The election is over, the winners are gleeful and the losers are in despair.  

Media pundits and Democratic party officials are trying to dissect the results and understand the implications. 

Assumptions include: Biden shouldn’t have run, Kamala Harris didn’t undergo the rigor of a primary, Harris didn’t answer some questions correctly, the Democrats overemphasized “woke,” or the Democrats ignored inflation.

I don’t believe issues or how the election race was run had anything to do with the results. Whoever was going to vote for Donald Trump would vote for him regardless. 

Trump is a twice-impeached, felony-convicted, serial-cheating, serial-lying, draft-dodging, soldier-insulting, insurrectionist-inciting, sexual predator.  All of these “qualifications” are both factual and unequivocally unacceptable.  If none of this disqualified him from your vote, I don’t think anything would.  

The original Patriots would’ve tarred and feathered him.

Any of Trump’s behavior would be unacceptable from your spouse. It would be unacceptable from your children. It would be unacceptable from your children’s teachers. It would be unacceptable from any of your social acquaintances.  It would be unacceptable from your boss. You would never hire someone for your business who behaved like this.

And yet, to over 75 million Americans, it is acceptable for the leader of our country and the free world.  

The question is “why?” It isn’t the so-called economy or border issues, which coming consequences will prove.

When food prices soar because we deported the people who harvest our fruit and vegetables and process our meat, look in the mirror.  When you can’t find anyone to put on a new roof or do some construction work, look in the mirror. And if we don’t end up deporting part of our work force, then the illegal immigration issue was a sham.

When inflation reappears because we place new tariffs on one of the largest exporters to our country, look in the mirror. When crop prices drop because that same country – one of our largest international customers – shops elsewhere, look in the mirror.

When civil unrest and the persecution of people “not like us” increases, look in the mirror. 

When you experience the increased destructiveness of an environmental event, look in the mirror.

When Russia threatens broader Europe, when we welch on alliances and treaties and find ourselves alone in a threatening world, look in the mirror.

There is a different, deeper and more troubling despair among those of us who opposed Trump and the Republicans who shamelessly enable him.  

Abraham Lincoln explains this best. In his first inaugural address, we were on the brink of civil war.  Lincoln believed our common identity as Americans would “swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely, they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

One month later, the Civil War started because half of our country ignored the “better angels of our nature” to support the unacceptable institution of slavery.

Those of us who despise Trump are not crazed liberal villains out to destroy America. We simply saw a person unacceptable by any common sense standard of character. 

Our friendships with you are based on mutual integrity, character and a shared value system. Political differences don’t matter because mutual trust and affinity are built on something far more solid.

Our despair is because we believed in your “better angels.” Trump’s deficiencies as a human being were so obvious we trusted you to be the people we knew you to be in your heart and to reject him.  We had a chance to cleanse our government and get back to electing people based on decency, integrity and proven qualifications. Instead, you broke our hearts.  That is a despair I’ve never experienced before in my lifetime.

There was no real issue or danger that justifies electing such an unqualified person. If you truly believe so, then you need to find a different source of information – one that did not pay $800 million because they lied about the past election.  

The real danger is that you have entrusted our country to a man who is largely ignorant of the world around him – a narcissist who can’t take advice from more qualified people, a man ruled by impulses vs. reason, and an arrogant elitist who doesn’t accept that laws apply to him. 

You have given our nuclear weapon codes to a felon who cannot legally own or buy a firearm.  

How could you ever trust such a person? What moral compass exists to guide him through the most difficult leadership decisions on our planet? Your choice contradicts everything we know you to be in any other situation in our shared lives. 

How could you like Trump?  Deep in your subconscious, do you want to be like him?

Only you can answer such questions. Look in the mirror. I will continue to hope that you are not, in some dark recess of your being, the person you elected.