It happened, folks.
Despite the fact that he lost the popular vote (for those of you who slept through civics class, that means more voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton), Donald Trump will be our next president.
As a result of the shocking outcome of yesterday’s election, many questions loom large today:
Is he really going to try and make Mexico pay for a border wall?
Is the president actually going to ban people from entering the country based on their religious affiliations?
Should millions of Americans be afraid that the person who’s soon to be the most powerful man in the country will discriminate against them on the basis of their race, gender, or spiritual beliefs?
The answers: no; it’s an incredibly sad possibility; and it’s a tragic certainty.
One of the questions that has no clear answer, however, is:
Does Donald Trump really even want to be president?
After all, it’s impossible to count the number of times he seemed to self-sabotage over the course of his 17-month campaign.
His behavior was so erratic, his ground game so non-existent that some even speculated he was participating in a conspiratorial effort to get Hillary Clinton elected.
Trump wanting the attention that comes with running for president but not wanting to do the work that’s involved in occupying the highest office in the land has even been a running joke on South Park throughout the show’s entire twentieth season.
(Showrunners Trey Parker and Matt Stone are reportedly frantically re-writing tonight’s episode, as many of the jokes had centered around Hillary winning the election.)
Insiders have claimed that Mike Pence and other GOP heavyweights (must … resist … Chris Christie joke) who were vetted to be Trump’s running mate were promised that they would serve as “the most powerful vice president in American history.”
The reason for that, of course, being that Trump has no desire to actually govern.
It’s all enough to make you wonder if the man will even last four years in the Oval Office.
There’s a very real possibility that he’ll just step down the first time he gets a call from the King of Jordan and dejectedly hangs up upon realizing it’s not Phil Jackson.
And on top of the fact that Trump is the first president to give us reason to believe he doesn’t actually want the job (with the possible exception of Franklin Pierce. That drunk-ass had no f-cks to give.), he’s also carrying more legal baggage into the White House than any of his predecessors.
On top of a pending fraud lawsuit, the real-estate-mogul-turned-demagogue has been involved in more than 3,500 legal actions, and the number of women who accused Trump of sexual assault has now risen to twelve.
He’s told reporters that as commander-in-chief, he plans to order the military to target families of suspected terrorists and violate the Geneva Convention by torturing prisoners.
If he goes through with that our president will, objectively, be a war criminal.
In short, though impeachment is a rarely-used and highly disruptive tactic, Trump’s opponents have plenty to work with already, and he’s still more than two months away from his inauguration.
As difficult as it may be, all Americans should wish Trump luck and hope for the best from his time in office.
Of course, we doubt many tears would be shed if his time in office proved to be unexpectedly brief…