Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,

London has swept about you this score years

And bright ships left you this or that in fee:

Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,

Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.

… doesn’t mean that men literally pay her. Sure, she’s someone stuck in a time when she can have nothing of her own; someone who assembles her life from the odd bits she collects from others, choosing a catch-all existence over a suffocating marriage—made second-rate perhaps by her time, not by her self—but the “fee” doesn’t mean she is being paid for sex. He tells you that you just don’t get it. What he doesn’t get is that she’s a person. He is aging and bald and enjoys saying “whore” to a roomful of children. A few years later, he gets fired for having sex with a student. Him? Him. Of course, him.

The next time you meet Donald Trump, he’s your boss. Well, he’s your boss’s boss. A vice president in marketing who seemingly, literally, cannot stop talking. He’s on his third wife, and that’ll be over in a few years. He can’t believe your mother is his age. He thinks you are friends. He asks you if you’ve changed your hair every time he sees you. Sometimes during meetings he’ll turn away and open a magazine while someone is presenting. One time he comes to a halt in the middle of his own sentence to stare at a woman’s boobs for somewhere from seven to 27 uncomfortable seconds. (It’s hard to gauge time accurately during a truly aggressive boob-stare.) When he finally gets fired years later, his HR file as fat as a pig knuckle; the rumor is he’s caught stealing his own office furniture on the weekend. They don’t even stop him. They just let him go. It’s like the building itself sighs with relief.

And then you get out of your more corporate job and become a television comedy writer on a good show, a show that keeps going. You go from staff writer to producer to co-executive producer in the space of seven years. You work with your sister, which is like a dream, and your co-workers are cool, and your boss is very, very cool. It’s almost as if the fact that you’re a woman doesn’t matter at all. At all. It’s like you finally escaped.

The Trumps are vanquished. They’re dead, or arrested, or fired, sobbing quietly into their stolen office furniture, wondering where it all went.

But then, it starts happening. The actual Trump—the real Donald Trump—starts making a bunch of noise about the birth certificate of a black man. It’s racist. It’s so racist. But it’s just background noise. Then he starts winning in the primaries. You say “no fucking way,” under your breath a lot when you read the headlines.

There he is, implying that people of color are dangerous, that women are whores, that you just don’t get it, opening a magazine while someone else is talking. There he is, all the worst people you ever had to meet, and tolerate, and fight, or at least ignore. There is the villain at the end of the horror movie rising up again with his knife and you are like: “This motherfucker again? No way, I’m tired.”