4 Years

I will always remember the day Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States of America.

For us in France, the results were coming in the night between Tuesday, November 8 and Wednesday, November 9.

There was a special edition on national radio, and I woke up several times in the night to tune in and listen to the latest news. When I went to bed, every single poll indicated that Hillary Clinton would win. Every time I woke up, it was becoming less and less sure. Until, at some point, around 5, when it became almost impossible.

Waking up that morning, it was surreal.

It was kind of like if everyone was waking up from a terrible nightmare. Kind of like if nobody could believe it, if nobody could believe that it was actually happening. When I arrived at school, the first thing I did was to go to see a teacher I had the previous year and with whom I had been discussing about the election. I will always remember that.

All day, this was what people were talking about. The fact that a racist white supremacist billionaire with no experience in politics and who had been campaigning telling lies upon lies upon lies and never showing any intention to make any good in the world had been elected President of the United States, aka the world’s most powerful person. And that he would be President for the next four years.

Then, maybe even more precisely, I remember watching his inauguration on January 20, 2017. I will always remember crying as he was being sworn in and became President.

At this time, I was not really picturing what these four years would look like, but one thing I remember is thinking that it would never end, that four years were too long to imagine the end of it, too long to say “okay, this will come to an end at some point”.

And well, four years later, here we are, we’ve made it. It’s been four rough years, but thousands of lies and deaths and 1,461 mornings waking up fearing what he might have tweeted, today, Donald Trump is leaving office.

Starting today, Joe Biden is the President of the United States. That doesn’t mean things will get better. But it does mean we can hope to have an impact.

Please never forget that when he was elected, FDR had no intention to do what he did with the New Deal. Organizations, movements and activists forced him to.

Now comes the fight.