So what so what so what's the scenario?

One of the benefits of not being an actual pundit (and barely playing one on TV) is that I feel no responsibility at all for toeing any lines. All day, I’ve been listening to the punditocracy putting forth their various pet theories about why Kamala lost. Invariably, whatever they believe she did wrong happens to align with their personal ideology: not progressive enough, too progressive, no clear policy, too focused on policy. Whatever. Pundits are going to pundicize. Most of them are too busy breaking down Trump’s media buys on streaming platforms that attract young Black men or whatever other bullshit they’ve on about, and ignoring the obvious truth:

America wants this.

It’s that simple. They were presented with, as the David Sedaris joke goes, the chicken or the shit with the bits of ground glass. We chose shit/glass. And I don’t want to hear “But it was close.” Yes, in raw numbers it was close so you can make the argument that if 117,000 votes had swung in x,y, and z counties, blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t have come to 117,000 votes when one party’s candidate is a literal rapist.

The Democrats gave us a vision of the possible. Loans for small businesses. An expanded tax credit. Steady progress on lowering grocery bills. Trump gave us a vision of the damned. Marauding immigrants, urban hellscapes, poisoned national blood, trans women spiking a volleyball into your daughter’s head, the enemies within. Trump marketed fear and sold his own strength. Harris marketed joy but couldn’t convince enough Americans to buy her hopium over their resentment.

Bad Grandpa won the day. My son, living through his first true election heartbreak and in true mourning, has reached the same conclusion I did on Election Night. It’s theirs now. Let them have it and let’s see what they do with it. Yes, their first term was a shitshow but Bad Grandpa is older now, and wiser. He’s humbled, I think, by this second opportunity granted to him by the American people. He’s learned, as Susan Collins famously told us, his lesson.

Except we’re the little kid and the road is leading to Moscow.

That’s the best-case scenario. It’s so unlikely as to be implausible and so implausible as to be laughable. The truth is, for those of us who care about human dignity and decency, the best we can hope for is that the inveterate liar Trump was lying about the mass deportations, that his attacks on the vulnerable were just chum for the dumb fish whose votes he needed, and that deep down Trump just wants to spend the next four years lining his pockets, letting competent technocrats manage the nation, after which he’ll quietly go away. Again, grand larceny and benign negligence are the best case.

But I suspect you guys don’t think that’s likely. I don’t either. I don’t know what’s likely to happen in the months and years ahead. I’m not going to assume the worst, despite the constant gnawing in the pit of my stomach. A more realistic best-case scenario is that his second term will be much like his first. Chaotic, filled with in-fighting and back-stabbing and grifting and littered with the occasional extra-constitutional dalliance. Bad but survivable. I think it gets worse from there.

Which is why it’s so maddening to the still-sane among us that America wants this. And yes, I will call us the still-sane ones. The rest of the country can credibly declare that they’ve created their own reality, but we don’t have to live in it. Now there will be those who say refusing to share reality with, you know, reality is the definition of insanity but to them, I say the following: we’re not the ones who went fucking nuts. Sure, the spoils belong to the victors. Fine. You can have my spoils but you don’t get my values.

(You’ve soiled my spoils?)

I wish I knew how to turn my brain off about his stuff. My son seems to be moving on, but he had the advantage of spiraling on Election Night. My own nosedive took a day or two to make itself known, and now that it’s here, I just need to noodle on this for a little while. The only reason I’m bothering to write at all is because I suspect most of you are going through the same thing as me. As I said a couple days ago, it’s not that we lost an election. It’s that it feels like we lost our nation.

I also know that Republicans felt the same way when Obama won. And Democrats when Reagan won. Yet, somehow we always muddle through. One of the few maxims I have learned from the world of finance is not to believe the “this time it’s different” narratives, and I am extremely mindful of that when it comes to any sort of forecasting. But it’s hard not to listen to that tiny squeaky voice whispering, “Yeah, but this time really does feel different.”

I don’t know if fascism really has arrived in America exactly as Sinclair Lewis once predicted it would, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. But I don’t like that I’m even asking the question. That alone is different. I never asked that question before, even when Trump won the first time. In fact, I scoffed when people said ignorant shit like that before. Why aren’t I scoffing now? So yeah, that squeaky voice might have a point after all.

America wants this. And maybe we’re right to want it, or at the very least, to want something. This nation isn’t working. We may disagree on its causes but both sides agree that something has to change. This is their effort at it; they tried in 2016 and mostly failed. They’re going to try again and I suspect they will mostly succeed. I don’t know what all that entails, but I know I disagree with even the parts they haven’t thought up yet. How we look when we emerge from that is anybody’s guess. To those who voted for Trump thinking it can’t get any worse, let’s check back in with each other in a few years.