I've been on the phone for the last two hours trying to calm my parents down about Trump winning. My mom is at breaking point and I'm really worried about her health. I know it's easy to dunk on older liberals who were blindsided by this and were really cheering for Harris (even though yes yes she sucks).
But like, my parents live almost entirely off of Social Security. Republicans have been gunning to cut Social Security benefits for ages. Even a small reduction would devastate them financially in their old age and growing medical costs. I don't have any reassuring words for my parents that this can't happen, even though I don't think Republicans would go so far.
My parents are also still paying off my brother's student loan debts as co-signers, and the only thing helping them was Biden's SAVE plan to keep the payments down. What happens if Trump dissolves the Department of Education? I have no idea. I can't reassure my parents that the debt won't go to some even more predatory collection agency that will start garnishing what little wealth they've saved for retirement.
And being in Romania, they're even more terrified of what a Trump-Putin alliance will look like for Eastern Europe. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
I'm so angry at Trump and his followers. But I'm even more angry at the Dems for throwing their own voter base under the bus, for choosing to chase after Cheney and every grimy "moderate" Republican who was never going to vote for them anyway, for relying on "brat summer" tiktok memes while sidelining the progressives who would've carried her through doing groundwork in swing states, for giving a blank multi-billion dollar check to one of the worst genocides of our lifetimes, and for betraying people like my parents who in good faith put their hopes in the Democratic party.