"Trump's four-year reign of terror and error was a gut-lurching mix of farce and nightmare," writes Mark Dery in Medium, " and it was that rollercoaster of absurdity and atrocity that made those endless four years so deranging, and gave them their mindwarping unreality."
Welcome to a never-ending farcical nightmare, one in which "reality itself is trolling us."
To be an American, picking your way through the debris field of what used to be, at least nominally, a democracy — before Trump and his confederacy of dunces defiled, corrupted, plundered, pimped, sabotaged, and otherwise destabilized it from within — is to live in a nation permanently on edge, a nation whose nervous system has been short-circuited by post-traumatic stress, a nation that knows it will be retraumatized tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and maybe for every tomorrow to come by the farcical awfulness of just about everything.
Trump's sociopathic policies rocked the foundations of America so hard that it's doubtful they can ever be fully repaired, especially in a country where laws are set up to keep the minority party in power. Unless we reverse the country's path toward autocracy and oligarchy and rebuild the United States in a more inclusive, just, and equitable way, we're going to have to live in Trump's farcical fascist nightmare for the rest of our lives.