So, I'll be honest. After the shock of the election began to subside and the waves of the post-shock tsunami began to recede, there was a tiny, infinitesimal, Lilliputian part of me that began to look for silver linings. And, even, the subset of hope responsible for giving someone the benefit of the doubt. "Maybe Darth Cheeto won't be the worst thing to happen to America since the Lost series finale" this smaller-than-the-plate-reserved-for-Sage-Steele-at-the-cookout part of me surmised. I didn't even dry heave when Dave Chappelle ended his SNL monologue with a plea for us to give him a chance. (I was tempted to, but I didn't.)
But then, within a day of that inkling of a thought, Cheeto went ahead and named the country's most prominent White supremacist as his senior adviser. And the appointments he's made since then have followed the same script. Jeff Sessions — a man so racist the Republicans in the freakin 80s were like "Yeah…this dude can't be a federal judge" — was just named the motherfucking Attorney General. You know things are bad when Rudy Giuliani, a man who's basically a Lugz chukka with sentience, is only the 5th or 6th worst person in Cheeto's circle.
When thinking about this, I can't help but remember way, way, way, way back when when there were actual debates about Hillary Clinton being the lessor of two evils in this election. "It doesn't really matter who wins" these people said "because neither are going to make our country any better."
This actually isn't completely untrue. Perhaps Clinton wouldn't have made things better. But this type of thinking ignored the very real possibility of one candidate making things much, much, much worse. There's a difference between occasionally problematic status quo and actual evil. Not evil in name only. Or "evil" as a hyperbolic and hysterical way of articulating something that rubs you the wrong way. But real evil. The Cheeto is presently installing an administration that will try their hardest to make things as evil as possible for Black people and brown people and women and Muslims and Mexicans and members of the LGBTQ community and every other marginalized group of people. This is actually happening.