How Donald Trump gave my life meaning

Pay no attention to the title. Since I saw the so-called Attorney General's summary of the Mueller report, I've felt worse than at any time since election night 2016. I've got the same deflated feeling as I had when I realized that Trump had the electoral votes to win.

I knew exactly the kind of horror show a Trump administration would be; I was never silly enough to believe that there would ever be a "pivot." The elected Trump was exactly what candidate Trump promised, and I knew he would be.

On November 8, 2016, the electorate let the country down. I say this even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million. That sixty million voters could be stupid enough to vote for someone as vile as Donald Trump is enough to make a person feel like a stranger in his own country.

Although I never believed in the "pivot," I did have a tiny speck of hope that some of the members of the electoral college would take their jobs as protectors against an unfit president seriously enough to be "unfaithful." That, of course, didn't happen. In fact, there were some unfaithful Clinton electors, to add insult to injury. The electoral college and the system let us down.

My next faint hope in the time of dread that was the period between November 8, 2016, and January 20, 2017, was that the Democrats in the U.S. Senate would pull the dirty trick that had been suggested, and sneak Merrick Garland onto the Supreme Court. They didn't try that. It was a long shot, but the desperate grasp at straws.

Now, about that "meaning" part in my title. I retired in 2016, and looked forward to a quiet, relaxed coast to the graveyard, but because of Trump and his Republican henchmen, that was not to be. First, there was the matter of Obamacare. Now, I'll admit that the premiums were already too high for a retiree. (I'm on Medicare myself, but my wife is too young for that, and is unable to work.) But, with Democrats in power, things like that could be improved. With the Republican sabotage that was really designed to kill Obamacare off forever, there is no hope for improvement.

Now, during my whole life, it has been the Democratic Party that has tried to improve the lives of the citizenry; the Republicans have long been the party of maintaining the status quo, no matter how dire. Sometime after the Nixon resignation, however, an especially deadly mean streak began to show itself. Once upon a time, for example, the Republicans merely tried to avoid spending money on welfare for the unemployed. That stance has metastasized into one of outright hostility towards people who are working hard, and yet can't make a living wage. Once upon a time, the Republicans merely fought against the right to an abortion as granted by Roe vs. Wade. Again, metastasis: now they attack birth control itself.

You can choose your own examples of ways in which today's Republicans, far from merely refusing to make life in America better, are actively trying to make it worse.

You may have guessed that the way Trump has given my life meaning is that he has made it more interesting. For more than two years now, I have done all I could (in my own insignificant way) to resist Trump's fascistic intentions. So far, so so-so.

I still hang onto a thread of hope that, if there is such a thing as a "deep state," it doesn't let us down. Or that the electorate has awakened enough to not make the same mistake again.