Well, here we are again. Eight years ago, I told you that no one cares that you’re sad. That you needed to contribute to non-profits and journalism in order to fight what Donald Trump was about to do. Then, four years after that, Joe Biden won more votes than anyone ever has, Trump’s every illegal effort to stay in power — not to mention the violent efforts of his followers — was stymied, and I thought we as a nation might have realized the error of our apathy in 2016 and gotten our shit together.

I was wrong. It’s worse now. His supporters are emboldened, and so is he. It’s abundantly obvious that the only reason he wasn’t able to accomplish his selfish and fascistic goals in his last administration is that there was just enough friction from people inside and outside his administration to slow him down. That won’t be a problem this time. He’s surrounded himself with a group of enablers even more craven and sniveling and utterly devoid of thinking beyond their own ambitions than before, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that they’ll tell him no.

Forget what Schoolhouse Rock told you: the system of checks and balances is a lie, because it depends on someone in that system taking their role — that of considering the needs of the many above the needs of the few, that of attempting to prevent the accumulation of unchecked power — seriously. And they don’t. The Republican Party, now and for the last near-decade, exists solely to advance the whims of Donald Trump, and there is nothing they will resist him on.

Let me share with you a line from the New York Times’ live coverage last night, because it’s the line that broke me.

In every state that has counted most of its votes, Trump has improved on his performance from 2020.

Now look at this map.

That represents the shift since the last election. Everywhere except Colorado and Atlanta, essentially, has gotten redder than last time.

And who do we have to credit or blame for this? Is it the surprisingly fervent supporters with the red hats and the coal-rolling trucks, the Uneducated White Male demographic that no one took seriously eight years ago and apparently no one took seriously this time?

No. It’s the apathetic. It’s the 15 million people (numbers aren’t finalized yet, but roughly) who voted for Biden last time because they presumably saw the danger of another Trump presidency but this time they…just didn’t?

Who are these people? These people knew that, despite all of Biden’s shortcomings, despite the fact that he was old and had a shaky record on progressive causes and wasn’t Bernie Sanders, the country needed to do whatever it could to stave off allowing Trump behind the wheel again. And then, when the stakes were higher, when Trump and the people around him have spent the last four years telling us explicitly how much more draconian they intend to be if ever given the reins again, these 15 million people just…let it happen.

I can guess at a few of their objections. Deny it if you want, but many of them are just misogynists who don’t think a woman should be in power. The only thing Biden had that Hillary and Kamala didn’t is a penis. Some of them claim to be upset about the fact that the primary process was somewhat subverted by Biden dropping out of the race. Never mind the fact that party leadership is under no obligation to choose the winner of the primary vote in the first place and that the sole purpose of the primary process is a popularity contest. Some of them claim to be concerned about Harris’ record as a prosecutor, putting people in jail for drug crimes that are no longer illegal. Some of them claim to be concerned about the fate of Gaza under a Harris presidency.

I say “claim” in all of these examples because if any of these people actually cared about any of those things, they’d have voted for Kamala Harris. There’s no such thing as “voting your conscience.” Oh, you’re not a fan of the electoral college or the two-party system? Well good news! You might never have to vote again, and won’t that be nice?

Then there are the Trump supporters. Sure, lots of them are simply self-serving idiots who use phrases like “own the libs” and “cope and seethe” and take gleeful pride in the fact that sane people hate them for being terrible people. They saw Trump descend the elevator in 2015, promptly insinuate that most Mexicans are rapists and criminals, and it only got worse from there, and they thought to themselves “FINALLY I can be a terrible person in public again.”

But there are other Trump supporters, the ones who…nope. There aren’t. Every single person who has ever expressed the slightest modicum of support for this man is a dipshit of the highest order. All of you.

MAYBE I would have given you the benefit of the doubt last time. In 2016, there were a lot of people who thought, for some reason, that Trump’s attitude during the campaign and the previous 30 years of his life was all bluster. They thought that if elected, he’d surround himself with more competent, knowledgeable people — something he’s never shown the intent or propensity to do before — and become “more presidential.” That clearly didn’t happen.

Not only did it not happen, but he went completely in the opposite direction this time around. Now, the people in his court are Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Peter Thiel, Rudy Giuliani, and so on. All of them fully insane and divorced from reality in a way that can’t be overstated. If he appoints a single Cabinet member with even a shred of public service experience, I’ll shave my head. Except I won’t, and you won’t care, because nothing means anything.

You’ll see highbrow publications over the next several months trying to assign a method to the madness, saying things like “well, Middle Americans don’t care about foreign policy, they just want their grocery bill to go down” or “This goes to show that pollsters were underestimating how much people care about the crisis at the southern border.” No they fucking don’t. They couldn’t tell you the first thing about how Biden’s policies hurt them or how Trump’s will help them with a degree of clarity. If they knew anything about the economy or border control, they wouldn’t have voted for a man who has no idea how to do anything about the problems and probably wouldn’t give a shit if he did.

But they don’t know anything. They are idiots. They saw a man with the charisma and intelligence of a pile of rotting lunch meat and thought “finally, a man who owns many shiny things and isn’t ashamed to mock the disabled, I shall pledge myself to him forever.”

Trump spent his entire first administration finding ways to enrich himself and his friends, all while violating every political norm and actual law he can think of, and he spent the entirety of the Biden administration promising to do so even harder, and you think there’s anything redeemable about having a creature like that in the White House? No, there’s no hope for you. He showed you who he is and what he is and you either applauded it or didn’t care enough to make the slightest effort to stop it.

So what’s going to happen next? Who knows. Like I said, there is no worst case scenario here.

Maybe Republicans will make abortion illegal on a federal level, from conception, no exceptions, and it’ll be up to Democratic stronghold states to simply refuse to enforce that law.

Maybe Trump will decide that Truth Social is now the sole and exclusive means of communication of the White House.

Maybe he’ll directly and openly call for the assassination of Gavin Newsome and Jared Polis and JB Pritzker and then, when those people are assassinated, he’ll pardon whoever did it.

Maybe he’ll expand the Supreme Court to 15 and fill it with his own family. You think the Republican Senate will draw the line and refuse to certify Eric and Ivanka? Fuck no they won’t.

Maybe he’ll appoint Elon Musk as the head of NASA, so they can shut down any money spent on monitoring hurricanes and sea ice and instead focus all of NASA’s budget on Musk’s lunatic pipe dream of reaching Mars. Of course, a lot of the actual rocket building will have to be done by private companies and wouldn’t you know it, Elon Musk has a rocket company too!

While we’re at it, let’s make Musk head of the FCC so he can deregulate and pay fat exclusive contracts to Starlink in order to provide internet to rural areas and, since Musk is now head of the FCC, net neutrality will be out the window so it’ll be literally impossible to access the New York Times from a Starlink connection. Oh, Musk can’t be chairman of the FCC and NASA at the same time? Is there a rule against that? Would he care if there was?

You know what, let’s put Brett Favre in as Secretary of Education so he can institute a ban on all trans kids competing in sports and also mandate Christian-nationalist-based education standards. No evolution, no sex ed, no Trail of Tears.

Maybe he’ll stop supporting Ukraine and encourage Putin to fully subsume it. Maybe he’ll do the same for Poland. Who’s going to stop him? Maybe he’ll allow or even encourage China to take over Taiwan and with it the company TSMC, responsible for the vast majority of the world’s high-end microchips, allowing China to absorb it into their federal government and effectively control the future of technology indefinitely.

Maybe he’ll nuke Palestine.

Maybe he’ll invoke the Alien Enemies Act and deport or intern anyone born south of the border or in a Muslim-majority country (except Saudi Arabia of course, they let him build a casino there), legal status be damned. Think he can’t do that? It’s already been done several times, and the courts defended it. Read up on the Japanese internment camps in the 1940s while you still can, because we’re scratching that from school curricula too.

And let’s not forget Project 2025, which Trump claimed not to know about but no longer has to pretend he doesn’t support anymore. Some quick bullet points:

• Ban all abortion and birth control drugs or apparatuses. Jail doctors for defying this rule. Jail women for attempting to circumvent them.
• Mass-deport anyone in the United States illegally effective immediately, no exceptions. Dissolve birthright citizenship entirely. Dissolve the asylum system for political refugees.
• Expand warrantless surveillance
• Use federal law enforcement to target journalists and protestors, effectively ending the First Amendment
• Cripple voting access for millions
• Censor any discussions on race, gender, oppression, or anything else that doesn’t fit the cookie-cutter right-wing view of the world. And of course defund and threaten any university that doesn’t comply.
• Ban all pornography
• Ban divorce

Does this seem outlandish to you? I can already hear people typing up long comments about Trump Derangement Syndrome and how this is a classic liberal overreaction. But I’m not making these things up. These are all things he and his closest compatriots have said they wanted to do, out loud and repeatedly. And what’s to stop them? When the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court have already made it very clear that they have no intention of standing in his way, what possible mechanism remains to prevent any of this from happening?

Republicans had their chance, over and over, and refused to do it. They didn’t have to make Trump the candidate in 2016. They could have refused to certify his obvious ideologue Supreme Court nominees. They could have impeached him properly either of the two times he was impeached, refusing to let him hold public office again. They could have nominated someone else this time. They could have, just once, distanced themselves from the things he says rather than wrapping their lips around his shriveled mushroom dick at every opportunity.

The other mechanism was voting, and you fucked it up. 70 million of you voted for Trump because you are, as I mentioned earlier, dipshits of the highest order. I have nothing redeeming to say about a single person who’s voted for Trump, and that includes family and people I considered friends. No, we cannot “see past our differences.” That ship sailed a long time ago.

Another 70 million of you didn’t vote at all. This is also unforgiveable, for different reasons. You cannot simply “sit this out.” You cannot be “not that into politics.” If you didn’t participate in this election, it means you’re either too apathetic to care or too ignorant to participate, and both of these categories are inexcusable.

And of those 70 million who didn’t vote, 15 million of you voted for Biden last time and didn’t vote for Harris this time, and you’re the worst of them all. I will never understand what pathetic, sniveling, short-sighted, selfish, shallow reasoning you offer for not having participated in this election when it would have been trivially easy to do so and when the stakes are so high, and I will never forgive you.

What’s the best-case scenario? Trump’s general idiocy, incompetence, and mental decline will prevent him from executing any of the objectively horrible things he claims to want to do. Maybe previously spineless members of the Republican Party will suddenly resist him. Maybe he’ll die.

I don’t have answers this time. I don’t have suggestions.

Good luck.