Fifteen years ago we all watched horrified as fundamentalist terrorists flew plane loads of innocent people into the Twin Towers. The symbols of New York’s greatness crashed to the ground, along with the aura of invincibility that the USA has always had.

On Wednesday we watched as 58,1 million voters flew the notions of equality, respect for the poor, and the moral leadership of the world into the Statue of Liberty, the Wall Street Stock Exchange and the White House.

But the real culprits, are not the 58 million people who voted for Trump. It is the 85 million voters who did not vote. The passengers of democracy. And all the picky passengers who want exactly the right seat by the window or I am not flying. Susan Sarandon the socialist star who didn’t vote “with her vagina”, to every millennial moralist who had doubts about Hillary Clinton’s truthfulness, and every lazy, apathetic person “who just isn’t political”. The tens of millions of people in the US who stayed at home or made a protest vote delivered the keys to the Oval Office, the nuclear codes and America’s  leadership in the world to deranged hairball from a neutered orange Tomcat.

Just as with Brexit in Britain earlier this year, lots of amateur liberal theorists cast ‘a protest vote ‘, and wiped 156 billion dollars off the world markets, by sending Britain off into an unknown future. And then the next day, ‘in their millions’, they said we want to vote again, they had changed their minds!  They were lucky though, along came Theresa May, who with calm control settled everyone down and laid down a groundwork for the short term future that stabilized Britain fast. The USA has no back-up plan for this kind of crisis, Trump is the back-up plan.

And back home, many white whiney liberals across South Africa this year DID NOT vote in the municipal elections. Hundreds of thousands of existing DA voters, knowing that they had the chance to change the future of the meters that they moan about every day, did not take the 45 minutes out of their busy schedules to vote. Luckily our politicians from the DA, the Eff and the smaller parties did the work, they leveraged, negotiated, and compromised to ensure that change happened. Who can leverage Trump? Nada – as Vladimir Putin is saying now!

For four years we will now live with unanswerable questions.

Can you imagine being the security team who has to take a bullet for him?

Can you imagine the political and financial opportunities that China, Russia and Asia see waiting to be exploited?

Can you imagine every woman who needs an abortion in the next four years living under a man who said “she should be punished” if she uses that right?

Can you imagine the Republican Party living with the fact that they have delivered the Supreme Court to a Trump appointee because they would not do their constitutional duty and appoint Merrick Garland to the vacant chair?

Can you imagine Republicans John McCain and Paul Ryan, now trying to rein in their own ‘leader’ as he attempts to enact impassable and unconstitutional laws?

Can you imagine the leaders of every member of Nato, the Economic Union and ‘the free world’ who have no idea where they stand with the US, and if they want to stand with them at all?

Can you imagine the ‘radical Islamic terrorists’ who now have an enemy so well defined, chaotic and explosive that their recruiting rate will go sky high?

Can you imagine the Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Security teams who have to try and restrain a man who explodes at a tweet?

Can you imagine the men in the nuclear bunkers who know that they will have to launch the nuclear arsenal if the President is having a(nother) bad hair day?

Can you imagine the joy of the bankers and billionaires who know that they are going to be given free rein to sell and manipulate markets and plunge the USA into even a deeper financial crisis than 2008?

Can you imagine every American child born to Mexican parents, who doesn’t know if and when they will either be separated from their families or will be deported to a country they don’t know?

Can you imagine being Jim Comey and his fabulous(!) FBI team, having to now work with a man whose knowledge of the law is minimal and who believes that  desire trumps due process?

Can you imagine the elation in the boardrooms of every dirty coal producing, oil manufacturing and fracking company who are to be given free rein to damage the planet further as climate change reform is reversed?

It is enough to make you pee your pants, put your head in the ground and pray for a miracle of deliverance.

However, there are a few very dim linings to these clouds?

Can you imagine how comedians and commentators are going to have richest vein of comedic gold to mine EVER?

Can you imagine Trump battling with the slow pace of bureaucracy and the frustrating realisation that government is way much more complicated and frustrating than running your own company?

Can you imagine that the Rand will strengthen against the dollar because of what the US President did, rather than plummeting because of something the SA President did?

Can you imagine the day when sanity returns in 4 years time and he is sent into the political wilderness –please God?

It is not much, but it is something.

But in the meantime – reality television just became reality. Now the manufactured crises of reality television will become the real crises of reality.

And personally I am afraid! I am very afraid! In fact I just had to change my pants – again! DM