Fool Us Twice

My brain feels like scrambled eggs, so I reserve the right to delete this. For now, I need to get this out of my body before it poisons me further.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

On Wednesday morning, I woke up early to catch a flight. I rolled over in the cheap, crinkly sheets of my bed in the Courtyard Cincinnati Covington and already felt a creeping sense of dread rotting inside me. I reached for my phone and saw the words: Breaking: Donald Trump is elected the 47th president of the United States. 

I cried, compulsively refreshed Twitter, then cursed myself for making Elon Musk richer, then contemplated going back to bed and missing my flight. Feeling like a trampled animal, I wrote and deleted paragraphs. My brain was malfunctioning: I texted the same sentence to a friend three times, about 15 minutes between each message, without realizing it until I read our conversation back later. I was a record doomed to loop this same phrase over and over again for eternity: We are so fucking fucked, dude.

As I walked through the Cincinnati airport, I found myself nursing vindictive fantasies about encountering someone in Trump memorabilia. I’d ask them at what point in their lives they had decided women’s lives were worthless or that a man credibly accused of, among almost countless other things, raping a 13-year-girl with Epstein in 1994 was worthy of a vote because it’s a little expensive to fill up an F-150. 

But that’s not what I found. What I found was worse.

The Cincinnati airport population seemed almost uniformly untouched by the events of the day. It was as if nothing had happened; there was neither celebration nor despair, only people lazily scrolling through feeds or reading some Bleacher Report article about the Chiefs or thumbing through Colleen Hoovers. The lack of physical evidence of the night’s events and the palpable sense of indifference to our collective circumstances made me feel legitimately crazy.

In the hours that followed, I started to feel poisoned by my contempt for the situation and those who delivered us here. 

We have, for the second time, handed the cockpit keys to a hijacker poorly impersonating a pilot. The worst part is, he isn’t even a charming, talented, or particularly likable hijacker. 

I wish he were.

I wish he were a smart, handsome liar.

I wish he were young, charismatic, and articulate.

I wish he had a regrettably squeaky-clean, impressive record.

I wish for anything that would make the incomprehensible make sense, because the reality is that an angry, petulant, nearly-80-year-old man said and pledged to do horrendous, chaotic things for eight years, and 71 million people said yes, we’d like that very much.

It would make a little more sense if his economic plan was good for the working and middle classes. It is not.

It would make a little more sense if he promised grand and fabulous things, the equivalent of the student council candidate offering weekly pizza parties should he be elected. He does not. 

It would even make a little more sense if he were just a fantastic orator, a man with a compelling and cogent vision for the future.

But he is none of these things.

Since Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are most fluent in lies, here are some truths:

Donald Trump has made lewd comments about wanting to have sex with his own daughter, on television, on more than one occasion. Yes, the man who cares so deeply about protecting the integrity of middle school girls’ volleyball from the devious plans of trans kids.

He is an adjudicated rapist, and accused of sexual misconduct by no less than 27 different women. Yes, he will protect women.

He has said immigrants “poison the blood” of America and hosted Hitler Youth Boy Scout Nick Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago for dinner in 2022.¹ But yes, he loves and has a plan for Black men.

He has pledged, overtly, to bolster the dominion of white, cisgender, heterosexual men over the rest of us. Yes, he stands for family values.

His most enthusiastic celebrity endorsements came from token aggrieved, past-their-prime white men who perceive their own irrelevance as proof there’s a radical conspiracy by the immigrants and gays against “their kind,” rather than what it actually is, a culture that’s moderately less interested in suffering fools (or so we thought). Yes, he’s just telling it like it is.

His economic plan has been widely, openly derided by economists as disastrous and foolish: 16 Nobel economists signed an open letter warning of the “deeply concerning” consequences it would bring to bear, warning that “the outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come. We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.” Yes, Trump “will fix it.”

His tax plan, in plain sight, raises taxes for everyone who earns less than around $400,000 per year (those who earn more can expect a tax cut). Yes, he cares about and fights for the working class.

He promises “mass deportations,” seemingly misunderstanding who, primarily, grows and produces the food that fuels his precious hordes of Proud Boys—more than a million farm workers are immigrants, and roughly half of them are undocumented. Yes, your grocery prices.

His presidency is expected to raise the federal deficit by $15 trillion over 10 years, twice as much as Harris’s proposals—which included building 3 million homes and down payment assistance—would have. Yes, the government is wasteful; Trump will drain the swamp.

The American electorate looked at all of these facts and said yes.

This is the most agonizing, infuriating, maddening part—he does not spin beautiful, well-crafted lies. He does not bury his bad ideas or obscure his asinine plans with fancy, well-reasoned jargon to conceal how damaging and counterproductive his ideas are. These truths are out in the open, and still, 71 million people said yes.

We’re willing to endanger the lives of millions of women, Black and brown people, poor people, trans people, and people who aren’t straight, white, cisgender, heterosexual men for this man and these ideas?

I don’t know what to make of this other than the interpretation that it seems to me America suffers from a deep and profound Freudian death drive because we, for a second time, have chosen a monster instead of an overqualified woman. We will suffer for this.

He has taken a mirror to our worst, ugliest parts, magnified them, and declared them good. We have allowed a con man to make a fool out of us not once, but twice—to reveal how deeply the groundwater of this country has been poisoned. And I know it’s poisoning me, too: Like a victim of abuse, I find myself wondering if maybe we actually deserve what’s coming for us. There is no option left but to dig out the rot from its roots; to burn it down and start over. 

I admire the online leftists who have already found their way to optimism and making plans; I fear the road for me will be much longer. Today, I only feel despair. This election has taken something from me that I didn’t know I still clung to: the small hope that maybe America wasn’t as bad as I feared. It’s taken something from all of us—some of us just don’t realize it yet.

And now, things will get worse. They will get much worse. And we will have nobody to blame but ourselves. 

1. After the results were announced on Wednesday, Fuentes tweeted, “Your body, my choice. Forever.”