The country couldn’t be saved, and the consequences will be dire
It was bad. It may get worse. We've also been here before.
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Last night was sickening. A replay of 2016. It’s hardly ancient history. We stepped on a rake years ago and we decided to do it again. This was a reminder that 2020, not 2016, was the year where the presidential election went sideways. The year of the pandemic was also the high watermark for the decade. The results are bad for church/state separation. Bad for civil rights. Bad for bodily autonomy. Bad for Ukraine and our foreign allies. Bad for Palestinians. Bad for science and the climate and common sense. Bad for just about every issue that matters to the type of people who read this newsletter.
The worst people you know got pretty much everything they wanted. The people who have empathy and expertise—the people who care too much and want the best for others—lost again. A Trump without guardrails is a Trump who’s even worse than he was years ago, and he was really fucking awful years ago.
If the famous saying is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we’re about to be ruled by people who’ll do everything in their power to make sure we never learn about the past. The people who ban books, whitewash American history, and reject science have been given another chance to turn their ignorance into policy. We’re screwed in the event of another pandemic. Blue states will not be able to rely on federal funding in the event of a natural disaster because that will require Trump’s signature. When the economy collapses, Republicans will blame everyone but themselves and most people won’t know they’re being lied to. (The mainstream media can’t be expected to push back. They failed to meet the moment this time around, and they’re bound to get worse.)
With the Senate now in Republican control and the presidency within Donald Trump’s grasp (the blue wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have not yet been called), we’re on the verge of seeing at least two years of utter chaos with ramifications that will last even longer. At best, if Democrats manage to flip the House, they will still control a mere 1/6 of the federal government.
Ryan Walters could very well become the next Secretary of Education; even if that doesn’t happen, it’s a very real possibility, which is terrifying. That’s, of course, assuming the Department of Education is allowed to exist at all.
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito may retire, but only because they’ll be replaced by 30-year-old versions of themselves. Or Aileen Cannon. If that happens, a majority of the Supreme Court will have been hand-picked by arguably the most unlawful president we’ve ever had.
JD Vance, a perpetually online bullshit spewer, will be a heartbeat away from power.
Project 2025, which could have been an internal document never meant for public consumption, will be the policy playbook for an even more extreme Republican Party.
If Republicans also retain control of the House, the Senate will eliminate the filibuster in order to pass anything they want, and that would include a national abortion ban and an overturning of nationwide marriage equality. The few bright spots last night involved states like Missouri and New York and Arizona and Nevada enshrining abortion rights in their state constitutions, but it won’t matter if a federal law prohibited the procedure (or pills) entirely.
Want a silver lining? Republicans, if left unchecked, will go so far to the right that they’ll alienate a large swath of the American public and there will be repercussions… eventually. Maybe. Then again, that assumes the electorate will make them pay for it, and American voters just gave the world more Trump.
If people weren’t familiar with Christian Nationalism before, they’re about to be. Their lives will soon be dictated by what the most radical white evangelicals believe. And the most irrational, delusional voices in that movement will be elevated to positions of power. Even if they’re not in the administration, they will be heroes to their gullible followers, claiming to have beaten back the threat of a (barely) progressive president.
Incidentally, exit polls found that 81% of white evangelicals backed Trump. It’s virtually identical to 2016 and 2020. They haven’t changed. They’re not ashamed of him. They have no problem having their faith defined by his actions. (And we shouldn’t hesitate in connecting those dots.)
It’s depressing beyond belief that the worst person in the country is also the luckiest man alive, backed by the most spineless and unprincipled politicians in the country.
Just because we got through it before doesn’t mean we’ll get through it again. (In fact, many people didn’t get through the first Trump administration precisely because of Trump’s policies. More women will now die from lack of abortion access. More refugees will suffer as our nation becomes even more hostile to anyone who’s not a white citizen.)
I don’t know how to beat back the firehose of misinformation that contributed to the rightward shift of the country. I don’t know what could have changed the minds of the half of the country that seems immune to reality. I don’t know what else the Harris campaign could have done to change the outcome. (There’s an argument to be made that she should have pushed back against Joe Biden’s policies, especially regarding Israel, but given the results, even if that helped her with Muslims in Michigan, it arguably wouldn’t have moved the needle everywhere else as much as she needed.) I also don’t believe Biden or a different candidate would have fared any better.
It’s easy to feel like the past few months were just pointless. The debate that Harris won didn’t matter. The half-filled Trump rallies didn’t indicate a loss of support. The meandering ramblings of a man whose brain is clearly broken didn’t turn off enough people. The major endorsements for Harris—and the lack of big ones for Trump— didn’t change much. The overwhelming financial support for Harris didn’t overcome the billionaires backing Trump. The “vibes” didn’t match the other side’s arrogance. The Democratic National Convention, so full of joy, now feels like a last gasp rather than a new beginning. The Democrats’ superb ground game and the utter lack of one for Republicans still didn’t meet the “margin of effort.” Trump’s criminal indictments and impeachments and legal battles and mugshot and looming potential jail sentence (!) weren’t dealbreakers.
January 6 eventually led Trump to another term in office when it should have blackballed him from public life.
Too many Americans are nostalgic for a utopia that never existed, and when they realized they’ve been conned, there are going to be a hell of a lot of conservatives eager to blame minorities of all stripes for all the problems they made worse.
At the same time, as older generations of Americans understand all too well, the path to progress is never smooth and it requires constant vigilance. We knew that in 2016 and there were reverberations—in 2018 and 2020. We’ll now walk down that path again. It will likely be even more fierce this time around.
I was going to post something today about how the openly non-religious candidates did, but honestly, I’ll get to it later. I’m numb. I’m frustrated. I’m angry at pretty much everyone who didn’t take the election seriously enough to vote—or wasted their vote on a third party candidate because they always expect Democrats to be perfect while rewarding Republicans for being terrible.
So give me a minute to grieve. Back to work tomorrow.
So humiliating to be an American this morning
The chickens voted for Colonel Sanders. They know the colonel, they know what he's promised to do, and they voted to put him in charge anyway. The saddest thing to me is knowing that the majority of Americans are not, and apparently never have been, worthy of the country and its principles that our Founders bequeathed to us. Yesterday was the day American democracy died.