Category: FUCK TRUMP

Do you remember waking up the morning after the 2024 election?

That’s if you had managed to sleep at all.

I didn’t exactly fall asleep that night. I basically just shut down.

That’s my stress response, and terror is only one of the many, many things that set it off. Anything I can’t control, can’t contain, can’t explain, anything that rears up bigger than me and beyond my reach can leave me wanting nothing more than to close my eyes, even when I’m not tired.

For me, election night wasn’t about screaming. It was about the silent torment, like being seatbelted in your car and sinking into the abyss of a lake with your hands useless in your lap, the dashboard still lit, the radio still playing, the black water climbing the windows with all the patience in the world.

At some point, I couldn’t take in another thing. Physically, mentally, emotionally, there was nothing left in me to take it in with. I cried until even that became impossible, then lay there hollow and numb, past the point of taking anything in. I wasn’t tired. I was done.

The next morning I came back in pieces, the light coming through an unfamiliar hotel window, the pillowcase creased to my cheek, the mascara streaked down my face. And for those few merciful seconds before I remembered, I was just a woman in a bed, and nothing hurt yet.

And then I remembered.

It hit like a fucking avalanche.

Grief. Sorrow. Shock. Rage.

And a sickness so deep it had a taste, like cold pennies and bile.

All of it thundering down the mountain at once, burying me alive under the covers before my feet ever found the floor.

When I finally stood, my body kept falling, that missed-stair lurch in the dark that never quite lets you land.

There was a before the 2024 election, and there was an after. There was living, and then there was surviving.

Because accepting it meant questioning everything all over again, only worse this time, because now it was clear that basic decency meant nothing to so many people I thought I trusted, thought I cared about, thought I respected, thought I knew.

I honestly didn’t believe he could win in 2016, and when he did, it gutted me. But I could at least try to reason with myself that some of them, in between enjoying the racism, the xenophobia, the transphobia, the Islamophobia, believed he was the guy from The Apprentice.

I needed to believe we could chalk some of it up to the unknown, to what we hadn’t yet seen, because that left me somewhere to put my faith in people. By 2024, they couldn’t say they didn’t know anymore. There were no question marks, no what-ifs, no variables left to explain away. The worst-case scenarios they’d called me hysterical for imagining had names and dates and body counts. He’d shown us exactly who he was, what he was willing to do, who he was willing to hurt. And I couldn’t believe that people who’d watched all of it would send us back for more.

We knew every rancid inch of him. He golfed through a pandemic while refrigerated trucks idled behind our hospitals, shrugged at the dying, and went on talking about himself.

And when this country rejected him, that treasonous, tantrum-throwing tyrant called a mob to our Capitol to take what we had refused to give him. They erected a gallows and screamed for Mike Pence to hang because he wouldn’t throw out our votes. They crushed police officers in doorways, beat them bloody with flagpoles, drove them backward through shattered glass while the seat of our government became a hunting ground. And their Nero sat in his dining room watching it all unfold, watching our Capitol under siege, watching heroic police officers defend the citadel of our democracy against people carrying his name.

He let them fight for their lives while he fought to keep what wasn’t his.

Our votes. Our government. Everything generations of Americans had marched for, bled for, been beaten and buried for, brought to the edge of annihilation because this petulant, power-drunk, grievance-gorged parasite couldn’t tolerate the humiliation of losing.

They knew all of that in 2024.

They knew a jury had found him liable for sexually abusing a woman. They couldn’t hide behind “locker room talk” anymore. They knew about the fraud. The thirty-four felony convictions. The threats, the scapegoating, the promises of retribution. This remorseless, rapacious, rancor-ridden man, whose appetite for humiliation is inexhaustible so long as somebody else is made to kneel, had laid his malice out before the country and invited people to imagine what he could do with fewer restraints.

And millions wanted him precisely because he would give their resentments the force of government and let them call the devastation justice.

That was one of the most incomprehensible, eviscerating parts of all of this: we looked at the suffering he was offering and saw a warning. For them, it was the promise.

And so they chose him again.

And these were people in our lives. Family. Friends. Colleagues. People we made small talk with at the grocery store, stood beside at soccer games, carpooled with, broke bread with, waved to across the street. People who seemed decent. How do you go back to those ordinary exchanges knowing what they were willing to let happen to somebody else? You think you know people. You think you know what’s in their hearts. And then you have to live among them with the knowledge that you didn’t. God, how lonely that felt. How lonely it still feels.

And this time, we knew who was waiting to crawl into his lap: the sycophants, stooges, and sadists who would only be bellows for that fetid fascist flame.

Everything we’d held onto, hope and safety and democracy and justice and human kindness, felt severed at once, like the strings of a marionette cut above its head, the body folding before it could understand why nothing would hold. I needed something to reach for. Some way to stop them, to do something. And everyone I talked to, once they could stop crying or throwing up long enough to speak, kept coming back to the midterms.

We have to get to the midterms. We can get to the midterms. It’s only two years away.

The election we’re standing on the edge of now was barely a pinprick then, one needle-hole in the blackout curtain at the farthest seam of the horizon, so faint I couldn’t tell whether it was something to steer by or something my eyes had invented because they could not bear the dark.

Between us and that light lay two years of minefield, and we knew we’d have to cross it. We didn’t know whose footsteps would stop behind us, or how far we’d keep walking before we dared to turn around.

Only two years. They pressed those words into my hand like a coat-check ticket in a building burning to the ground. It might as well have been a million years when I was struggling to get through the next hour.

Two years didn’t get any shorter just because we needed them to. Some days we spent everything we had getting to nightfall, and that light hadn’t budged. We’d wake with our jaws clenched and yesterday still lodged beneath our breastbones, and there would be another whole day between us and relief.

So we walked, we crawled, we clawed our way through the interminable days, minute by minute when that was all we could manage, holding each other up and borrowing courage from whoever had any left.

And along the way, the absences began to accumulate. On kitchen counters sat lunches packed by parents who never came home; by the doors, small shoes waited for people who weren’t coming back to tie them. There were human beings kidnapped off the street and carted off to countries they had never set foot in, and people shot on their way to work in front of their children.

Dread has woken up before we have every morning since November 6, 2024. We open our eyes waiting to read the next new horror, the next new obscenity, the next new cruelty we couldn’t have imagined the day before. We’ve been carrying it to bed like wet wool, its sodden weight settling against our ribs, the chill seeping deeper as we sleep. We wake beneath it, aching for one unburdened breath before the world asks us to carry anything else.

I’ve known trauma since before I could spell it, and I tried for years to navigate what I was enduring alone. As a young mother surviving abuse, I learned to keep my pain so quiet that I could smile through school drop-off, cheer at the baseball game, and take notes at the class mom meeting while something inside me was coming apart. I kept functioning. I kept hiding it. And I ended up on the verge of suicide.

There are versions of me I still can’t think about without wanting to reach back through the years and gather them into my arms. I’ve learned over and over again that the way through is with other people, through community, through kinship, through connection, through letting someone hear what you’ve spent so long trying to survive in silence.

That’s what all of you offer me and each other. I’ve seen you show up when you can barely hold yourselves together, find words at two in the morning for someone who has run out of them. I’ve been buoyed and comforted by your bravery. Too many of you have sat with a stranger’s grief while still raw from your own losses for me to believe that cruelty is the deepest truth about this country.

This is why they want us divided, at each other’s throats, each of us sealed inside our own small terror. They know we cannot be defeated when we stand together.

The only way out is through, and the only way through is together.

And no, this election won’t fix everything. It won’t bring back the people we’ve lost or heal everything that’s been broken. We can’t rebuild as though none of this happened. We’re changed, and we’ve learned to turn toward people we once would’ve passed without knowing we needed them. We didn’t ask for these times, but we will be judged by how we met them.

When Wednesday comes, we get back to work. We have the work of a generation before us. I want our children to inherit more than our injuries. I want them to have ordinary days that would feel like miracles to us right now.

And no matter what Trump and his cabal of felon-fellating oligarchs, kleptocratic griftocrats, and aspiring authoritarians do, no matter what they try in the days to come, we stick together.

But those craven, conniving, Constitution-shredding bootlickerati in Congress have fed his power, funded his campaigns of persecution, and thrown themselves between him and the consequences. They voted for this. Now we’re going after their seats.

This is our final stand for the soul of our nation, and I’m not spending what’s left of today laying flowers on a future we still have time to fight for.

Yes, we’re exhausted, down to the marrow, in the places sleep stopped reaching two years ago. We’ve spent those years surviving, just surviving, and I want us to live. To draw a breath that isn’t preparation for the next blow. We’ve shown up every day anyway, we’re showing up now anyway, and we’re never going to stop.

And that chance we could barely imagine reaching, the one people kept telling us to hold on for?

It’s here.

It’s FINALLY HERE.

It’s fucking tomorrow.

There will be a before tomorrow and an after, just as there was in 2024. I remember opening my eyes that morning and having to live with what other people had chosen for us.

Tomorrow, we get to choose.

Ignore the polls. Polls don’t vote. We vote. If you haven’t voted, make your plan and follow through. If you have, reach somebody who hasn’t. Make the call, offer the ride, get them there.

Too real to steal. Too big to rig.

We turned our clocks back yesterday, but I’ll be goddamned if we let these fascists drag our country backward another inch. Tomorrow, we spring forward into action.

Now it’s our turn.

All gas. No brakes.

Run through the tape.

Let’s fucking win this.

1 comments

Has there ever been, in the history of mankind, or whatever genus of jackbooted Jell-O he technically belongs to, a bigger fucking crybaby than Donald J. “for Genius” Trump?

My God, that puling, peevish, petulant pantload, that sniveling, snot-sucking sultan of self-pity, that heaping pile of clammy deli trimmings that looks like somebody tried to sous-vide a Stretch Armstrong in the cloudy runoff from a can of hot-car Vienna sausages, is so absolutely, mind-bogglingly, embarrassingly pathetic.

Does Fat Satan hold the unofficial world record for competitive pissbabying? Get Guinness on the phone, but don’t tell this diapered dauphin of disappointment there’s a certificate, or we’ll never get the gelatinous little glory whore off the line.

He’s been whining nonstop about the “Noble” Peace Prize while we’re in the middle of a war he started and this preening, pud-pulling prima donna is picking out tile for his bulletproof ballroom, because heaven forbid he have to do his double-fisted jerk-and-twist to “YMCA” on a floor that doesn’t flatter his cankles. 

He’s also trying to sue me again for posting a picture of him with a pedophile, as if I’m the one who should’ve been more careful about who he was standing next to. But I digress.

This pick-me, panhandling pork rind has spent years dry-humping the committee’s leg without learning the name of the fucking prize, because apparently the self-proclaimed stable genius who keeps reminding us that nobody knows the word “dumb” ends with a B can’t distinguish Nobel from Noble.

All that panting, pawing, and varnishing its corduroys with orange chin grease, and he still thinks “no” is a clerical error he can overturn by forcing himself upon whoever and whatever he wants.

And they gave it to a WOMAN? In the putrid, pustulent, pussy-grabbing primordial sludge that passes for his presidential psyche, a woman is something HE gets, not somebody who gets something HE wants.

Barack Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize, and that’s nine hundred percent of what’s eating this envious little bastard alive.

Obama has one. He doesn’t. He can fill the White House with enough gold to make a Saudi prince request a less ostentatious table, and there will still be that one shiny thing Barack has that he couldn’t buy, browbeat, or bitch his way into being awarded.

Obama, young, lean, ludicrously handsome, wickedly intelligent, devastatingly articulate, with that slow grin, that velvet baritone, that exquisite composure, and a lethal wit he could deliver with one raised eyebrow, sexy enough to make a woman mistake a discussion of monetary policy for foreplay and briefly resent Ben Bernanke for wasting that mouth on the fucking bond market, stood at that 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and filleted him in a tuxedo.

A Black man with all that grace, all that gravitas, all that effortless command of a room this prestige-starved parasite would gargle warm denture water just to impress. In the rancid racial pecking order Donald had inherited right along with the real estate, this man was supposed to be beneath him.

Donald had been peddling the racist birther bullshit that Barack Obama wasn’t even born in the United States, trying to delegitimize the first Black president. And there was Barack, standing behind the presidential seal, making him the fucking punch line for all the world to see.

For a creature of such colossal conceit and cringing insecurity—a vainglorious, vindictive vulgarian—having Obama strip the gilt off his entire goddamn existence must have been fucking annihilating. The genius, the tycoon, the irresistible ladies’ man: he’d spent decades bullying the world into accepting his bullshit as biography, until The Apprentice gave the mythology a boardroom and a broadcast schedule.

This counterfeit Casanova even posed as his own publicist, John Miller, to tell reporters how many women wanted to fuck Donald Trump. He invented another person to corroborate his own bullshit.

And now the actual president was peeling the cellophane off the whole fraudulent creation in front of the Washington press corps, and the man who demanded everybody’s admiration had to endure the public evisceration of the mythology he’d spent his entire life trying to pass off as himself.

And the room laughed. Oh, how they laughed and laughed and laughed.

Obama even put up a mock-up labeled “Trump White House Resort and Casino,” which, considering the People’s House now looks like Saddam Hussein’s third wedding in a Paramus banquet hall, where somebody’s spray-painted the shrimp gold because the groom thought they looked poor, was pretty fucking clairvoyant.

All these years later, Baron von Bitchfit is mentally still at that Correspondents’ Dinner, jaw clenched, corn-niblet fingers curled into fists beneath the table, furiously rehearsing the comeback he wishes he’d delivered before Barack got back from the bathroom. 

Except now his comeback has a motorcade and a military budget.

That humiliation seared itself into whatever spite-saturated substitute for a soul this man possesses and metastasized into Obama-Induced Resentment Syndrome, a chronic, terminal condition. He wants the footage destroyed, the witnesses to swear they were choking on dinner rolls, Barack to confess his lifelong envy of Donald’s magnificent physique, and the Nobel committee to issue a groveling apology for its catastrophic error in judgment. He wants to know why winning the presidency TWICE hasn’t entitled Donnie Diapers to unlimited pudding and official recognition as the most special boy in the universe.

None of that is happening, but Veruca Salt in a pair of black patent-leather Florsheims with three inches of elevator lifts and enough heel polish to waterproof a bass boat isn’t leaving Wonka’s factory without her golden goose, even if she has to threaten the Oompa Loompas with federal indictments.

Sooner or later, that overstuffed bad egg is headed down the garbage chute.

And all the while, he’s so spectacularly constipated with resentment that he actually had Barack’s portrait moved and slapped up that oversized “painting” of himself after the assassination attempt, a Franklin Mint limited-edition “Presidential Martyrdom” collectible that looks like it came with a certificate of authenticity, a complimentary velvet display pouch, and six easy payments of $39.95, batteries not included.

The damn thing doesn’t even fit the wall panel.

Unable to wrestle Obama’s Nobel out of the universe, the Great Orange Gland of Grievance got his greasy meat mittens on somebody else’s. María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, handed him her 2025 medal in January, apparently hoping to secure his support for her bid to lead the country. She surrendered the most prestigious honor of her career to a man who’d sell his own grandmother’s dental implants for a McRib coupon, and what did she get in return? Fuck all. No endorsement, no path to power, not even a lousy refrigerator magnet from the White House gift shop. He pocketed her medal, announced he’d received the honor “indirectly,” and essentially told her, “Thanks, bitch. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

And even THAT wasn’t enough for Beelzeblubber, who wants EIGHT peace prizes, one for each war this medal-mad, megalomaniacal mound of presidential mortadella claims he “ended.”

By that standard, I deserve one for not losing my mind when my daughter turned my kitchen into an artisanal pumpkin muffin sweatshop at MIDNIGHT.

Another for the restraint I demonstrated at a stoplight when some horn-humping jackass in a Dodge Ram was riding so far up my ass he could’ve performed a colonoscopy through the tailpipe, and I only flipped him off THREE TIMES.

And a third for not informing my neighbor that her drunk-ass husband asked me about my sex life while I was handing out Halloween candy, because maintaining peaceful relations between sovereign households while a shitfaced suburban satyr conducts unsolicited research into my vagina over a bowl of fun-size Snickers requires the restraint of a bomb-disposal technician.

Did I summon the Norwegian ambassador to acknowledge my extraordinary contributions to suburban détente? No. I went inside and ate a leftover muffin.

The Tangerine Tantrum Tyrant expects the full Scandinavian production, complete with trumpets, tuxedos, a twenty-one-gun salute, and preferably a notarized statement confirming Barack Obama’s dick is smaller than his.

He’d insist his proctologist submit a five-star review of his asshole for inclusion in the banquet program, then demand to be carried into Oslo on a gilded sedan chair by four Norwegian weightlifters in orthopedic back braces while the string section abandons the overture to fan his swollen, swampy balls with their sheet music, assuming the cellist can hoist that collapsed wedding cake of Man-FUPA without giving himself a fucking hernia.

Even after all that ceremonial ball ventilation, he’d need Daddy to tell him he’s a good boy, which leaves the Nobel committee playing the role of five Norwegians in oatmeal-colored fisherman sweaters who can refuse him without getting fired.

Daddy said no, Donnie. Daddy keeps saying no. You need to stop fucking asking.

Except the Pouting Potentate of Pissbabyvania doesn’t hear no. He hears an invitation to apply pressure, punish, and threaten until whoever’s refusing him submits or breaks. He believes wanting something obligates everyone else to surrender it. Countries. Institutions. Women. Consent is an administrative inconvenience. He told us on the Access Hollywood tape: “I don’t even wait.”

He. Doesn’t. Wait.

Grab ’em by the Peace Prize.

He thinks the Nobel committee owes him a medal for taking his boot off a throat he put it on. With Iran, he’s demanding the medal before he’s even lifted the fucking boot—counting it among the wars he supposedly settled while still talking about how he’s going to settle or win it, as though starting a fire and eventually getting bored with watching it burn qualifies as an advanced degree in fire prevention.

That’s the arsonist who torches the Sizzler, calls 911, and plants his ass on the fire hose demanding a hero’s parade because he rescued the five-gallon bucket of ranch dressing. The firefighters are trying to save the building, the salad bar has reached temperatures ordinarily associated with Mercury, and this kerosene-cologned catastrophe is demanding the fire chief thank him personally before asking whether the cameras caught his good side.

Ending a war you started doesn’t make you a peacemaker. And “winning” a war you started sure as shit doesn’t make you one either.

Take that definition to Minab, where a U.S. strike hit a girls’ school and killed 175 children, and explain to the parents who buried them why the man presiding over the war deserves a gala and a commemorative photograph with the king of Norway.

Their daughters are dead, and this self-absorbed sack of presidential suet expects the world to console him because nobody gave him a necklace.

As if the dead children weren’t enough, Mussolini Alfredo is preparing to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, who uses a wheelchair. American soldiers, a condemned man, a worldwide audience, and a government convinced that military justice has been missing a production crew.

Gandhi never even got the fucking medal, but this bloodthirsty butter sculpture expects one while his people work out the camera angles for a public fucking execution.

Giving this malevolent, marauding madman a Nobel Peace Prize is like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a James Beard Award for sourcing locally, Ted Bundy a Volunteer of the Year plaque for helping lovely young women carry things to his car, and Joe Exotic the Carole Baskin Award for Excellence in Conflict Resolution.

And since we’re handing out honors to men whose résumés read like evidence inventories, find this spray-tanned supplicant a consolation prize before he works himself into a presidential prolapse. Rummage through the recycling, find a Fancy Feast lid, punch two holes in it, and thread a ribbon through the bastard. Check the edges, because I refuse to spend three weeks hearing that the president received a Purple Heart for being lightly inconvenienced by a can of Gravy Lovers Ocean Whitefish & Tuna.

Hang it around his neck, tell him it’s an upgrade on his FIFA Peace Prize, pat him on the head, and give him a chocolate chip cookie. Throw in a juice box and a participation certificate with a gold foil sticker that says WORLD’S BEST DONALD.

None of it fucking matters, because I’m never gonna be a natural blonde married to Ewan McGregor, he’s never gonna be a six-foot-three, 213-pound, high-IQ genius, and there isn’t enough gold in Fort Knox to bribe, bully, blackmail, or bludgeon somebody into hanging something around his sweaty neck-fold cheese that will ever make him a man of peace.

He’s not a war-ender. He’s not a humanitarian. He’s not some magnanimous, merciful, olive-branch-wielding statesman. He’s a sadistic, self-sucking, spectacularly spiteful son of a bitch who doesn’t give a solitary shit about peace unless there’s a piece of something in it for him.

Barack Obama is never going to apologize for embarrassing him.

That room full of people is never going to stop laughing at him.

And the Nobel committee is never giving that fat, ugly fuck a prize.

UPDATE: What I feared would happen when I finally told my story about the Trumps coming after me happened: another letter, six pages of threats citing my tweets and the very Substack essay I wrote about them threatening me, because now they’re threatening me for telling you they’re threatening me.

It’s straight up harassment, and I’d be lying to all of you if I said it didn’t scare the shit out of me, or that I haven’t spent a good chunk of the last two days crying, but I will be goddamned if I let them scare me into silence. 

I’m fairly sure this is going to result in a lawsuit, but I guess we’ll wait and see, because I’m not going to stop.

In the meantime, thank you, all of you, for your incredible, unwavering support—it’s the only way I’m getting through this.

I love you guys! Stay safe, stay strong, and stay connected to each other!

💙 Jo

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