It felt like 2016 all over again. I was at a friend’s house watching the voting numbers roll in. It didn’t look good. Not that Trump’s reelection was surprising to me, but it’d be nice for surprises to be pleasant for once.
Around 8:30, that familiar feeling settled in. “I can’t really watch this anymore,” I said to Jessica. We came home, and I put on David Fincher’s Se7en.
Somehow, it was more comforting to watch the bleakest movie ever released by a major studio than the election results rolling in.
****
In 2016, I was still writing for San Diego CityBeat. If you worked in media during that time, the days, weeks, months after the election felt like driving into a tornado, a manic attempt to understand the chaos, and—if possible—steer it toward something that resembled normalcy. There was no story that I couldn’t angle back to “Trump: he so crazy/stupid/dangerous.”
I look back at some of the things I wrote and am filled with both awe and embarrassment—awe at the optimism, fighting spirit; embarrassment for the naïveté.
Back then, Trump’s election seemed like a fluke, a freak accident, something that we could somehow reverse. If we just posted harder on social media, op-ed-ed harder, protested harder, we could fix it. #Resist, we said, tweeted.
It didn’t work, obviously.
When I read those old CityBeat articles, I feel bad at my younger self for giving away so much anger and sadness. Just giving it away for free. But over the past few years, I’ve come to realize this country didn’t deserve my emotions. Very Online people have for years rebranded “caring about friends/family” as “emotional labor”, but the real emotional labor is the sadness and fear that you invest in a culture that gleefully weaponizes them against you.
****
The morning after the election, I woke up and checked the news. “Trump projected to win” read all the headlines. I scrolled over and deleted Twitter from my phone.
If there’s one silver lining to all of this election, at least it’s gotten me to finally—FINALLY—get me off Twitter.
****
There will be people who read this and their takeaway will be that I don’t care. That I’ve become nihilistic. That I’m willfully putting my head in the sand. And I think that’s fair—think whatever you want, it’s America (at least for a little while longer)—but it’s not entirely true.
There’s a fine line between not caring and not investing. Of course I care about what happens to our country after this election. Of course I’m worried about what Trump’s second term will mean to friends and people in my community—women, immigrants, LGBTQ folks. But my compassion is stretched, and I want to save it for the people who are important in my life. The fuckheads who voted this fuckhead back into office, they don’t deserve anything from me.
****
Two days after the election, a trusted adult who played a prominent role in my upbringing posted this on Facebook:
It’s breaking my heart to see the hurt that people I care about are feeling over this election... I voted for Trump for so many reasons not just one and I feel good about my decision, even though others might not. This time is full of so much emotion, because of untruths, truths, worrying, happiness, celebration and sadness. I hate seeing the hurt it has caused all around.
Briefly I thought about replying. What did she mean by “many reasons”?
Instead, I just unfriended her and deleted Facebook off my phone.
****
It’s not a very teacherly thing to say, but sometimes you just have to give up on kids. It’s impossible to force a kid to learn if they don’t want to. You can take away their phone, you can assign more work, you can call parents, you can set up one-on-one conferences. You can plea, bribe, beg, and after all of that, you will still get nothing. A paraeducator with 25-years of experience told me he once had a kid say to him, “Why can’t you just let me fail?”
“So I stopped hassling him,” the para said. “He failed, but we got along fine after that.”
That’s how I see Trump voters: kids who don’t want to learn. And so you give up on them. You can fight them, argue, debate, but it’s all a waste of time. The best we can do is establish distant coexistence that hopefully prevents us from destroying each other.
Maybe one day, we can say “We told you so,” and it will be a nice little treat to warm our weak, liberal hearts as we cook food over the remaining fires of our scorched cities.
****
Watching Se7en, I was struck by how political it felt, how strangely allegorical it was. But It wasn’t the bleakness of everyday living that resonated—it was the personalities and relationship between Detectives Mills and Somerset.
In one scene, a drunk Mills (Brad Pitt) lays into Somerset (Morgan Freeman) for his negative worldview:
I don't think you're quitting because you believe these things you say. I don't. I think you want to believe them, because you're quitting. And you want me to agree with you, and you want me to say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. It's all fucked up. It's a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin." But I won't. I won't say that. I don't agree with you. I do not. I can't.
This moment used to choke me up. In a film so nihilistic, these shreds of hope and optimism feel revelatory (It’s actually surprising how many quietly touching scenes there are in Se7en—I had forgotten).
And this was me back in 2016. I was Mills: gung-ho, angry, ready to fight to make the world better. But this time, I saw Mills how he really is. Pathetic, impulsive, set up to lose.
Now I see more of myself in Somerset: retired, tapped out, stingy with hope.
****
I was joking about the scorched cities and whatnot. I don’t really believe Trump will bring about the end of the world. Plus, histrionic, apocalyptic language is so 2016. It’s the kind of stuff Republicans love to see because: they got us. We’re so owned. Triggered, even.
My favorite thing about Tim Walz was how forthright he was about demystifying Trump. He’s an objectively awful, disgusting, weird human being but he’s still just a man.
Or as Somerset says: “If we catch John Doe and he turns out to be the devil, I mean if he's Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations, but he's not the devil. He's just a man.”
****
Before deleting Twitter off my phone, I saw someone post “At least this will be the last time.”
Ha ha ha! I thought. Buddy, Republicans have the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Which is not the first time in history it’s happened, but the first time it’s been under an administration that so blatantly shits on the face of ethics, decorum and history. You think after four years, Trump/Republicans are just going to clap the dust off their hands? You think they’ll be like, “Welp, we are done, because those are the rules”?
But I didn’t say of this. What’s the point.
****
The day after the election, I asked students in my English classes if they wanted to talk about the results, air feelings, share thoughts. Most kids remained quiet, and then one kid asked who I voted for.
“I voted for Harris. But this is America, and you can vote or support whoever you want. However, just know that there are a lot of kids at this school whose lives could be negatively affected by this next presidency, so just be mindful of what you say and who you say it to.”
After the bell, one kid stayed behind and asked, “Mr. Bradford, am I going to get deported?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”
****
Upon learning about the death of his wife by the hands of killer John Doe, Mills “becomes wrath” as anticipated by Doe, and we, the audience, feel nothing. Cinematic revenge has hardly felt as empty or meaningless.
Somerset pleads, but it doesn’t work. Mills destroys his own life by succumbing to wrath.
****
I no longer feel like understanding the nation’s choice with Trump. Pundits are yet again scrambling to dissect what happened: Democrats have lost touch with the middle class! Their lack of action on Palestine is what caused this! They didn’t appear on podcasts!
But I don’t think it’s that complicated. I think the analysis is giving too much credit to a general populace that is not Very Online (a fact that Very Online people cannot seem to grasp) and who take everything at face value, and whose investment in politics amounts to little more than a fairweather sports fan’s when their team is winning. I think people voted for Trump because they wanted cheap gas, to go to restaurants during pandemics, and to eat McDonalds without breaking the bank. Not much more
Well, let’s also not forget or underestimate our country’s relentless hatred of women.
****
The final lines of Se7en—spoken by Somserset as he watches Mills taken away in a police cruiser—go: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”
I know I’ll eventually come around, but right now I’m having a hard time agreeing with that second part.
Well done. Truly top notch.
Really great stuff, Ryan