In the wake of this unprecedented presidential election I think we all need to take a deep breath and with as little emotion as possible consider what has just transpired.

In this interminable Sophie’s Choice of an election season we were faced with two nearly equally distasteful candidates one of whom – like it or not – was going to be the next president of the United States.

In Hillary Clinton we had a woman who is widely considered untrustworthy and untruthful; a woman of immense ambition both personal and political with a penchant for blurring the lines between the two; and finally, a woman who represented the resurgence of the blighted Clinton Regime.

In Donald Trump we had… well Donald Trump. A man who has spent his adult life promoting himself, his brand, his casinos, his hotels, his golf courses, his university, his water, wine, steaks… and well, anything that might make make him more wealthy, enhance his celebrity and keep him in the spotlight.

These were two horrific choices for the American people… real monsters.

Yes, Hillary had vastly more government experience owing to her time in the White House, Senate and State Department. But for many Americans this  experience – especially when put in service to the Establishment’s status quo agenda – was no virtue. Hillary may have been better equipped to execute the duties of the office of the President… but if that meant more globalism, more elitism, more crony capitalism and more war – then her very experience might prove a negative with regard to the needs and interests of the average American citizen.

With his focus on ruinous Free Trade Agreements, Illegal Immigration and the threat of Islamic Terrorism, Trump spoke directly to issues which touched a nerve in huge swaths of America’s miserable majority… and Hillary had no answers.

Donald spoke in plain language of concrete solutions – build a wall, tear up trade agreements, register muslims, deport illegal immigrants – appealing to a population exhausted with trying to parse out the meaning of  Clinton’s trademark political double-speak and empty, non specific promises.

Trump – both to his credit and shame – exploited the pain and fear that middle Americans have born largely in silence for many years. Like Ronald Reagan when he identified the religious right as an untapped, unserved voting block, Trump took advantage of the Democratic Party’s disgraceful abandonment of their traditional working-class base and presented himself as their champion. He mirrored their dissatisfaction with a government rife with incompetence and corruption. He empathized with their distrust of the media. But mostly he held out the promise of the American Dream to a people who had all but lost hope.

This may be difficult for many of you to hear… but don’t blame Trump Voters for voting for Donald Trump.

There were no good options here.

So I think we have to dispense with all of the name calling and disparagement of Trump supporters.

Were they duped by a con man the likes of which we haven’t seen perhaps since PT Barnum… absolutely!

But believing in Trump as agent of change and savior of the working class is no less idiotic than believing the same of Hillary Clinton. She is a tool of the wealthy elite and he is one of them, so either way we were going to have the interests of immense wealth influencing the leadership our government.

I believe in the coming months and years Trump supporters will go through what many Obama supporters experienced when he was elected – when all his promises of transparency and change were simply forgotten – and instead of change, his administration became simply more of the same.

I’m not going to sit here and try to predict what a Trump Presidency will be like…. for better or worse, as the first modern President to gain office having never held a single political office at any level, he is bound to be unlike any President we’ve ever seen before.

I will predict, based on years of watching Trump the person – the arrogant, egomaniacal, thin-skinned, attention grabbing, pussy grabbing, vulgar flim-flam man – that once in the Oval Office he will behave in ways that will appall many of us and reflect badly on the Office and the nation as a whole.

And when that happens, Trump supporters… we are going to let him know. We are going to protest him, denounce him,  We can’t know the future, so we have no way of knowing if the Evils of a Trump Administration will prove to be worse than the Evils of a Hillary Clinton administration. We’ll just have to wait and see.

But here’s something many of us can agree on….

The American people wanted change.

We wanted change and didn’t get it with Barack Obama.

We apparently wanted the change offered by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

And apparently, we didn’t believe we would get much change from Hillary Clinton.

Does that mean Donald Trump was a great choice for President… Hell to the No!

But it will be different… and maybe – just maybe – some good might come of that.

Good luck to us all!