First, I’d like to address the people who accuse those of us who protest, resist and speak out against Trump of being petulant, haters, sore losers and unpatriotic.  You can say that all you want, but you cannot get around the fundamental problem with your assertion: Our Founding Fathers built into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights safeguards to ensure that the people are able to hold those in power to account through peaceful protest and free speech, among other things.  The founding fathers wanted the peoples’ voices to be heard loud and clear.  They expected us to speak out when we see the powerful behaving in ways unbecoming of their offices.  Criticism in its many forms is an act of patriotism.  So when blonde bimbos with an Internet audience accuse us of being unpatriotic, petulant children, I say, you’ve obviously never read the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, or if you did, you clearly do not understand the content and application thereof.

We who protest are patriots.

Second, I have a fundamental problem with people who routinely display what I very lightly refer to as bad manners.  Trump embodies not just bad manners but apocalyptically, mind-blowingly atrocious behavior.  This is a point I cannot stress enough.  Somehow, over the news cycle of the last year and a half, we normalized the behavior of a demonstrably narcissistic, sociopathic, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic sexual predator with a god complex who thinks it’s acceptable to brag about sexual assault and who has documented predilections decent people would consider nauseating.  And we elected him president of the United States.  I have a sincere problem with that.  When I was a kid, if I said boo in a restaurant, I was promptly escorted outside and given more than a talking to.  This man belongs either in jail or in a padded room.  Instead, he is now POTUS.

I have heard acquaintances make statements like, “I’m not hiring him to be polite, I’m hiring him to run a country.”  That is one of the worst arguments I’ve heard in favor of electing this man.  It is incredibly short-sighted and here is why: Diplomacy demands a modicum of politeness.  True statesmanship requires thoughtful, measured, intelligent statements and responses to those of other leaders, foreign and domestic.  Trump has shown repeatedly that he is capable of neither.  If your personal immediate response to my assertion is, “That is total horse shit,” go back and look at all the footage of him, because it does in fact show the honest, unbearable truth of the horrific things HE said and did.  Furthermore, if the only things you read or watch are things that reaffirm your own deeply held beliefs, I encourage you to start reading and watching other news outlets.  Our Republic depends upon it.

Third, I realize that many people were coerced into voting for Trump under the auspices that he will do better than his predecessors because he is an “outsider.”  Many of those were people who felt marginalized and ignored.  I feel badly for them on a human level and I wish them peace.  Others were drawn to the racist rhetoric he routinely included in speeches at rallies, and we saw as a result a resurgence of the kind of white power movements we haven’t witnessed in quite some time.  I know racism exists not just in America–it exists the world over in various forms.  What I did not realize and what I find deeply disturbing is the sheer number of genuinely racist people who emerged from the shadows during this election.  I had hoped that racism would largely die down in the States in this generation.  Unfortunately, my hope has been dashed with the events not only of this election cycle but also in clashes of civilians with police, hateful people killing members of the LGBTQ community in night clubs and Christian worshipers of color in churches.

I do not understand this level of hatred, but Trump tapped into it in a visceral way and used it to get where he is.  I realize Trump stoked the fires of nationalism and populism as a means to an end.  But he awoke a sleeping giant that will not soon be tamed.  These people see in Trump an outsider coming to bring change to a system they view as absolutely corrupt.  I will not argue the point about extant corruption in politics because we see that plainly nearly every day.  What I will argue is that Trump may be a political outsider, but he is not a man who will at day’s end stand up for the little guy who feels displaced or kicked to the curb.  Never forget that he is a billionaire who made his money off the backs of little guys who he has a documented history of not paying and who, in some cases, he put out of business because he refused to pay for their hard work.  Why didn’t they sue him, you may ask?  Because they couldn’t afford to, and he knew it, and he took advantage of that as well.  What in the name of all that is holy makes anyone think, based on his record, that he is going to stick up for the little guy?

Fourth, he is a narcissist.  I know this is old news but it bears repeating because many people do not truly understand or know from experience what this portends.  He is incapable of caring about anyone or anything other than himself, his immediate needs and his image.  He is literally incapable of caring about the American people, or any people anywhere.  He cannot do it.  He is charismatic after a fashion and can talk a good game to the audience he is addressing, hence all the instances of all the lies he tells without a second thought.  His need to be, as he put it, “Well liked,” his insatiable desire for recognition as a god-like entity, his persistent self-aggrandizement, his notably absent moral and ethical compass, his gas lighting, his insistence that he and he alone can solve all the problems this country faces are all hallmarks of a classic narcissist.  What is not often evident in public discourse pertaining to Trump’s mental illness are the devastating effects a narcissist has on everyone around them.  They wreak havoc in every sense.  They are mentally and physically abusive.  They have an uncanny ability of making everyone around them think they are the crazy ones while conversely, the narcissist is the only sane person in the room.  They actually lead you to believe that what you JUST saw NEVER happened.  They are manipulative in the extreme.  They serve one master: themselves.  And they do all of this to devastating effect.

Fifth, I’ve known a lot of sales people in my day.  I  can boil them down to two different schools of thought.  There are sales people who sell you on the magic, the wonder and the intrinsic value of what they are selling.  They don’t allude to other, similar products.  They size you up, they figure out what they can appeal to in order to get you to buy, and they go for the gusto.  A classic example is selling a Porsche to a guy who is obviously in the midst of a mid-life crisis.  “It’s a sexy car, a chic magnet, it’s fast, and it’s got gorgeous lines.”  Then there are sales people who sell by preaching over and over again that everything else is horrible.  “You’re never going to get laid driving a Subaru, it’s an awful car, they break down, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t hate that car, it’s very, very bad.”  In other words, they don’t sell based on the value of their product.  Rather, they tap into some discontent—any discontent—they perceive you might harbor, and they feed it.  They get you thinking about it, wallowing in it, wanting something “greater.”  Then they sell you a used car that breaks down inside of a few months.  They know what they are selling is inferior, but they have to sell it.  My perception, based on my observations thus far, is that Trump is the latter.

What is my most recent evidence of this behavior?  You mean aside from all the rallies he held wherein he did precisely that?  Today.  Today is my evidence.  In his inaugural address, he began in a benign enough manner in order to lure in his prey.  He started by encouraging everyone to come together, promising that he would be a president for all Americans.  Then the wheels fell off the used car when he went on for quite some time about how horrible conditions are in the United States today, how jobs are leaving and communities are falling apart, how we, together, need to make America great again.  He not only denigrated leaders who have worked tirelessly to assist their constituents by working to create jobs and fighting for justice in their districts, but he literally sold himself and his followers on his legitimacy and greatness by disparaging and insulting his presidential predecessors, all but one of whom still living were sitting on the dais right behind him.  It was the ultimate, “They are very bad, so I am the greatest mother fucker here!” moment.  THAT, ladies and gentlemen, was a quintessential, graceless, careless, obnoxious move.

Do I believe he will bring change to D.C. politics?  Absolutely.  Am I convinced that any of it will be positive?  Not even remotely.  Here is the last thing I’ll say on this for now: We elected a petulant child to the highest office, arguably, in the world, who is painfully unqualified to operate in that capacity and troublingly mentally ill.  But it is somehow justifiable to give the nuclear codes to a man whose currency is vengeance.  It is somehow justifiable to vote in a president who is morally reprehensible.  It is somehow justifiable that someone with the vocabulary of a fourth grader should represent us as a nation.  It is somehow justifiable for him to literally and figuratively grab us by the pussy.

So here we are, on the raggedy edge, getting ready to protest the disgraceful people who just entered the hallowed halls of the White House, but still hope against hope that our voices will be heard.  There have been calls for “coming together,” “creating unity,” “working together.”  These are all respectable goals and lofty desires.  I too desire those things, and I’ll be working in my community, one person at a time, to do just that.  But if you ask me to support a government that clearly wants to gut programs we were forced to pay into all our lives, to leave elderly people out in the cold again, to ensure women have no rights over their own bodies, to deport people who have lived here all their lives to some other country they don’t even know because they never attained citizenship, to persecute people whose faith is not yours, to turn a blind eye to hellacious acts of racial prejudice in its varying forms, or turn a blind eye to any social, moral or ethical injustice for that matter, then no, I’ll not do that.  Nor will I join anyone who actively or passively espouses this activity.

Because I am a patriot.