms voted for him. But it’s clearly not the kind of thing you talk about in between high fives over hat tricks and traded couch stain removal hacks (no JD Vance, I won’t tell you any of them), so I just don’t know who voted for who, and I’ve given up trying to tell. So as a result, right now, just as it was in 2016, I feel acutely alone everywhere I go.

Especially so, when I’m around other people.

Just yesterday, we stood on the sidelines, united in our cheers for the same 6th-grade soccer team. Yet, almost all I could think about was given how “normal” and “nice” they seemed, how could they possibly vote for him? How?

I felt so alone.

What are they seeing that I don’t see? Why don’t they see what I see? HOW don’t they see what I see?

Do they LIKE what they see??

I know I’m not losing my mind but have they completely lost theirs?

He’s a truly terrible fucking person, lacking a single redeemable quality so far as I can tell.

He’s a twice impeached, adjudicated rapist, business fraud, convicted felon traitor who plotted a coup and incited a deadly insurrection in order to overturn the last election.

He stole a metric fuckton of our national security secrets on his way out the door to do God only knows what with, and then he kept them in his gilded golf motel’s fucking bathroom. He’s bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, he mocked a disabled reporter, he’s repeatedly said immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, he’s demeaned women, people of color, Latinos, members of the military, non-despotic foreign leaders, his own former cabinet officials, his old VP, and just about every single human being who has ever had the audacity to criticize him in the fucking least.

He’s a malevolent madman who openly encourages bigotry, routinely applauds cruelty, perpetually promotes violence, enthusiastically inflames intolerance, and gleefully stokes division.

When Americans were dying by the thousands a day, when he wasn't tweeting about ratings, he was fucking golfing.

He’s a conman, a phony, and a fraud. He’s not religious, he’s not a patriot, he’s not a family man, a self-made billionaire or a real estate savant. He doesn’t love our troops, he loathes them. He doesn’t put America first, he puts himself above all.

And on top of all of that, or undergirding it, depending on which view you find less nauseating (as if there is one), we are also talking about a despot-curious, historically incurious moron so cripplingly addicted to never being wrong he took a sharpie to a goddamn hurricane map.

And if it’s not abundantly clear that dead golfer dick himself is in the throes of some kind of decompensation that pairs especially poorly with having access to the nuclear codes, I don’t know what the hell is.

He’s literally everything I tell my kids not to be.

He doesn’t have a plan to lower childcare costs, doesn’t have a plan to replace the ACA he wants to repeal, and he doesn’t have a plan for how our public schools will function without a department of education. And he doesn’t even care.

Worse than that, no one who voted for him seems to care either.

Because somehow, some fucking how, when it came to choosing who they should hire to steer this nation for the next four years (let us pray), nearly 77 million Americans took a look at all of that and said: “Yeah, you know what… I’m fine with it.”

And they put his sick, saggy, septuagenarian ass right back in the very fucking office people died stopping him from trying to steal in the LAST ELECTION.

So if you’re still on team sanity and you’re also asking yourself why in hell they would have voted for him, allow me to provide you with the answer I personally hear most often:

The economy. Inflation. The price. Of. Eggs.

And I cannot help but stand here scratching my head in baffled bemusement upon hearing that because yes, eggs are good, but they’re not hand my democracy over to a rapist bully who’s up to his beady, Addy’d eyeballs in Russian kompromat good.

And then I realize, it’s not about the eggs at all.

So, given that fact, I have a few words for the Trump voters out there right now trying to gaslight us into believing their vote was “all about the economy” when it wasn’t. 👇

So, you want me to believe that you voted for a racist, rapist, convicted felon, business fraud who incited a deadly attack on our Capitol after losing the last election because of the price of eggs?

That you voted for the orange-dipped dude who ran with a different VP because the last one was nearly hanged for not breaking democracy, because you’ve been getting fewer hours at your job these days?

You want me to believe that you voted for someone who nearly every economist in the world has said will grow our debt (which he did by the third largest amount ever the last time), increase our costs, raise inflation and destroy our GDP because a burger and fries at Five Guys is more expensive than it used to be?

You want me to believe that you voted for the drink bleach guy who golfed while thousands of Americans were dying a day because you had it so much better then, when you were stockpiling toilet paper, than you do now?

You want me to believe that you voted for the guy who had 4 years to pass an infrastructure bill and didn’t, the guy who promised Mexico would pay for the wall when they didn’t, the guy who promised to bring manufacturing back, lower the cost of prescription drugs and end the opioid crisis but didn’t, because you preferred his “policies”?

You want me to believe you voted for the “grab em by the pussy” guy who wants to destroy the Department of Education and to repeal the ACA despite the fact that he has nothing more than “concepts of a plan” to replace it, the guy who will roll back environmental protections, strip women and minorities of more rights, the guy who will hand Ukraine to Putin and Gaza to Netanyahu, the guy who has said he will be a “dictator on day one”, because you’re worried about losing your gas stove?

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe any of that, and frankly, I’m not sure you believe it either.

Because the truth is that your vote wasn’t about any of that.

You voted for the traitorous embodiment of the 7 deadly sins because when it came to casting your ballot for a Black woman, you just couldn’t do it.

And because you like getting away with being your worst self.

And because life is a whole lot easier to stomach when all that has gone wrong for you, is someone else’s fault.

Let’s be honest here, that is what it was.

So when the price of eggs is $18, and your Latino neighbors have been deported or moved to some f’d up “camp” to pick the strawberries none of you will pick, and your miscarrying wife has to contend with sepsis before she’s allowed to have an abortion, and your autistic child is unable to get the early intervention they desperately need, please remember what it really was that you voted for.

Because I promise you the rest of us will never, ever forget.

I’m so mad right now. I’m mad that we are risking sending this little experiment of ours over the side of a cliff for a psychotic idiot reality game show host. I’m mad that being a woman in this country is more disqualifying than being a felon. And I’m mad that we have to deal with this motherfucker again. I wish I knew how the fucking fuck we landed here again. Because honest to God, no matter how many books on fascism I read or podcasts I listen to, I still don’t really know.

But more than any of that, I’m worried. I’m anxious, and I’m scared.

Not about myself, I’ve had a good run on this rock. I’ve driven too fast, partied too hard, and stayed out too late. I’ve had sex in bathrooms, backseats and even on a bus one time. I’ve fallen in and out of love, I’ve lost myself, found myself, given up and gotten up again and again.

I’ve lived fully even if it wasn’t always exactly freely, like it is now.

But what I fear, what keeps me up at night, is the thought of what the future might hold for my daughter and my son.

But especially my daughter.

The guardrails are off, the gatekeepers are gone. And when I think about someone trying to hold her down or snuff out the light she contains within I nearly throw up.

But I won’t give up.

I don’t know who the hell more than half of my country is right now. But I know who I am, and I know who my girl is. And I know that I’m going to cling to that knowledge with everything I have.

My daughter is a firework who hasn’t yet had her chance to streak across the sky, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone or anything stop her from being able to light up the night and dazzle the world.

I don’t recognize much of my country right now, and that makes me profoundly sad and mad and lonely, but I know how to fight for what I believe; I believe in my little girl, I believe in my son, and I believe in us.

I believe in America.

But I won’t lie to you, the thought of what is to come terrifies me. So, if it’s ok, my little family will need to hold your hands, and maybe you can hold on to ours too.

And no matter what, we won’t ever let go.

Deal?