President Trump has left the White House for the last time in his term.
President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States at noon ET. pic.twitter.com/td3IThjwh6
— NPR (@NPR) January 20, 2021
I’m going to be real honest: I don’t actually know how to start this piece. There are a lot of thoughts circling my head and every time I think I’ve settled on one another comes along like, “Naw, that’s not how you’re feeling right now.” So instead of analyzing one, I’m gonna try to analyze them ALL, because there’s no singular answer for me when asked, “How do you feel now that Trump is out of office?”
- Happiness
All rise for the National Anthem:
Because it’s finally happened:
It’s like going to the grocery store and seeing that Cinnamon Toast Crunch is on sale. And not the small box that only lasts for like three bowls, but the BIG box, the one you skip past because you don’t wanna spend that much on cereal even if it’s your favorite. Then you turn the corner and you see that ice cream has the nerve to be B2G1, and it’s the name brand ice cream, the kind with delightful flavors like birthday cake and double chocolate brownie batter.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that I’m so unbelievably happy right now.
- Relief
There’s this deep breath moment that’s hitting me on repeat, this sense of absolute PHEW as I see tweet after tweet reminding me that Trump has said his final speech and has left the White House. Even if I knew this day was coming, part of me wouldn’t allow myself to fully believe it until I saw it happen in real-time. It’s like when they swear that game/movie/media franchise you’ve been pining after for years has a release date but it gets delayed time and time again so you refuse to believe it until you actually see it on your screen.
Now that I’ve watched Trump wave from the helicopter I feel like the flippin’ Ninja Turtles as they watch Super Shredder take himself out of the fight. He could’ve listened and stopped destroying everything around him, but nope.
Cowabunga?
Yeah, that’s the one. Cowabunga.
- Surprise
For a while there I didn’t think Trump leaving was possible.
Like.
At all.
Not just because of 2020 but that sure as hell didn’t help my skepticism.
Trump didn’t exactly instill much goodwill amongst the people, nor did his administration. He also emboldened a lot of folks to be their absolute worst selves, so much so that I can never look at a red cap the same way again. This went on until the very end, from the recounts to the storming of the Capitol where Republicans did one of two things: 1) embraced a bogus message of unity, or 2) jumped off a ship that’d submerged into the bullshit a long time ago.
After all of that plus years of Donald Trump being Donald Trump… we made it.
- Worry
These next two are ones I feel bad about expressing because I don’t wanna yuck anyone’s yum.
But I said I’d write out all my feelings and that means acknowledging them both because:
I do think a good portion of people know that, though, and I fully subscribe to the notion of how embracing happiness does not mean you’re ignoring the bigger picture. I’ve done it plenty of times myself.
I think my biggest concerns lie with folks who think that with Trump gone we’re done dealing with the bad shit. On top of having to undo a lot of the things he did, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic and, well, we’re still dealing with plenty of folks who keep throwing around the word unity without realizing that it HAS to work both ways, and right now, the Trump side hasn’t done anything to warrant me wanting to come together with them.
Especially after the events at the Capitol.
Just because Trump’s no longer president doesn’t mean all those people who believed in him are going to evaporate into the atmosphere, never to be heard from again. They’re still very much there and it’s still something to be worried about.
- Frustration
The overwhelming urge to scream I TOLD YOU SO to every single person who tried to tell me why Trump wouldn’t be that bad back in 2016 is not a feeling that’s gone away. I actively try to ignore it because I actively try to not engage with folks who thought that it’d be best if I saw things from the perspective of such a blatantly problematic figure and his supporters. It wasn’t like Trump was hiding his discriminatory behavior or his lack of competence when it came to politics. It wasn’t like his supporters hadn’t outed themselves as, well, the kind of people who would storm the Capitol, at worst, and the kind of people who both sides you to death at best.
But really, all Trump did was give a visible bumper sticker for bigotry. So I’m not so much frustrated that he even made it into office, it’s more like I’m frustrated that it took THAT to get people to see the issues that have been here, and for some, it took even longer and is still taking longer.
—
So how do I, and others who are probably in the same boat, come to terms with all of these emotions? The best I can come up with is this: it’s ok to not have a cohesive answer for how you’re feeling when you realize that the president label is no longer attached to Trump. It’s ok to not know how to feel or shift between varying emotions. You don’t have to know for sure how you’re feeling, and hell, you may be so numb to everything that you feel nothing at all.
That’s valid.
And that’s fine.
(Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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