Donald Trump is not my president. I say that with a heavy heart and a heavier spirit, feeling hopeless about the future of the United States, and traumatized by the brutality of the past year. Donald Trump is not my president because I refuse to normalize his abhorrent behavior with my acceptance. I did not vote for him and I am baffled by the people who did. I know they voted for him with confidence and pride– What do they see in him that I don’t? Is there good in him that I am missing? Is there truth there and competence and compassion that I have somehow overlooked? If there is, someone please point it out to me, please, so that I can get over this thing and move on. All I know is, right now, every time I think of Trump as our President, I feel a swooping dread settle into the pit of my stomach right before a furious resentment sets in; My family and my friends and I will be forced to go through the upcoming Apocalypse alongside his supporters, when, if life were fair, we would be exempt from the trouble to come, being that we knew better than to vote him in.
These next few years (who knows how many, really, as impeachment looms large in the background already) will drag by filled with turmoil and lies and loss of rights, unless, of course, we all just go up in a fireball or slowly expire in a nuclear winter. If we have to go, I vote for the fireball, by the way. Less pain. Less muss and fuss. Whether Trump’s time in office is a trudge toward impeachment or the quick flash and burn of a nuclear war, is, in my mind, a toss-up between two scary options. Whether we live or die could come down to a Twitter fight, or whichever way the wind is blowing that day. No, really.
It feels like a bad dream. It cannot be true. Trump cannot be about to take the oath of office. I am in mourning. Hillary Clinton trounced him in all three debates. Doesn’t matter. She was the adult to his toddler. Who cares? She had experience galore. Gobs of experience. He had none. Fun Fact: Did you know that Donald Trump will be the first President in history that has never served in public office, OR been a General? How is this man competent to be our Commander-in-Chief? Would you choose a brain surgeon who had never operated before and held no medical degree? No? Not even if he were super-de-duper extra confident in his abilities? Still no? Then why did anyone choose a person to run this country, to run the world, basically, who has no relevant experience under his belt? It just makes no sense to me. It’s one thing to shake things up, it’s another to reward cocksure incompetence.
Trump is not a politician, he’s a businessman– and not even a particularly good one! He got his start with a generous loan from his rich Daddy, and then went bankrupt, like, six or seven times. Worshipping money, cheating your vendors, stiffing your creditors and taking credit where none is due are not good qualities to have in a President. Hell, they are not good qualities to have, period. Not to mention that he refuses to release his taxes so we have no idea who he is beholden to, and I heard he had mob ties…. Still, it would be one thing if he realized he was in over his head and spent all of his time studying and trying to get up to speed before the inauguration—but that is not what is happening. Trump doesn’t know what he is doing and he doesn’t care to learn. He prefers to wing it because he thinks (and I know this because he has said it on the record) he and his big brain are the only things that can fix this country. …God help us all.
I will never get with the program and support Trump for the good of the country, because he is not, in fact, good for our country. He has not bothered to hide any of his egregious flaws. In fact, he celebrates them all, proudly bragging about them and reveling in his own wickedness. Anyone with any kind of a heart should be able to see what kind of a man he really is. (I am lookin’ at YOU Evangelicals. God opposes the proud—or did you forget that? I am convinced that God allowed Trump to win to teach this country a hard lesson).
As for me, I refuse to wait and see what kind of havoc Trump can wreck on our country. I will not grace him with a period of unopposed time, while hoping for the best and giving him the benefit of the doubt. That would be ridiculous and misguided. Trump has not earned my trust nor my respect. I will not stand by and watch Muslims (or anyone) being forced to register with the government (will they have to wear emblems stitched to their clothing next so we can all pick them out)? I will not stand by and allow anyone to be forced into internment camps. I will not overlook Trump’s attacks on Hispanic people and disabled people and women. I will not help him implement his horrid agenda of taking money and health care and birth control from the poor to further enrich Mr. and Mrs. Fabulously Wealthy. I can’t. I won’t. I am going to stand up. I am going to resist. I am going to fight.
Sour grapes you say? “ Those Dems just need to get over it– Trump won fair and square”. …Except that he didn’t. Not really, and that is kind of the point. Thank you Rep. John Lewis for standing up and saying what a lot of people have been thinking privately. Trump is illegitimate. (Apparently, only Trump can call a President illegitimate. How dare anyone else even think such a thing about him)! An election where Russians hack in and try to swing the election for their preferred candidate by harming one candidate’s credibility and spreading misinformation about them is not a fair election. When one candidate (with possible ties to Russia) publicly tells Russia to hack the other candidate’s emails and they do! That is not a fair election. Not to mention James Comey and his partisan, misogynist idiocy, where he had dirt on both candidates for President but only went public with the stuff he had on the one with the vagina. (That man should be fired for what he did. He should be brought up on charges, because he and his agenda helped swing this election to Trump). Need I go on? Wikileaks, and the press lapping it up, gleefully printing new emails every day (would ANYONE like to have their private emails blasted to the entire world? Could anyone come out smelling like roses with that kind of humiliating, daily scrutiny?). Despite all of that, Clinton still won the popular vote by almost three million votes. She lost the Presidency due to the Electoral college—by a total of less than 100,000 votes, I believe, and Trump has the temerity to go on and on about his landslide win… Man, this election was the poster child for election fraud, and yet we are all pretending not to notice that man behind the curtain. Not me. Not anymore. I prefer to whip the curtain back and see what we are dealing with—and it ain’t pretty (I wish he’d keep his shirt on).
You don’t need to actually go in and hack voting machines to swing a close election in your favor, though I wouldn’t be surprised if we someday find out that the Russians did that too. If you look at it logically, if the Russians were willing to interfere with our election, why would they then grow a conscience and stop short of hacking the actual voting machines? (No, that’s just too far. We will go this far and no farther)! We might not want it to be true, and there might be no real way to prove it—nor might it be in the country’s best interest if it were proven, but ignoring it doesn’t make the possibility go away. I wish we could have this discussion in this country, without being seen as conspiracy theorists. If the tables were turned and the exact same thing had happened to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was now the President elect, cozying up to and defending the President of the very country who had cheated and helped her win, would that be ok? Would anyone consider that to have been a fair election? No. And neither was this.
One last analogy. Suppose you and a bunch of other millionaires were playing Monopoly with real money, and real stakes, and the banker gave himself twice as much money as everyone else to begin. Is that fair play? Would you be ok with it when he proceeded to win all your money and property? Now, suppose the banker gave another player twice the bank, unbeknownst to that player, and he won big. Would that be fair? Let’s say that afterwards, the banker fessed up to what he had done, but instead of having a rematch, the winning player called you all losers, patted himself on the back, did a victory lap and went to buy himself an island. Maybe you’d be a little bitter. I know how that feels.
Election day was, for me, a dark and devastating one. As a woman. As a human being, I have not yet come to terms with the results. I feel like we were robbed of our rightful Madame President and there is nothing I can do about it. Even if Trump should someday be impeached for election fraud, for cheating, for helping the Russians, for something completely different, Hillary Clinton will not, then, become the President. That ship has sailed. Mike Pence would win the prize, and he is almost as bad (if not worse when it comes to LGBTQ and woman’s rights) than Trump is. That, in a nutshell, is why I am still so pissed off about the results, and if you need to call it sour grapes, well, so be it. But don’t try to gaslight me into thinking that none of this happened or matters.
I despise Trump’s racism and his misogyny. I am thoroughly creeped out and frightened by Trump’s sexually predatory attacks on women. I am disturbed by his inability to tell the truth—about, literally, anything. He praises violent dictators and seems to identify with them. He has sketchy ties to Russia. He is a demagogue. This crooked, boastful, authoritarian, vengeful, bigoted, mentally ill carnival barker, who daily, no, hourly, makes up his own reality to suit his ego, and who seems to be overflowing with a plethora of really scary personality disorders, is about to become the President of the United States of America. If that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine you are made of stone.
The press needs to do a better job of holding Trump accountable for his words and his actions. They need to take back their power before they have none left to wield. They should have many chances to do that because Trump is constantly in the news about something. Who wants to think about your President every single day? I don’t. I want my President to fade into the background. I want to go to sleep at night confident that there is a sober adult flying the plane. I do not want to see him erupt in embarrassing Twitter fights at the slightest provocation. I do not want to hear about new scandals and lies and incompetence every day. Trump, stop freaking me out and go out and govern! Quietly. Rationally. I beg of you. If you do this, people like me might eventually come around. If you don’t, you will end up impeached. A laughingstock. A buffoon. You are well on your way already. Stop. The time has come.
As I said. I did not vote for Donald Trump. As such, I take no responsibility for any of the horrible things that are about to go very wrong with our country. I will close with something my sister texted me the other day that felt very true. In four years Trump and Putin are going to exchange a dollar bill, like at the end of the movie “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy. “I bet you one dollar that I can ruin the United States in four years.”
Bet’cha he can do it in two.
About Clear Blue Water (my comic strip) and me and mine 