I am by no means an optimist. In fact, if you were to ask most people who know me what my general outlook towards the ultimate fate of humanity looks like, you would find that their answers would range from “dour” to “depressing.” This is not to say that good things never happen—in fact, they happen more often than most people notice. My general frame of mind is that while good things happen, bad things happen just as often, and even as a consequence of good things.

This does not mean that I wasn’t at least a bit giddy for a second there when it looked like it was going to happen.

For once, it looked like most of my stresses regarding the state of US politics were going to be alleviated. For a week or so, I wouldn’t have to worry about the growing xenophobia abounding the streets, the normalized racism in normal speech, the millions of deaths caused by anti-vaxers and red-pillers, the borderline-fascist movement of book bans or the sheer intellectual loss of research budget cuts. I believed that I could breathe easily for a bit, and then I could continue worrying.

And then it didn’t happen.

President Donald Trump is alive and as healthy as a 79-year-old man whose diet seems to consist almost exclusively of bigotry and McDonald’s. In health reports, he shows an almost stellar degree of well-being, with the worst aspects in his medical history being a now-controlled high cholesterol and some relatively easygoing gastrointestinal disorders. He also didn’t show his face for six days, with the only sign of his consciousness being some half-hearted Truth Social posts and faux photo leaks from months prior. For each of those six days, social media became exultant in anticipation, eagerly awaiting the inevitable to occur, most of them believing, like I did for that brief second, that most of their sociopolitical woes would be solved when he got solved. The fact is, I don’t begrudge these people, but, unfortunately, that glee only lasted for a second for me, and that is for one key reason: even if it did happen, the fallout has to be dealt with.

If it happened, the next president in the line of succession would’ve been Vice President JD Vance who, other than being hilariously uncharismatic and the object of mockery of both the left and the right, also spends his time spewing hate and being boosted by megalomaniacal technocrat Peter Thiel—of hypervigilant Big Brother corporation Palantir fame. The extent of surveillance that Thiel, and by extension Vance, promise is an AI-backed, ultra-repressive all-seeing eye on each of the inhabitants of the United States. In fact, we have already gotten the first taste of Palantir’s brand of panopticon by way of ImmigrationOS, a software created by Palantir for the explicit purpose of tracking immigrants and visitors to the United States, which the software can then report to ICE.

There is also the matter that JD Vance has repeatedly shown himself to be one of the biggest backers of Trump’s economic policies, from the devastating Big Beautiful Bill to the bizarre shifts to trade and tariff policy. JD Vance may be liked by no one, respected by no one and recognized as a serious politician by no one, and thus unlikely to become the succeeding leader of cult MAGA, but if it happened, little would matter, because he would default as president.

Additionally, the presumption that, if it happened, the entirety of the extreme-right would wake up as if from a trance and revert (or convert) into some semblance of human decency after years of Trump-era politics, where it has become fair game to normalize or justify lynchings, city takeovers and school shootings, is naive at best and blind at worst. Cults of personality and mob mentalities are quite the drug, but so is human cruelty and fascism. These last ten years of Trumpian pomp and circumstance have unmasked vile hatred and made the most downtrodden of us accept it at face value. It has made us fear that any baby or immunocompromised child could get a deadly, preventable disease because some find death more palatable than a fabricated paranoia. It has made us lose hundreds and thousands of neighbours, coworkers, friends and family members to an immigration system that does not care for anything except for American white supremacy. It has made us lose countless trade relationships, diplomatic understandings and made us fund through our tax dollars some of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history. The soul of American politics had never been spotless, but these last ten years have left an indelible stain that will never be made up for.

So, yes, when it does happen—as it inevitably will, as death comes for us all—I will be happy. I will celebrate. I will pop a bottle of champagne, as I did with Kissinger, Fujimori and Anita Bryant. But, I will be conscious that the death of a man with so many sins weighing his soul does not mean that those sins have not left repercussions that will last for generations.