I woke up this morning with a political hangover.  The prospect of a Trump presidency terrifies me.  It makes me physically ill.  Seeing “President-Elect Trump” in headlines leaves me incredulous.  Hearing it on TV makes me nauseous.  Part of me is still hoping that I will go back to bed, wake up tomorrow and it will be Election Day, mercifully realizing that the past 18 hours were all just a terrible, apocalyptic dream.  It still hasn’t fully sunk in.  At the end of the day, it’s pretty fucking depressing.

I, and many of you, are depressed and disheartened knowing that our country, purported by many to be the greatest country on Earth, elected an avowed racist.  That we’ve voted in a clear misogynist.  That we’ve emboldened a bigot and vindicated a narcissist megalomaniac.  That his seemingly absurd self-confidence was proven out over the predictions of more educated and seemingly more knowledgeable professionals.  All of those regimes which we felt superior to over the last few years—Turkey, Venezuela, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines—that elected illiberal strongmen, we now can no longer look down upon as our undemocratic inferiors.  Our moral authority has been impugned by our collective affirmation of a man many feel unworthy of the office.

What are the near-term consequences of a Trump presidency?  I probably don’t have to tell you and I certainly don’t want to depress you even more, but we should all be prepared for what’s coming.  For one, the Supreme Court is in immediate jeopardy of assuming a decidedly conservative bent for the foreseeable future.  This means that Citizens United will not be revisited and that campaign finance will continue to be dominated by large, unaccountable interests.  That the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which aided and abetted some of the voter obstructionism that helped win Trump states like North Carolina, will remain in place.  That Roe vs. Wade may also be revisited.  But perhaps most cynically, that the unprecedented, unconstitutional Republican obstructionism of the last year in failing to consider Judge Merrick Garland will have paid off.  That’s one of the more depressing storylines of this outcome—that this kind of narrow, bald political play will have borne fruit.  For another, the Republicans will shortly control all three branches of government.  From a civil liberties perspective, this is unnerving at best and petrifying at worst.  I already have friends who are afraid for themselves or their relatives and friends, be they Muslim or immigrant or gay or other.  It is unconscionable that we have elected a man who makes American citizens or residents feel this way.  It is why I so desperately wanted to avoid a Trump presidency.  Things are now on the table that we never felt possible.

So, in the immortal words of a famous revolutionary, what is to be done?  Well, whether we like it or not, Donald Trump is the democratically-legitimate president elect of the United States.  As such, we owe him a certain fidelity—to let him prove himself better than his campaign rhetoric.  To see if he can be a president for all Americans, as he promised in his election night speech.  We should try to support him and hope for the best.  We do, after all, want our country to succeed and continue supporting our allies and the causes of democracy and development the world over.

But if this does not turn out to be the case, if a President Trump does not change his stripes and sees fit to try to violate constitutional norms, to overstep his bounds, to use the power of the presidency to bully whom he sees fit, we must be ready.  Ready to protest.  Ready to march.  Ready to dissent peacefully but passionately and loudly.  We need to use all of the checks and balances written into the Constitution to prevent the despotic accumulation of power and its use against our own citizens and residents.  We too can be obstructionist if the situation calls for it.  We cannot abide another regime that sanctions torture.  Or one that capriciously bombs women and children.  Or one that elevates the power of the executive at the expense of the other branches of government.  This is path to authoritarianism, and we must be vigilant.  And ready to vote in sufficient numbers to overturn these elections results in the midterms of 2018 and the presidential election of 2020.

This election has left many of us disillusioned with our vision of America.  We thought we were beyond this.  That the election of Obama had signified a turning point from which there was no coming back.  We now know that not to be true.  But what we need to hope is that this election is the last gasp of white privilege.  The last one where white fear and white entitlement can hold off the progressive tide of an increasingly diverse population and electorate.  The demographics are on our side, but we assumed that this would simply be enough and without the passion and energy of the last two campaigns, it wasn’t.

We should not stand in the way of progress, if Trump is the one to help us to get there.  But should he prove unworthy or unequal to the task, we will do it without him or in spite of him.  We will make this country tolerant again, kind again, and respected again.  The path today is more difficult.  But it’s not impossible.  We just have to want it more and be willing to fight for it.