Mano Singham has an excellent post up about understanding what we are actually facing with a narcissist poised to be president. Highly recommended reading, just a bit here:

This is not someone who is merely narcissistic in the colloquial, casual sense of the term, meaning that he’s selfish or self-centered. This is someone with a psychiatric disorder in all its flagrant, florid particulars. To grasp its seriousness is to be staggered that someone too disordered and rancid to be a trustee of your condo association will be running our country. How is it possible that almost half the voters, even those who like his values and disliked his (conventional politician of an) opponent, could have listened to him taunt and lie and bully his way through a campaign and then said, “Yep. That’s who should be in charge of the country”?

The implications going forward are nothing short of chilling.

Go have a read about what we are truly facing: What having an extreme narcissist as president is going to entail.

After reading Alfie Kohn’s article, I’m going to add this from the beginning, because there’s something I want to hammer home.

Reporter: What do you think people will take away from the [Republican National]   Convention? What are you hoping?

Donald Trump: From the convention? The fact that I’m very well liked.

– New York Times, July 21, 2016

The initial shock has given way to a twofold horror. First, there is the unavoidable fact that more than 62 million Americans voted for this man. Most white college graduates preferred him. Most white women preferred him. Presumably many of those 62 million aren’t bigots or bullies or sexual predators or compulsive liars. But they knowingly voted for someone who is all of those things and more.

And then there are the sickening practical implications. During the campaign, novelist Adam Haslett remarked that “endless acts of verbal violence shock us into stunned passivity so we no longer register the horror of what we’re living through.” But that’s nothing compared to the horror fatigue that awaits us under a Trump administration. His election — along with Republican control of both Houses of Congress and more than two thirds of state legislatures — will almost certainly precipitate an assault on civil rights, civil liberties, environmental protections (including a reversal of early, tentative steps to deal with global climate change), consumer protections, reproductive rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, prisoners’ rights, humane immigration policies, aid to the poor, gun control, antimilitarism, support for public education, and on and on. It will be bad enough for an individual deeply committed to any one of these issues; for those interested in all of them, it will be difficult to absorb, let alone summon outrage about and become active in opposing, a tidal wave of reactionary policies likely to continue on a daily basis for many years.

The potential impact on official policy is staggering. And yet I can’t stop thinking about the man himself.

The emphasis is mine. For every single person who either voted for Trump, or who used their opportunity to avoid this catastrophe by writing in someone or something stupid while voting, or who didn’t bother to vote, you fucking did this. You. That’s where the responsibility for the ruin we face rests. And more than anyone else, it’s you who needs to read that article. After that, try to figure out how to become a human being, because we’re going to have one hell of a fight in front of us.