Accepting President Trump doesn't mean giving him a pass.

It’s every American’s right to criticize any elected official, including future president Trump. We have this weird little thing called the “First Amendment,” and it promises us that the government will never take retribution for what we say, provided we’re not gross and we don’t advocate violence, insurrection, and whatnot. I never once minded when a right-winger criticized President Obama; even as a liberal I found plenty about his presidency to dislike. It’s when their reasons for criticism were based on either lies, phony, ginned-up scandals, or just outright racism that I took exception.

But let’s be honest — there wasn’t a whole lot of measured, reasoned criticism of Obama. From the moment he was sworn-in, Republicans tore him a new asshole every chance they got. They tried to delegitimize his presidency by fostering a fabricated back story for him, wherein he was actually born in Kenya, but had American identification records falsified, because you know, everyone just knew he’d not only knock out Hillary Clinton in the primaries one day, he’d go on to be elected twice.

This is the kind of stupidity that conspiracy nuts buy into, but it also helped foster a truly vitriolic and antagonistic streak in a lot of Republican voters.

We heard Obama called “Obummer,” “Obozo,” “OBobo,” “Dear Leader,” and more direct insults were thrown, involving the N-word or “clever” variants of it. We saw his wife and kids horribly mocked…”Moochelle” anyone? And we saw them obsess over whether he was a literal gay agent of communist forces with a transgender wife sent to infiltrate our government and destroy it from within. Then they went and elected a reality-TV star who poses a far greater existential threat with every misguided, emotional Tweet tantrum he throws, so go figure.

Over eight years Obama was treated to abuse after abuse.

To be fair to conservatives, it’s not like liberals were all that happy with George W. Bush’s eight year tenure as president. Then again, there might be an explanation for why most of the country wasn’t as up in arms about as Barack as they were about Dubya. Obama won the popular vote in both elections, and Bush got in on a technicality probably none of you have heard before, The Electoral College…But it’s not like we’d let that idiocy give us another president more Americans don’t want, right?

Every time I see an angry Republican tell me I have to “get over it” and “accept Donald Trump’s presidency” I laugh my testicular regions into a frenzy. It’s absolutely, positively the height of ironic hypocrisy for anyone who spent nearly a decade trashing Obama simply because he’s either a Democrat, a black guy, or in some super-duper racist people’s minds, both, to turn around and tell those of us who voted with the “majority” to calm down and give Trump a chance.

Before he’s even been sworn-in, Trump has done more to warrant a scandal investigation than Obama ever did in all eight of his years. Imagine if an Obama tweet had cost Boeing stockholders hundreds of millions of dollars. Hell, just imagine if Obama had tweeted like Trump did about Boeing’s Air Force One contract at all. Republicans would be hollering from the rafters about him putting his thumb on the scale. And when you consider that just minutes before Trump hinted that Boeing’s costs were out of control — they aren’t — Boeing’s CEO had been publicly critical of Trump, how can anyone see the Boeing flap as anything but personal retribution?

Somewhere in the deepest, darkest corners of Hell, Dick Nixon is getting a humongous boner thinking about what he’d be able to do in the Trumpian Era.

Even if we accept on faith that what Trump has done thus far isn’t grounds for impeachment and removal from office — once he’s actually sworn-in — that doesn’t mean liberals in this country owe him a free pass. I’ll hasten every Republican to remember that Mitch McConnell was openly trying to subvert Obama’s agenda and make him a one-term president from the start. Those were Turtleface McGee’s own words from his own mouth, too.

Give me a break with this, “accept the election results and move on.”

I accept the results. Donald Trump won, albeit by the Electoral College. It’s kind of like taking your sister to prom, which is why so many Trump supporters have no problem with winning on democracy’s version of the infield fly rule. And memo to pedants: Yes, I know that we’re a constitutional republic. Now go find me a definition of that term that in any way implies we can’t directly elect our leaders. We didn’t start directly electing senators until the beginning of last century.

Times change, people change, and government should change with the times. But don’t listen to me, listen to the people who actually wrote the goddamned Constitution.









If I were a conservative I would be white-knuckling right now. My guy was just elected even though he lost the popular vote by a huge margin, and his opponent got more votes than any other white male president in any single election. I’d remember how liberals treated Bush, who was an absolute abortion of a president, but at least gave it an honest effort to look the fucking part. Trump isn’t even trying to hide the fact that he sees this as a chance to enrich himself and his family, and the whole “presidency” thing is an afterthought at best. If you thought we liberals wrote scathing comedy and punk rock songs about Dubya, you have no idea what electing a walking, talking, shart in a suit like Trump will elicit from us.

We’re Americans, too, Republicans. We’ve spent eight years watching you drag an imperfect, but ultimately good man through the mud. Trump isn’t half the man that Obama is, even on Barry’s worst day.

We’ve watched you demand his impeachment and imprisonment over every burp, sneeze, and fart. In retaliation for forcing you to stuff your racial, gender, and sexuality-based epithets to the side for eight years, you elected the least prepared, least presidential person you could possibly find. If you think adults are going to sit back and watch him pull the Brinks truck up to our government and shovel the money in without a fight, you have underestimated us from the start.

Liberals invented protest songs. We’ve started the counterculture movement in every generation, and we’re the ones who will be pushing the ball forward again, after you guys squander your chance to lead…again. So buckle-up, fuckos.

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned by the Electoral College.

Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.