With each new rumor, screams were heard. Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General? As Secretary of State? Chris Christie as White House doorman? The runt of the Sessions litter? Steve Bannon as anything? How could this be? They’re awful, terrible, racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, white supremacists+. How was it possible that the president-elect chose these horrible people?

Early signs of what the Trump administration may look like: A man associated with white supremacy and misogyny will be White House chief strategist; a man rejected for a judgeship because of alleged racism will be attorney general; and an Islamophobe who has taken money from Moscow will be national security adviser.

No, this is not satire.

I’ve repeatedly noted that my side lost this election, that elections have consequences, and that President-Elect Donald Trump should be given a chance. He seems intent on blowing that chance.

Given a chance to do what, exactly? Make Lena Dunham Secretary of Education? Put Lady Gaga in charge of wardrobe? It’s not that the people being chosen, or whispered about, or rumored to be something, aren’t the people I would choose if I was president, but I’m not president. Neither are you.

It doesn’t mean I (or you) can’t complain about Trump’s choices. This is America, and complaining is one of the few things we do really well. But if we step back a bit and stop viewing these people through the lens of whom we would pick, whom we despise, it’s a little less catastrophic.

There’s a United States Senator. There’s the twice-elected mayor of one of the most progressive cities in America. There’s a retired Lt. General of the United States Army, who also served as Director of Defense Intelligence under some other president whom we suddenly love a whole lot more than we did before we had someone new to hate. There isn’t one I want to invite to dinner, but each managed to do something I haven’t done. Nor have you.

And as much as every 12-year-old girl would have thought it totally awesome for Katy Perry to be a senior presidential adviser because she kissed a girl and she liked it, it’s really not a qualification for governance. Ah, but Trump has no qualifications either! So there!!!

Except The Donald managed to get himself elected. So what if the people who put him over the top didn’t actually want Trump, but just ran screaming from Clinton and progressives. So what if liberals stayed home in droves, allowing the combination of conservatives and alt-right nutjobs to have their way with a nation. So what if I told you this was going to happen, for which I was repaid with the adoration of millions by shrieks of mean names.

At the same time, fantasy theorists are creating a mythology of the outgoing regime and its predecessors for the purpose of juxtaposing how great we were doing with how horribly we will suffer under the new regime.

Wasn’t this country doing great under President Obama? Well, Black Lives Matter was born in response to innocent, dead black guys, a lot of them, as compounded by systemic abuse of the poor, usually the black, rampant constitutional violations and institutionalized abuse, all of which happened under the careful watch of the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights, who did absolutely nothing about it until some tragic event made someone in Main Justice look up from memos about not targeting marijuana as they continued to crank up the MRAPs to end the plague of demon weed.

You might have heard about all this on your Apple iPhone, the one they demanded they have access to, have a backdoor to, prevent dead terrorists from doing dead-terrorist things. Not that they didn’t already have every utterance you ever made anyway. But at least you got health insurance, provided you didn’t actually have to use it because it was worthless and expensive unless you suffered a catastrophic illness, and nobody wants to suffer such an illness.*

But everything will be worse, far worse, horribly worse, under Trump. Maybe. Not that we haven’t suffered through horrible AGs in the past. Hi, General Ashcroft. RIP, General Mitchell. Yes, there is an extremely good chance that some of these folks will do some serious damage along the way, reflecting a regressive approach to many of the reforms for which we fought long and hard, trivial as they turned out to be.

It’s not that the Obama administration did much to help, though. The abuse of executive orders and bureaucratic guidance left the door wide open to rescission because it was the wrong way to make change. Wrong, both in its circumvention of democratic institutions, and wrong in that it failed to reflect the will of the people. Not you, perhaps, but those other people whom we delightfully call citizens who vote.**

Drew Morgan‘s pal Trae may talk with a funny accent, so that all the intellectuals at Yale dismiss him as just another dumbass redneck, but nobody would call him all those bad names used to make reality disappear in the cloud of sad feelz.

You knew better. You wouldn’t listen. Full of your smug self-righteousness, and armed with jargon gibberish that made no sense to anybody who didn’t pray to your god of feelz, you handed an election to Donald Trump. So now he gets to pick the senators, mayors, generals and new media website impresarios of his choosing.

Would you really have preferred the Ambassador to the Court of St. James to be weeping in the shower?  Well, yeah, you probably would. That’s why Trump won.***

*Before some dingleberry feels compelled to list his beef with this litany of Obama failures, these are just a few examples, not an exhaustive list. This is not about bashing President Obama, but pointing out the sudden absurdity of sanitizing his administration’s failures in order to claim we were mere inches away from Utopia before the apocalypse ruined everything.

**Colin Kaepernick took a knee. During the national anthem. On election day.

***At least he’s got a plan.