How to talk about the last couple weeks? We had a wonderful, long overdue trip to the Bay area, and I felt physically great throughout. Felt cosmically good on election day. As we parked for an early (5 pm Pacific time) dinner, our friend flashed the Bitcoin price at me—it was skyrocketing. He looked somber. Not knowing what it meant, my friend said, “Trump.” But it was still early. Nothing had been counted. We made our table a phone-free zone and enjoyed the last meal in a free country.
Our friends had a work obligation to taste different flavors of a fancy ice cream brand, so we’d picked up nine pints of ice cream earlier that day. As the night wore on, nine pints of ice cream seemed as good as any way to manage the situation.
I didn’t sleep much that night, jacked up on sugar and horror and disgust and consumed with trying to formulate the most scathing combination of pejoratives to describe Trump voters.
My early ideas were inelegant: “What the fuck, you stupid, dumb fucks???!!!?!?!?!”
Trying to understand data gradually, gently, only leads to more questions. Trump supporters have overwhelmingly voted against the best interests of the rest of society: women, children, immigrants, everyone but rich, white men…and for that, I’ll never not think of them as pathologically selfish, horrible people – also too ignorant to understand that they have fucked over themselves in the process.
A big part of my post-election despair was just how many of them are out there. Like 50/50 voted for Trump. But that’s not true! More people didn’t vote than voted for either Trump or Harris. 89,278,948 people who could vote, didn’t (I have special words for them, but at least they didn’t make a conscious effort to vote for a sociopath). 76,701,827 people chose the sociopath. 74,150,117 chose Harris/Walz. This is important: more than 2 out of 3 people you see on the street did NOT vote for Trump.
This makes my plan to punch every Trump supporter in the mouth much more manageable.
We’ve all identified the known Trump supporters in our lives. We’ve tracked that shit all along, becoming more and more incredulous as Trump’s promises and actions became more and more demonic.
Now we get to watch Trump fill the clown car of ineptitude that might be his cabinet. A TV star Pseudo Dr. A FOX talk show host. A guy who hasn’t washed his hands in ten years because he doesn’t believe in germs. Someone with a worm in his brain who doesn’t believe in vaccines. The richest man in the world, who also happens to be Putin’s good buddy. A nutball who shot her dog. The hits keep coming. What the fuck. It’s apocalyptically hilarious.
On those I know to be Trump supporters, I’ve moved beyond rage to contain and distance; they are the swerving car on the freeway. Give it wide berth, and move away as quickly as possible. Do not engage. It is a lost cause.
I’m a floating blue ball, with a blue safety force field all around me. I avoid the orange balls; they’re prickly and suck away energy. I know so many other blue balls! Like (most of) you! We stick together and can form a great, big blue raft. And that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get through it. And we’ll use our individual and collective power to help those who will be horribly fucked in ways we can’t even begin to predict.
Bob and I have stopped watching the news. Our nightly routine used to be eating dinner while watching Chris Hayes on MSNBC, slightly behind air time so we can fast forward over commercials. We now watch Antiques Roadshow or Shark Tank over dinner, because Bob draws the line at watching veterinarian shows (my choice) while eating. I’ve turned off political notifications on my New York Times app. I’m subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American newsletter on Substack. She’s an academic historian who reports the daily updates in a straightforward manner, and often ties them back to similar occurrences in history.
In other news, there is zero nutritional value in Kellogg’s Corn Pops cereal, until you add milk, and then it has the nutritional value of milk. And if anyone could help me remember why I ordered two pounds of black sesame seeds, that would be awesome. Yesterday was a terrible day after weeks of good days: pain, moments of considering calling an ambulance, couldn’t settle on which catastrophic malady was about to kill me, then feeling fine, did a bunch of work, had a terrible headache, periodic vomiting, more ambulance consideration, had to cancel out-of-house appointments, ended day feeling totally fine. And today was a great day. I think this is pretty much the way it’s going to be, for all of us, going forward. We’re going to have really terrible days. But that’s okay, because we also have a big blue raft.