Thinking this week about how both compressed and expanded time feels. Compressed because how can another four years have passed and brought us here? And expanded because somehow memories have not kept up, like 2020 happened a long time ago.

Only four years ago, we were partway through what would be a full year of Trump’s horrific governance during the first year of COVID, a year that ended with his fostering of a deadly insurrection. That he could lie ceaselessly about that year and never be truly challenged on it; that the way the year felt, and what we experienced through it – adrift, abandoned, fearful and divided by his uncaring and mean government. That such a year is not, after all, seared into more peoples’ memories, is so baffling.

I don’t know how any opposition to an endless stream of lies and anger like that could win. It’s not simply that it wasn’t challenged; it’s that it wasn’t repeatedly, assertively dismissed as a vile set of lies by everyone who witnessed it. There was no truth too much for the voters who believed him. “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” – this was treated for the next twelve weeks as representing a policy difference, not a gross and obvious disqualification. Not as representing a profound truth of the man.

In the final weeks his campaign doubled down on anti-trans hate-mongering, and I hoped this would mark a desperate turn. I’m dismayed that it did not. Somehow, the promise to punish marginalized people, the open endorsing and encouraging of bigotry, was more persuasive than the lived experience of just four years ago. That’s a truth of America that I have to sit with for a while.