…About how we never/all saw this coming. But a few folks did. And it’s been brewing for 4, 8, 36 years. Or longer. A couple of months ago, about when Hillary’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment was making the rounds, I remembered Mitt Romney’s ‘binders of women’ reference from one of his 2012 debates with Obama. Mitt was monumentally out of touch, and not half the orator Obama is, but he was making a valid point: He knew that he needed to improve the gender balance in his administration and he told his key players to bring him some CVs to work with.

And the left nailed him to the wall over it.

Don’t get me wrong: I preferred to have the Obamas’ grace, dignity, and gravitas in the White House these last eight years. In retrospect, I wondered what more could have gotten done had it been Romney working with his own party. Mind you, the GOP might have done to him what they did to John Boehner.

I had my first conversation about the election with the gentleman at the dry cleaner this afternoon. We were talking in English because my Dutch is lousy, and he said ‘Congratulations on your new president,’ without irony that I could detect. We chatted for a few minutes and he indicated a low opinion of Mrs. Clinton. It wasn’t the time or the place to get into it with him, maar na negen jaren ben ik nog nooit zo gemotiveerd om nederlands te leren. (After nine years, I’ve never been so motivated to learn Dutch.)

I do hope we survive the next four years, but I fear for the republic.