2024: The Year That Broke Us

It was a bad year!

I knew Joe Biden was in trouble. A lot of you still don’t want to believe it, and apparently he now thinks (or at least some aides do) he could have won if he’d stayed in the game. The Bulwark did the math on that here. But I am in Detroit, Michigan. I talked to people everywhere I went, getting more and more nervous, more and more actually afraid. Young Black men were actively voting for Trump. Young Black women were actively staying home. And that was before the debate we all saw with our eyes, when we realized our truly terrific president, who never got no respect, really was ailing. We’d thought it was all — because some of it was! — Fox News lies.

We sat shell-shocked, waiting for anyone to grab the steering wheel and drive us away from the slow-motion cliff. When Kamala Harris burst through the wall like a smart, elegant, beaming Kool-Aid Man, the pent-up energy — the joy — was immeasurable. I called my Black grandma friends. We babbled with pleasure. We made dates to have cocktails at Black sorority-thrown parties in her honor. We smiled all summer.

We saw in her ourselves at our best, and we knew — we knew! — that this time, we would win. For our mothers and our daughters and our granddaughters, and for us. It helped that she was running against such a facially unfit man, his brain pouring out of his ears in large gritty dollops. Our good husbands and sons smiled too, proud to be good men who loved us and hated stupid and evil.

I have never in my life experienced such a natural high as standing and screaming with 100??? thousand other Democrats when the Wonkette staff and I went to the DNC in Chicago. We roared. (I got COVID, but I’m well-vaxxed and didn’t even have a cough.) My very favorite moment? When those 100 ??? thousand of us, gathered together, made our mutual hero Sen. Elizabeth Warren cry, refusing to shut up in our massive love. Many of us had supported Warren in 2020 after first supporting … you guessed it! Kamala Harris! And here she was, elder stateswoman, thrilled to join the fight for her young friend. You know what? Let’s watch it again.

I explained to everyone that there was no need to worry. I had never seen such a fine, flawless, energetic campaign. Comparing it to JD Vance wandering around empty police stations and Trump afraid to come up from Joe Biden’s 2020 pandemic basement made us just laugh and laugh. What fucking idiots! What pathetic men, stuck in the past! Oh, it was going to be a Reaganesque whomping! We were going to womp IOWA!

I have never been more shocked than I was on Election Night. Again.

And that was that. America had affirmatively chosen a brutish, stupid rapist and his billionaire pals. I wondered why I’ve been doing this job for 50 or 80 hours a week, for 31 years, when it was all so fucking useless, when all I had to show for it was a dumber, meaner America than ever before. Why the fuck do we cover politics, what idiocy, nobody cares.

I’m starting to crawl out of it, I guess, to shake it off. The only thing I’ve ever trained to do is call bullshit when people lie. And we’ll have some opportunities these next four bad years. There will even be good news, sometimes. Someday, Donald Trump will die.

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