As a child, like many others, I enjoyed the stories of Hans Christian Anderson. But the one that never made sense to me was The Emperor's New Clothes. It seemed so glaringly obvious that EVERYONE would notice and respond to the emperor's nakedness, and it wouldn't require a little boy calling him out.

Then when Trump was elected I finally got the story. Huge swaths of the country couldn't see what was unfolding right in front of their faces. And yes, there was a huge right wing propaganda machine cherry picking video and telling them that they weren't seeing and hearing what they were viewing, and a whole political party willing to blatantly, repeatedly, lying to the public to save their own careers.

But a lot of people couldn't see it. A lot of people couldn't even remember four years later they distress they felt during his first term. So unfortunately, things will have to get pretty darn awful before some of these people wake up. Some never will. But the first four years were clearly not bad enough.