When midnight struck on November 8th, 2016 and Donald Trump officially had won 244 electoral votes, it was starting to sink in that he would win. I turned off the TV and my laptop, put my phone on airplane mode and went to sleep realizing that all of my efforts and the efforts of others like Robert De Niro, Lebron James, Keith Olbermann, John Oliver, President Barack Obama, and many many others, had all been in vain. We did not convince the rest of the country, to whom needed convincing, to come to their senses and vote for Hillary. Although she was a candidate they may not have liked, she was less of a risk. The words of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, J.K. Rowling and others are nearing from cautionary tales to self-fulfilling prophecies.

I came to the voting booth that night in all black and carried my copy of 1984. I wore a tee shirt of the bloodied storm trooper helmet of FN-2187 from the new Star Wars movie. This was the character who turned from the new Empire to the rebellion and renamed himself Finn. On the drive to the polls, my playlist consisted of Killing in the Name Of by Rage Against the Machine, Master of Puppets and Leper Messiah by Metallica. I believed I came purging the demons of Make America Great Again, when in reality it was all for naught. I drank plenty that night, yet the actualization of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States of America was the most sobering experience of my life.

That night I wrote the title of this article in full capitals: SHAME. The one sentence I wrote before deleting was filled with indescribable hatred. I didn’t continue to write because I was too weary and defeated to go on. As the next couple of days post-election progressed, this article was changed into a more optimistic title as my zombified self (and not the one to be working at the Bates Motel) crawled into the grieving stage of acceptance. Even though pigs flew and hell has frozen over, the sun did rise in the morning, and life went on and will continue to go on.

I do lean towards the democrats and consider myself a feminist, but me voting, advocating, and pleading for Hillary Clinton to win the election had nothing to do with the Democratic Party gaining an advantage in the government or seeing feminine progression. The reason I begged the country to vote for Clinton was because I wanted to go to sleep every night at peace. I wanted to sleep knowing that a candidate who campaigned himself as a maniacal madman would not become the most powerful person in the world. Even after all of this, I still believed in my heart and mind that November 8th would end with Hillary winning and I could rest easy knowing that the world as I knew it was no longer in constant fear and paranoia. But with this result of the election, I soon realized, in the words of Robert Frost from the poem Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening,that I still “had miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

Yet even though I was against Trump and his campaign from day one, I now have to accept that he will be Commander-in-Chief for the next four or eight years. I have a hope that maybe, just maybe, the Donald Trump as president isn’t the extreme radical tyrant he marketed himself as. Maybe he will be a more rational and politically correct leader. Instead of far-fetched and terrifying plans and ideas his campaign advocated, maybe he will act more down to earth. I hope he makes logical decision and satisfies the general population.

Maybe his entire campaign was not the real Donald Trump but just a performance, a marketing tactic, to brainwash people into voting him. Perhaps, instead, we will get the tycoon, brash, jock, yet somewhat respectable Trump we grew up watching on The Apprentice. We could get the Donald Trump who we rooted for to win the battle of the billionaires against Vince McMahon at WrestleMania 23 who shaved McMahon’s head in the middle of the ring. Maybe he won’t turn out to be the worst and most dangerous President in American history. His term will likely be unconventional and rocky compared to any president in history, but not the dystopian dumpster-fire a lot of people expect. His victory speech, albeit were not his words but his speechwriters, was his first speech that sounded respectful and tolerable. His exchanges with President Obama when they met in the White House, the same president he called the founder of ISIS, were respectful, and made him look human for the first time since he shaved Vince McMahon’s head. But of course, that’s only maybe.

I also must emphasize to myself and the rest of the world that although it is the most powerful position in the United States and the world, President of the United States is not one and the same as Dictator of the United States. Donald Trump will not have full authority as President as he is only the leader of the executive branch of the government. There has been and always will be a separation of powers with the Executive Branch, Legislative Branch, and Judicial Branch. Although Republicans are the majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, not all of them are or were ever on board with Trump’s campaign. The House, Senate, Supreme Court, and citizens of the United States will undoubtedly neuter any of President Trump’s extreme plans and ideas in which he advocated in his campaign and will at the very least reach a reasonable compromise with the president.

There are midterm elections in 2018, new elections in 2020, another midterm election in 2022, and even if Trump survives as President throughout those elections, his presidency will inevitably end by serving his maximum length at the end of 2024. Even though it is admittedly a long time, eight years or less will be the length of Trump’s time as Commander in Chief, either that or possibly losing his office in 2020. Or impeachment, resignation, physically or mentally incapable of serving, and death can be the end of it.

So yes, even though I stood against everything his campaign stood for, I will give Donald Trump a chance to win me over as the President. But it will take a lot. So while the next president himself gets a pass for now, his supporters do not. After over a year of trying to understand how just one person, let alone millions, let alone nearly half the country, voted for Donald Trump and openly embraced him despite the glaring, Mount Everest pile of reasons they should not. My observation is that Republicans hated Hillary Clinton and the Democrats so much that they didn’t care to vote for someone who came off as a raging lunatic. And because everything Trump said and did in his campaign that would have been career suicide for the average politician, they liked it. They liked the racism, the sexism, the misogyny, the discrimination, the disrespect to veterans, the plain hubris, every single new sound-bite and story which alienated a demographic, they fell in lust. They saw all that not as indecent acts of unkindness, but bold and brass balls.

Maybe it’s good he ran and won because he exposed within his voters a shocking shallowness for a country that had a black president elected twice, a woman who was a democratic nominee this year and gay marriage becoming official and accepted in the mainstream. I understand the whole, “let’s respect our elders” and “people have the right to their opinion” way of life here in America. Yet even in my calm judgment, inside there is strong air of disappointment, lament, and Darth-Vader-Sith-Lord-anger I carry towards everyone who made this whole fiasco turn from a far-fetched idea into reality. Last time I checked, only adults could vote for president, but it seems to me that children chose blow away this house of cards and wished for chaos to rule the world. And who has to clean up this mess when it’s all said and done? The children of those children. If there is a fraction of solace about the result of this election is that for voters between 18-25, Hillary Clinton won in a landslide. For that I thank my generation for going out there in the hardest election of their lives, some their first, and the majority of them voting rationally and with their head and heart.

It is no secret that Democrats and Republicans today are the equivalent of the Montagues and the Capulets from Romeo and Juliet. They are two warring sides who despise each other and are unwilling to collaborate and make peace for the rest of the world’s sake. Then there is Mercutio, someone who was good friends with Romeo Montague but wasn’t concerned about taking down and conquering the Capulets, he preferred to go out, live his life, and have a good time. Even though he wasn’t primarily interested in the politics and hate between the two families he found himself caught in the crossfire between Romeo and Tybalt Capulet, and he was stabbed to death, as he lay dying his final words were “Ask me for tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses!” I, and likely millions of Americans similar to me, let politics be secondary in our lives, lay dying in the middle of this bitter war between the Democrats and Republicans which gave us a horrifying election and result and I cursed thee A PLAGUE O’ BOTH YOUR HOUSES!

There already has been and will continue to be protests of the electoral system and Trump’s presidency in general. Even though they are in the right as far as I am concerned, nothing will change. Progress always comes too late. It was too late for African-Americans, it was too late for women, it was too late for gays, it was too late for the soldiers, it was too late for the Jews, and it will be too late for us. That however, should not stop us from speaking against the incredibly flawed system and the process and results of this election. Our American duty is to make sure there will never, ever, be an election and a campaign like this one ever again in the history of the universe.

Even if Trump’s presidency turns out to be a surprisingly decent run, how he ran his campaign and the way he won should never be repeated. When our children and grandchildren are in school learning in history classes how a celebrity tycoon become president, we need to make sure that even though Trump proved that you can buy and bully your way into the oval office, it should a moral lesson from history on why together we stand, divided we fall.

I reluctantly wish Donald Trump luck as president so long as the overly radical and unrealistic ideas he ran his platform on do not come to fruition. I hope he moderates his wild personality, and can shape himself into a leader. I hope that regardless of if we like, respect, or agree with him as president, we can least get used to him being president. With this, maybe, just maybe, we can sleep well at night.