I wanted to be excited and happy today. Instead, all I feel is mixture of exhaustion, sadness, and relief. I wept on Election Night 2016, fearful of what would happen under a Trump presidency — because I knew his decades-long record as a business man clearly showed how he would govern. My worst fears that evening were realized beyond what I imagined.

Four years of witnessing Trump gaslight and lie to an extent that still staggers my imagination. Four years of seeing him undermine and destroy long-held, vital democratic ideals and principles. Four years of watching the GOP enable and support him in a boot-licking subservient manner that would have embarrassed the most sycophantic medieval nobility. Four years of watching him tear away environmental, worker, LGBTQ, and consumer protections. Four years of watching him flaunt the emoluments clause of the Constitution (again, with GOP help.) Four years of watching him put himself and his narcissistic desires above country. Then, nearly a full year of watching him callously do next-to-nothing about a pandemic that killed 400,00 Americans on his watch. All capped of by an insurrection attempt he clearly encouraged.

That wasn’t even the worst of it.

No. The worst was seeing what his rhetoric and policies brought out in a sizable percentage of the American people. I was appalled and disgusted by a number of friends and family starkly displaying just how much they despise people like me for my beliefs. If the Trump and the right wing noise machine said that was an un-American enemy, they believed it. There was nothing I could do to show that I wasn’t communist who was out to destroy America. I ultimately unfriended, with extreme prejudice, a number of people who I used to think were basically decent folks.

I’m certain that what I’m feeling is a form of PTSD. I wanted to be excited and happy watching Biden’s inauguration, but I just wasn’t able. Instead, as he took the oath of office, I briefly sobbed. Thinking about it too much much only tinges what I’m still feeling with anger.

Fuck Trump. Dante didn’t imagine a circle of hell sufficient to punish him for what he did to this country and its people.