So.  What the hell just happened?!? 

I’ve got to tell you, I shot straight to #2 of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief (anger), which for me was blind rage. No denial for me! I also don’t see myself moving to bargaining, depression, or acceptance any time soon. (Maybe eventually depression.) I had ALLLLLL the “I-told-you-so”s, and I was pretty smugly self-righteous and angry on social media for a few days.

Some people are in the denial phase and demanding recounts. To which I say for now – if Trump got to demand recounts that yielded no evidence of election fraud, and then whine about it for four years straight, Democrats should be afforded the same courtesy (although they’re less likely to whine for years on end if the evidence doesn’t go their way.) If one side was entitled to a recount, so is the other. It may or may not show fraud (and in all likelihood, won’t.) Keep an open mind when and if new evidence is presented. That being said, certain things seem a bit fishy to me and warrant an investigation, that the democrats should 100% spearhead. If they don’t, well…it becomes hard for me, and I suspect many of us, to continue to fight for people who won’t fight for themselves. If the evidence doesn’t show fraud, so be it, but at least ask the questions. At the very least, an investigation which finds no fraud would restore belief in the integrity of our elections.

On the absolute Nazi cesspool that Twitter (X) is nowadays, Trump’s victory translated into MAGATs braying “cry harder, faggot” en masse at anyone who expressed any concern whatsoever that just maaaaaybe, electing a guy who said he was going to be a “dictator on day one” was a bad idea. (They all screech the same vitriol from the same script on X. There’s no original thought there from the far right.)

(I’m not sure I’d bandy about the “losers” epithet with that level of spelling and grammar, but far be it from me to tell WillZilla how to live his/her/their life. I don’t want to assume their pronouns. ;)

Interestingly, I’m seeing some of them show some interest already in learning what they voted for (great timing, eh?) Check out the 90-day trend in google searches for “tariffs”:

Here’s the one for the search term “Project 2025”, and believe me, I saw an according spike in traffic to this site as well:

I won’t go too far into tariffs here (I’ve literally done so ALL OVER this website), so let’s just ask the question: how much sympathy should we have for people that didn’t bother to educate themselves about what they were voting for until AFTER they’d voted? (It’s apparently human nature. There was a similar phenomenon after Brexit of Britons googling “what is Brexit” after they’d voted for it.¹) I don’t get it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.

As I pointed out on Facebook after I calmed down a bit, though, the best time to protect yourself from Project 2025 was Tuesday at the ballot box. The second best time is now. I’m not gonna lie, I was about to start deleting people who voted for Trump right and left from my social media accounts. The problem is, while it’s easy to write off “cry harder, faggot” guy as a white trash MAGA idiot, and to lump them all together into the same “this is who you voted with” bucket, I actually grew up in a small town in a red state with people who supported Trump for whatever reason, and I know they’re not all bad people.

They’re people who, for whatever reason, felt seen by Trump. Most of them – I think – know in their hearts that he’s a conman, possibly the world’s most prolific liar², a rapist³, a man who stole from a childrens’ cancer charity⁴, a man convicted of 34 separate felonies⁵ and who would likely be going to prison for his 54 pending ones⁶, except that now that he’s won, he’ll simply make those charges go away. He’s a nasty, petty, whiny jackass. If Trump were an ordinary nasty, whiny jackass who walked into a bar in my hometown and started running his mouth about how he’s such a rich genius and everybody loves him and also everyone is out to get him and life is sooooo unfaiiiiirrrrrrr, he’d be likely to leave with fewer teeth.

So why did so many people fail to see him for what he is? (Seriously. I’ve never heard a grown man whine so much. It’s embarrassing.) I’ve certainly heard a lot of reasons over the past few days, and I haven’t seen one that I think nails it fully (and some are WAY off.)

I’ll get into that in subsequent installments here, but the bottom line is that we have a deeply, DEEPLY broken culture in America.

Photo Credit: The Independent

This picture? Wasn’t 10, 20, or 50 years ago. It was last week, after Trump won the election. That’s at Texas State University. [Source]⁷

So if you’re distancing yourself from Trump supporters and unfriending them on social media, you’ll get no judgement from me. People need to set healthy boundaries for themselves. I’m right there with you in spirit – I’ve stopped short of unfriending anyone so far, despite the fact that they’ve broken my trust and voted to harm me and others I care about, because if they refused to do the work ahead of the election to be an informed voter and really understand what they were supporting, they can do the work to unfriend ME, if that’s a boundary they want to set. Either way, maybe they’ll finally do some work, either to educate themselves or go out of their way to shut me out. I’m going to be a petty Betty and remind them EXACTLY what they voted for, when things like the above happen.

THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED, I’ll say. YOU DON’T GET TO LOOK AWAY.

As many fingers as I have to point at the right, I have an equal number pointed at the left. It’s very easy to look at the most extreme examples of Trump-supporting behavior and lump all of his supporters together with the extremists and write them off (I’m looking right at you, “basket of deplorables”). As accurate as that descriptor was – and continues to be, for the behavior of the farthest right of Trump’s supporters, it didn’t help bring anyone over to the other side. It also doesn’t account for the millions of regular people who simply thought Trump represented them better (God help me, I don’t get it, but I refuse to believe they’re all bad people. Call me Pollyanna.)

Ironically, the only person I stopped following was a far-left influencer who spent the entire election cycle arguing that one ruler of the “evil U.S. empire” was exactly the same as another, and that it didn’t matter who won. This person isn’t living in America. It’s easy to make the globalist perspective argument from a place of safety. I love a good cynic, but this time around, it was a bridge too far for me to listen to someone argue that both candidates are exactly the same when Americans – who actually live here – would be safe under one person, and literally lose (more of) their rights under the other. Both candidates were NOT the same, this time around.

American leftists who make similar arguments are doing so from a place of privilege, not safety, whether they recognize that accurately or not. It’s easy to sit out or make a third-party protest vote when you’re a straight, white cisgender American whose civil rights won’t be directly impacted by a Trump win. Suffice it to say, if you did this and pretended it was a “moral” position, I’ll similarly ask how “moral” you’re feeling when Trump inevitably starts hurting the people he’s promised to hurt. If you sat out or didn’t vote for the one person who was positioned to beat the fascist, all negative outcomes are on your hands, too. Not just people who voted for it directly.

So how do we begin to bridge these gaps and solve these problems? I’ll get into that. You can start by fully understanding that the culture war is being stoked by people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other billionaires, so that we are so busy fighting one another about ridiculous irrelevancies that WE AREN’T FIGHTING THEM IN A CLASS WAR. (Seriously, how stupid is arguing over saying Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays?)

For now, take a deep breath. If you did your part, it’s not your fault. No amount of Kamala Harris being a good candidate, or a good person – and she was – would have fixed this kind of brokenness in America. The kind of brokenness that has men sneering Your Body, MY Choice” at women in the wake of Trump’s victory⁸ (and make no mistake – that’s a threat and if I hear it out of your mouth in person, you’ll be treated as a threat). TRUMP ABSOLUTELY EMBOLDENS THESE PEOPLE.

Am I saying Harris ran a perfect campaign? No. But it was damned good. I’m saying that in a country where 70+ million of us are this broken, it doesn’t matter what her campaign looked like. Are these problems insurmountable? No. But we’ve got a LOT of work ahead of us.

Until next time, stay rational.

E.T. Parker