I spent the entire day Wednesday, November 6th wondering how more than half of the country decided on four more years of Trump. I heard all of the reasons given, chief among them the economy and the border, and none of them were sufficient in my mind to justify the risk we have just taken.

I am well aware of the typical Democratic stances on things and I understand the frustration of these people. But they have been sold a series of lies yet again by the most inexplicably successful conman.

They want the economy to improve but he will destroy it with regressive tariffs, reigniting inflation and shoving us directly into recession territory. He has literally said how much of his platform relies on these tariffs and has a fundamental misunderstanding about how they actually work. It is now public knowledge that importers almost always pass the tariffs on to consumers in raised prices, meaning the favorite argument they made for him will actually harm them instead. They were so desperate for change and relief that they chose a man who has zero regard for their struggles and is actively railing against them with this policy.

They want the border closed and a great deal of them support the truly insane mass deportation plan he is proposing. I completely understand the necessity for a better solution to the border problem, but the deportations will destroy the American economy overnight. Nevermind the massive debt that this will incur at the expense of… wait, who will it be? Yeah, the fucking taxpayers. The estimates for this backwards, racist, xenophobic policy start at $315 billion all the way up to just shy of $1 trillion, and you’ll get the bill every payday in the form of higher taxes. You know, the high taxes that they said they’d never levy against the working class? That’s who pays for all of this shit, you.

He promised to take America to a new Golden Age, harkening to the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world. He didn’t bother mentioning the explosion of wealth inequality that occurred during this period in history and how all of the wealth consolidated near the top just before it all imploded in the Great Depression. Within the first two days of his victory, the top 10 wealthiest people on the planet gained almost $100 billion in net worth and far as I can tell, those of us on the bottom just got to watch the divide grow exponentially.

The policy positions that had Americans voting will also open the door for potentially permanent changes in the way our government functions at the federal level. As usual, the concerned voters could only be bothered with surface-level details about who would probably be better for their checkbook, and they went with the Republican because they thought it was better than what the Democrats could do. This opened the door for the Republican party to sweep all three branches of the federal government and with the Supreme Court already on the payroll, they can make changes that will take decades to undo. The most hyper conservative among them used the playbook from 1981 and updated it for modern times and it will be on the desk of President Trump the second he sits at the Resolute Desk. The team assembled around him is an all-star cast of the most dogmatic conservatives the planet has ever seen, and they will hand him a stack of dozens of executive orders to sign on day one. Any action that requires Congress will have zero argument because Trump has battered the entire party into playing ball or having their careers extinguished. If the Supreme Court needs to be called upon, it will only take a free vacation or two to get the votes necessary. But the fact of the matter is, the justices would have done it for free, because they are no longer afraid to break the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution.

The people have spoken, and they said “We can’t be bothered to look beyond the surface level details of a candidate who has promised us the world. We take him at his word unless it is about how he intends to become a dictator, then he was just kidding.”

And maybe those of us who tried and voted against him are just raising alarm bells and nothing will come of his presidency. But why the fuck would you risk the alternative?