You look around and suddenly everything seems slightly askew. I don't know yet where this will lead. 

I know logically, I should not panic, yet. 

I did not have the view that half the country was racist and misogynistic. I mean, I know some people are. I know there are plenty of religious people here, but most of the ones I know are alright people and they accept and like me even though I am not religious. However, I am an East Coast guy, so the majority of religious people I know are Democrats. So, they might have their religion but they believe in separation of church and state and do not believe in jamming their religion down someone else's throat. 

I don't see DEI as dangerous but can see how it would be complex and an aggravation. MAGA ideas and Hamas I would not equate with DEI, as DEI ideas are not going to get anybody killed. Are there people that try to shove DEI stuff down our throats? Sure, but again, that is more just going to be an aggravation not get someone killed or cause them to have to watch their newborn slowly die because it is born with a birth defect it can't survive. 

DEI is not about cruelty though, it is about trying not to be cruel really. MAGA ideas often focus on cruelty, Hamas is a terrorist organization that kills people to push their agenda. They seem a very different thing.

I think DEI issues can be discussed and resolved reasonably. I don't agree with them all. My cousin was fired from a job because she offered to help a person whose first language was not English to rewrite a memo she was sending out company wide. She saw it was full of errors and just asked if she could help rewrite it. This ended in her termination and the woman that she upset was given her job. That was all about DEI, and I can see it enraging people because it did not make sense. Obviously, I don't agree with any of that, I see the flaws in it, and it does feel sort of like a Kafka story. However, nobody died, and my cousin got another job. 

I'll also say this, just to clarify what seemed to win this election here. Yes, in the Republican primary "woke" was a thing but when Trump was the candidate he did not focus on woke or DEI. He actually did not in the primary either, he let Ron Desantis die with that cause. It was way down the list. I believe what Trump does, what won him the election was his simplified and repeated message and the fact that it took a while for inflation to come down. That's it. Trump essentially threw just those things out there over and over and over. 

I watched way too much of his rallies and his message at them, the things he just threw out there over and over and over again were immigrants are scum, Democrats/liberals are sick and evil, and Joe Biden and Harris (who was not in charge of policy) caused inflation. Now, the Democrats are "sick and evil" was generally done by claiming all of his prosecutions, all of the crimes he committed, all of the stuff he was found guilty of, was all a hoax and invented by Joe Biden and Democrats. So, the biggest part of his play to get people to hate Democrats was that they were liars charging him with made up crimes. He would repeat this nonsense that if they can come after me, they can come after you. 

I did not watch his speeches in their entirety, but in most of what I saw, he never used DEI policy. He occasionally used it against our military, saying they were woke, but he mainly just wanted to make people hate our military leaders...because our military leaders were warning people he is dangerous and not loyal to our country. 

I truly want to understand what happened and how over the last 4 years how the country shifted into a place where they actually liked Trump more than they liked him in 2016. 

I think the key to it may be that there has been this growing attitude since 2014 or 2015 that the Democrats must be punished for being too preachy. That they dictate too much and do not listen. I think this is where Trump's appeal must lie. He is a fountain of anger and outrage. He spews his rage and it does not have to make sense...people just identify with it. People feel screwed, he tells them over and over that they are screwed, and this makes him appear as if he is more honest than the Democrats. He also tells them over and over that the Democrats are liars. I think after 10 years of repeating that message, it has become accepted by many people in this country. I think the idea he sold that the Democrats were hiding a Joe Biden that was not well enough to be president worked because of his strategy of calling them liars over and over. I mean, even Democrat voters worried about Joe Biden's health and then it looks like everybody was lying when Biden steps out of the race when he did. 

We've got to figure it out here in the United States, that is for sure. I think the message we just sent to the world was horrific. Trump could preside over a reign of terror that plays out across the globe. He is more aligned with Putin, Bin Salman, Netanyahu, and Kim Jong Un than he is with European leaders. That's more than a little insane. He says he is going to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East immediately. We know his plan to end the war in Ukraine is to give Putin what he wants. I don't know what his plan is exactly in the Middle East but we know the Palestinians do not matter in it. 

I think I am still in a state of shock over what has happened here. Not just that Trump won, but he won the popular vote, which kind of crushes my feeling that the people that are MAGA were a smaller minority. Turns out, they may actually be half the country. That in itself is difficult to wrap my head around. That people actually wanted the guy that was pretending to perform fellatio for the crowds and cameras. They want the guy that spoke lovingly about Arnold Palmer's penis. That talked about shooting the media and pointing guns at Liz Cheney's face. That over and over repeated that immigrants are scum when we are a country built on immigration. It was once our great strength. They wanted the guy that promises them hardship, wild inflation, crashing the economy, abandoning our allies, teaming up with Putin, that was found guilty of a whole slew of crimes and fraud. That liked to brag about grabbing women by the pussy and allowing states to take away their rights. 

I'm lost. I do not get it and I am open to hearing how others explain this because now we are in a situation where we are relying on Donald Trump, a man who probably has never done anything in his life that he did not think benefitted him, to act as a healer of this country and a world in turmoil. People really expect him to do that now, when his history says he will now take this opportunity to enrich himself and punish the people he does not like?