228 Comments

I am heartbroken, and furious. Furious that so many people in this country decided that a rerun of Trump's disastrous shitshow, this time with twice the dementia and four time the cruelty, is what they want. And I'm furious that they have put the lives of my wife, my daughter, my three granddaughters in danger. They all live in blue states, but if the MAGAs get their way it will not matter. And I am furious that at age 71 I will have to take to the streets and fight the forces of fascism and hate again. I did that once in the late 60s. I'm too old for this...

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I agree completely, I’m terrified right now, as a woman who chooses to remain childless and am still of reproductive age, I do not want to be forced to carry and care for a child I do not want and do not believe I can adequately care for financially. I live in California but it still scares me. I can’t understand how these idiots could vote for hate, division , misogyny, racism, violence, etc. I can’t afford to leave the country so I’m contemplating checking out🤦🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️, another Trump disaster is too much, too risky, too dangerous, too horrific. I don’t know where to go from here, I feel cheated, so many other countries have elected female leaders why haven’t we? Why are we so behind? Why do we (or they) want to be still stuck in the bullshit 50s when women had no rights and barely had the right to vote?! I don’t know what to do, I was fighting so hard, I’ve fought all my life and it just keeps getting harder and more impossible. Can someone who is not a troll or asshole please help us through this incredibly trying time. I’m not sure if I’m gonna make it and I already have too much on my plate just like everyone else. I hope everyone is trying to hang on, I’m with you all here. I know I’ve got to keep fighting but it’s so hard when you keep getting beat down and have little to no support system. I hope I can find other like minded souls on here to commiserate with. I’m here if anyone needs to talk. Trying to send out hugs and good vibes as hard as it is. I’m so disappointed and disheartened right now, I’m still in disbelief.

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You’re not alone. There are millions of us in the same place, trying to see a way forward. Give sadness and disappointment its moment… and then let’s keep working on behalf of kindness and compassion.

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You’re right, I agree with you completely. Thank you for your kindness and support. It’s greatly appreciated. 🥰🥰

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A lot of us, so many, are so disappointed. But I believe that goodwill/love will prevail. Right now the truth is hard. But it is the truth, that people want this man to be president. We have no choice but to watch this play out. There will be reaction and resistance. It helps to do whatever lifts your spirits and concentrate on yourself and your loved ones and to seek commiseration like here.

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At 26 I fought to have a tubal ligation. That was 51 years ago. Smart decision. PP helped me find a doctor. Consider it.

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Peter, feel the same. I’m a similar age. The fight continues. We need to do what we still can to make this world a better place.

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Midterms next. Let’s get active to get over this horrifying hangover.

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This won't be a rerun: This will be exponentially worse. Trump 45 was a buffoon. Trump 47 will be a terror, aided and abetted by culture-terrorists in suits carrying expensive leather briefcases.

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How have they put the life of your wife in danger?

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Married women sometimes get pregnant. Pregnancies sometimes go wrong.

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He is 71 yo and they have grandchildren. I assume his wife is no longer of child bearing age. How can her life be put in danger?

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Maybe she's an immigrant, a trans woman, not white, gay.... anyone but a cis white man.

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Ok, and how does that put her life in danger?

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My life was saved by the Affordable Care Act because I could afford to go to the doctor over something minor which turned out to be cancer. Six more months and I'd have been dead. Now your hero wants to end it, and that's how you put people's lives in danger.

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Certainly his daughters and granddaughters are in danger if we're making assumptions about child bearing in particular. Regardless, the larger point is that when women's bodily autonomy is denied ALL women suffer. I'd argue the men who love them do too. So you can stick to this bad-faith high-school-debate-point quibbling as to whether or not his wife is of childbearing age or you could engage the actual concern registered for all the women in his life.

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Vivienne, I’m trying to understand the commenter’s point. I may have missed something that Trump has said or advocated that would endanger the life of women who are not of childbearing age. Is there such a thing?

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Troll

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Than I apologize for the tone of my comment, Tian Wen. I still maintain that denying women bodily autonomy is a slippery slope for all, no matter how one parses it. You may disagree that doesn't constitute an actual threat - and that's fine, we can disagree and leave it at that. Either way, I do wish you well; be safe out there.

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Why this question?

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Peter made a comment, part of which I don’t understand. I may have missed something that Trump wrote or said during the campaign that would lead to endangering the life of women who are no longer of childbearing age. I’m trying to figure that out. Do you have any idea?

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So, as long as the women being endangered are of childbearing age, you think that's fine?

I'm a little confused as to why you'd support any male politician or judge who thinks they are more qualified to determine women's health care than women and their doctors...

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Yours is a distinction without a difference. Should men not care that such policies would endanger the life of some women, because they are not women? Asking for humanity.

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I'm a New York Times newsroom employee. I'm spending today on the picket line with our striking tech workers.

The work of the next four years is going to be horrible, and hard. The labor movement is more vital than ever. That's the work I'm focusing on today, and tomorrow, and every day until my colleagues get a contract. More than ever before, we're all going to have to band together and act collectively to protect each other, and ourselves.

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Thanks for reminding me not to play Wordle until the strike is resolved. I won’t have it much longer anyway, I canceled my NYT subscription and it will run out soon.

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I feel like the next NLRB will put the kibosh on any of that. :(

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I'm an old white guy from the Midwest and I'm just deeply saddened by last night. Not shocked or surprised - that was 2016 - just so sad that the citizens of our country could be so uninformed, oblivious and uncaring to elevate, for a second time, a person so spectacularly unfit to be the leader of our nation. I hate to think we get what we deserve but, maybe, that's the case.

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What timothy said. I feel the same way.

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Well said. Alongside the profound sadness, I'm also experiencing an anticipatory schadenfreude for the day his supporters discover the nature of the scorpion they've carried along is to sting everyone indiscriminately. They're not special. As Project 2025, and Turnip's other "concepts" become the law of the land, they'll be suffering alongside all the "woke libs" they've disparaged and decried and who they thought they would be lording it over.

We're in for interesting times.

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To be honest, I feel abandoned. I suspect a lot of the left opted not to vote for a candidate they didn't find to be perfect. She was courting the disaffected Republicans, and may have turned them off. The base is not always the best group to appeal to, but they can be the most vicious when they turn on you. I don't know how to go forward into this world that celebrates hate and violence and lies. I don't know how to forgive those who voted for him, or didn't vote at all. I don't know how to let go of the hope I had for a president I believed in more than any other in my lifetime. And I don't know how to trust that anything will ever be trustworthy again. The mea culpas from the pundits I trusted is killing me. I knew when the Times let its public editors go, it would be bad for journalism. I didn't realize how bad it would be. Thank you for this column. It helps on that front, at least.

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In 2020, 74 million people voted for the future felon. 81 million voted for Biden/Harris.

This year, 71 million voted for the insurrection president, a loss of 3 million or so. But only 66 million or so voted for Harris. Those absent voters could have swung the election, as always. Non-voters are the biggest (and laziest) party we have.

They sure showed us a thing or two, didn't they?

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Yup. I am as angry at them as I am at the trumpers. And I blame misinformation too. The economy is not a wreck. Biden does not control the world.

Not voting was a vote for tfg and that was said, over and over but those fools insisted on making a statement. Fools.

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Racism. Misogyny. Xenophobia. That’s the dark reality of where we are as a country. Kamala Harris did not fail us; we failed her. I weep that she received between 17 and 20 million fewer votes than Biden. How could that be?! And white women again. As one, I weep that we keep electing people who do not have our interests in mind. I alternate between rage and numbness. I’m not ready yet to figure out how we move forward.

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Honestly along with the sadness, I feel lost. Where do we go from here? And are folks prepared for what may happen?

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Yes. Where do we go from here? This is the most powerful country on earth.

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Midterms. Local school boards. It helps to act v dwell if you can act. I know how hard it is. You’ll find a community like you to act & commiserate.

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Quite frankly I am distraught and feeling frightened and hopeless. I am afraid of what will happen to us, to women, seniors, brown people, gays, and most of all our children. I am feeling intense grief and intense anxiety and intense sadness that the majority of Americans are so deeply hateful and angry. I don’t know what to do.

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It's okay today, this week, maybe for a while to not know what to do. But also know that even just 12 hours after this disaster became known, people with experience and open hearts are thinking deeply about what comes next.

The key for us, I think, is being open to seeking and trusting new leaders. I'm suggesting, for example, fellow substacker Anand Giridharadas: https://the.ink/p/welcome-to-the-rebuilding-years

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Will someone be considering that perhaps this win by Trump is not legitimate? Were foreign powers at work? The result is hard to believe -- how could Kamala's crowds have been so large and so enthusiastic and Trump's behavior so bizarre and scary and still result in Trump's win? I am uncertain that this is "REAL" ... 0:(

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Foreign interference has been at work for over a decade. They have some responsibility, but the bulk lands on us, Americans, too lazy to investigate, to easily led by the promise of wealth or retribution, to willing to be convinced that what we see and hear is NOT what we see and hear, too full of hate and fear and envy. I’m sick at the thought of the end of the USA as I knew it, as I grew up in, being over and knowing there are NO GUARD RAILS to stop the MAGA GOP from doing whatever they want. RFK in charge of healthcare; Musk in charge of reducing the size of government; Putin directing his asset, a felon, in the WH.

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Exactly, there's no conspiracy, beyond the ultra-conservative one we allowed to take root in the Republican Party 40 to 50 years ago, and then failed collectively to take seriously enough even as the evidence mounted that they were joining forces with the alt-right, the white nationalists, the Christian nationalists, and being supported by foreign interests in effectively dismantling Democracy around us. We did this to ourselves, complacent Democrats, power-seeking Republican Party quislings, and duped MAGA cultists.

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Those are my thoughts, too.

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There definitely was Russian interference, at a larger scale than previously thought. See Timothy Snyder’s substack post below.

https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/the-russian-bomb-threats?r=3jvi8&utm_medium=ios

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It did occur to me given Musks and foreign actions. I thought I sounded to ouch like him to say it out loud.

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I'm doing pretty lousy, to be honest. Worried for my world, my country, my state, my community. Worried for my adult daughter. Worried for my own sanity in an insane time. But I guess there is some small grain of comfort in knowing I am not alone in actually caring about people who don't look like me. It will take time, though, before I can possibly process, much less accept, what happened last night.

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The best way I can think about this disheartening result is: People are not endorsing cruelty, they are susceptible to fear, and fear of loss is stronger than hope for gain. For the nation to turn away from this dark direction, we have to confront, debunk, and dispel fear.

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Thanks Margaret. Like you, I am heartsick and thought more of us were better than this. That we could appeal to the better angels of our nature. I guess a majority of Americans really liked what Trump was selling.

I’m most concerned for my own and everyone else’s children. I’m very scared for them.

Hug the people you love, and be kind.

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I’ve already read thousands of words of anguish and despair this morning, but I must object to the characterization that “this is what America wants.” Tens of millions of Americans do NOT want this, and we won’t be silent for the next four years.

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This is what American is, who Americans are. Bigots. Women voted for that tangerine garbage sack. American women. Bigotry has no gender. Magical thinking has no boundaries. Willful ignorance recognizes no limits.

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Yesterday I was full of dread. Today I am terrified.

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My reaction is similar to David Rothkopf's - how the hell could I have been so wrong? I'm supposed to know something about people and politics but this outcome simply stunned me, even though the "polls" said it was likely.

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Heartbroken. Concerned for my 2 daughters in their 20s. Will they want to bring children into this scenario? If it gets bad, will my daughters agree to reside with me in a safer country? I could not go without them.

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My 31 year old daughter told me she's afraid to bring life into this new world order.

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