How the Fuck Did It Go This Wrong Again?!

Even though 2016 felt like someone ripped out my insides via my throat, right now still somehow manages to feel worse. Donald Trump, our 45th president, who is a sexual predator and convicted felon; staged an insurrection; denied election results; buried federal climate change reports; insulted and endangered women, minorities, and the LGTBQ community; and installed conservative Supreme Court justices (and wing-nut judges up and down the federal bench) that have—among other things—overturned Roe v. Wade, still won, and will also be our 47th president.

Despite his racist rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27 that actually seemed to turn some voters against him, and despite the shot of hopium from famed pollster Ann Selzer heading into election week, some key swing states—namely Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—broke decisively for Trump.

In addition to the Electoral College, Trump won the popular vote. The polls were wrong, fucking again. It was not a close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris: As of publishing this, he’s won 51% of the popular vote, and 277 electoral votes. She fared terribly, under-performing President Joe Biden in every state he won, including solid blue regions like New York City.

Fewer people voted in 2024 than in 2020, and according to national exit polls, President Joe Biden won 57% of women’s support; Harris only got 54%.

In a speech around 2:30 a.m. at Mar-a-Lago, Trump declared victory, calling media outlets the “enemy camp” and thanking Elon Musk ad nauseam.

The Harris campaign has not yet released a statement.

What now? I could list all the bad shit we’ll likely face in the coming weeks and months—but there’s plenty of time for that. (Unless Jezebel gets permanently shut down by a fascist Trumpian task force that eliminates anything that ever spoke out against him, or if Trump decides to turn his joke about people shooting journalists into a White House priority.)

But for right now, I, personally, will be drinking—tonight, and probably tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, tomorrow night, and through the weekend. I’m going to finish my Election Day pack of cigarettes and order a cheeseburger and a milkshake. Then, I’m going to do what Kimmy Schmidt—the titular character of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—did for those 15 years she was trapped underground in a doomsday cult: Count to 10. “You can stand anything for 10 seconds. Then you just start on a new 10 seconds,” she says in Season 1. There are 31,536,000 seconds in 365 days, so that’s just 12,614,400 moments of counting to 10. That’s simply listening to All Too Well (10 Minute Version) 205,781 times; watching Tár 13,306 times; or watching all 10 seasons of Friends just over 387 times.

Is this ridiculous? Yes. But numbers clearly don’t mean anything anyway.

There were a few good outcomes last night. In Missouri and Arizona, voters overturned abortion bans. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who have been outspoken against the genocide in Gaza, won their House races handily. And for the first time in U.S. history, there will be two Black women serving in the Senate at the exact same time. (I realize this reveals a pretty upsetting pace of progress, but it’s something?)

It’s going to be bad. I feel like apologizing, I’m not sure to who… I guess I’m sorry to the future of America, for however much longer it exists.