I live in a small town in the Midwest with a population around 6,000. I was born and raised here and I know a lot of people just by a factor of being here over 40 years.

Throughout my life I have traveled and I’ve visited every state except Hawaii. I’ve also visited 18 other countries and counting and I feel my consciousness grows with every addition to the list. Travel has made me better as a human being and gave me an appreciation for the quiet part of the world I live in.

This is a preface to say I have seen many countries and other ways of doing things so that I can make a comparison to where I live. I have visited countries that were far worse off, and I’ve visited countries that I’d move to tomorrow if opportunity presented itself.

With the recent re-election of Donald Trump and the clear and present danger he poses to American Democracy, it has me reexamining the place I live with a fresh perspective and a heightened cynicism. Just for the sake of transparency, the county I live in voted 75% for Trump.

The real life bind I find myself in is now clear. If I see four people I know by name but not close enough to know their political affiliations, I have to assume that three of them voted for Trump. It means that I have to reconsider any interaction I may engage in from now on, and this feels like a violation that I will never recover from. I didn’t choose for my life to be like this, but over the past 8 years, our divisions have become so severe that we have to realign our entire lives to accommodate.

I hate Donald Trump to the core of my being because he makes a mockery of our institutions. It is hard to prioritize which adjectives to use to describe him and there are dozens. None of them are good. I am part of the 25% who can’t see a positive from this outcome.

The quality that concerns me the most is his neverending thirst for power. He has fooled millions of people into believing it is just bombast but he is saying exactly what he intends to do when he is in office again.

Project 2025 and Agenda 47 are the precursors to the American autocratic movement. These insane policy proposals hope to bring us back to the earliest days of our nation when the wealthy owned people literally. It is hard to overstate how bat shit these proposals are, but it would make the country inhospitable for anyone who isn’t a white Christian nationalist.

So three out of four times I see someone, I have to operate under the assumption that they voted for autocracy. I can never look at people the same because it makes me suspicious of everyone equally. I have only been in public a few times since the election but every time I have felt myself on edge like never before. I genuinely hope I don’t see anyone I know who I might have to do the math before I greet them.

And then I visited the store and was confronted with this exact issue. I saw a person I am on a first name basis with and it had been friendly in the past, and I want to keep the relationship intact in that memory. So before he saw me, I made sure he didn’t, so that we didn’t have to reach an impasse. My gut tells me he is one of three and it would have been a full-throated approval of Trump and the coming shift. 

I suppose that eventually I’m going to have to start ripping off bandaids and confronting the topic, but I am still determining how to best handle that. I don’t want the decision stripped from me in the way that Trump foisted it upon me to reconcile. I want to hope that the world will not stand for the threat of an American autocracy and that our institutions will hold but I have serious concerns that they can’t.

Trump won the Presidency.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative super majority, 3 of which were elected by Trump. They are in his pocket and they don’t even bother hiding it any more.

The Senate has returned to Republican control, where they will sit and await Trump’s marching orders.

The House remains to be counted but as I write this, Republicans only need to fill 6 4 more seats to retain control.

This represents a full sweep of the apparatus of the federal government for the Republican party, which is now led by a potential dictator who intends to weaponize these institutions to exact his vendetta against all who have wronged him, real or imaginary. He spent all 4 years of his time off letting us all know this is exactly what he would do and now he has every possibility to get what he wants. The party spent all 4 years helping to carefully orchestrate the takeover and go further into debt to Trump politically. Every one of the man’s worst instincts will be encouraged by his sycophantic coterie, and his ego will grow to a size never encountered in any democratic leader. Because he isn’t one of those. He is our Hitler.

I have been hesitant to apply the label to Trump because this is not a small charge to levy against anyone’s character. But Donald Trump has no character. He is whatever people want him to be for the right price. He is a conman that has just scammed over 74 million Americans into believing he is their savior. Their honest to fucking Christ savior. He has gone so far as to say that he survived two assassination attempts because the perfect, blonde haired, blue eyed Christian god wanted him to rule. He desires unwavering support and flattery, and expects obedience always. If you do not possess these characteristics, then you are the enemy within. He has given every indication that he will use his now vast resources to exact his revenge on this roster of people, which numbered around 70 million when the dust had settled at the polls. 70 million of us are in completely uncharted waters now as we consider that we may become targets of the federal government and the unfathomable power it wields.

So now a trip to the store triggers a real-time threat assessment of every person I see, regardless of whether or not I know them. 

• Three of four people support the violation I experience as I assess them.

• Three of four people support the willful violation of people I know and love as family because of their identity.

• Three of four people support the wholesale violation of women’s rights. 

• Three of four people are indifferent or complicit in the violations that over 70 million of us will experience in the coming years. An additional population of immigrants numbering in the 10s of millions are also being threatened, but they can’t speak because they are the first official targets.

• Three of four people support the most insane, unplanned, mass deportation that the country has ever seen, too ignorant to look into how that may affect them.

• Three of four people support the candidate who has indicated his full cooperation in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

• Three of four people support Russia’s fight to conquer and absorb Ukraine.

• Three of four people are willing to hand their government to billionaires who have nothing in common with them and are using their endless wealth to gain further control of the world.

• Three of four people are willing to allow a convicted felon to evade justice entirely through his duly elected position and his ownership of the highest court in the land.

• Three of four people have become more like the man they voted for: completely concerned with themselves and their bottom line.

• Three of four people couldn’t bother to take 2 minutes to look up what a tariff is and deduce that they will have higher prices on everything if tariffs are imposed across the board.

• Three of four people sold me and the rest of the 70+ million out for cheaper eggs, which the conman convinced he could deliver with those regressive tariffs and by eliminating unnecessary waste like the Department of Education, the CDC, and the FED.

But he was lying about his intentions. He wanted power. And three of four people I see where I live bought the lie without bothering to read any of the fine print to see what it will cost them. The cost is democracy, and all 335 million of us will pay.