I was absent-mindedly deleting old podcasts from my phone today, something I don’t do very regularly, and I had NPR Politics podcasts from before the 2016 election. Podcasts from when we were so sure we would have our first woman President because who would vote for this asshole? A podcast from his attack on the Khans, when we thought how low can he get?

It was kind of like a gut-punch. Things have gotten so insane. Surreal. I remembered the fear, the frantic phone calls, the crying. I never cried about other opponents winning, with maybe the exception of Norm Coleman after Wellstone’s death and that was much more a function of sadness and shock at Paul’s death rather than Coleman’s election. Trump felt like an existential threat.

We weren’t wrong. It was and is a nightmare. He’s the worst President of my lifetime, and one of the worst of all time. He makes liberal people sympathetic to George W. Bush. W’s head ethics lawyer is running as a Democrat here in Minnesota. Ethics. It’s like we don’t even remember that time.

I thought I might list all the terrible things that have happened since then, but I’m tired and feeling ill and I don’t want to remind myself.

Things have gotten so bleak.