Trump after 2024

He won, and my brother-in-law in Philadelphia still talks like the county machines stole a feeling. They didn't steal a feeling. They lost. I live in a place that went for him so hard the yard signs looked like a crop, and I am not going to pretend I didn't put one in the yard. I did. I also told my wife, if he ever sat at this table he would talk over her, and she said, then he's not sitting at this table. She still voted with me. People outside this county cannot hold that in their heads. They need a cartoon. We are not a cartoon. We are a split-level with a new furnace I installed myself because I was not paying a guy to do what I do for strangers.

The personality is the part I will not sand down. He is a vain man. He picks fights like a bar. He lies in the small way that makes the big way easier to excuse, and I have excused too much of the small way because I liked the judges and I liked that the regulators got bored of us for a minute. That bargain has a smell. I can smell it and still prefer it to the other bargain, the one where a nice sentence from a campus comes with a stack of rules for a shop that already runs on thin margins.

After 2024, the losing side wanted him to be a spell that broke the country. The winning side wanted him to be a dad who finally came home. He is neither. He is a former president who is good at finding the bruise and pressing it, and a lot of bruises in this valley are real: fentanyl in the high school parking lot, a mill that became a story instead of a shift, a medical bill that turned a family into a GoFundMe. If you only see the pressing and not the bruise, you will lecture us. We have been lectured. It did not take.

Policy. I can do policy. Energy, I wanted the permits to move. I heat houses. I know what a winter bill does to a widow in Midland. I wanted the border to be a border, not a vibe. I wanted the court to send Roe back, which it did, and I can hear the intake of breath from people who think that makes me a handmaid. My daughter is 16. I would drive her to Pittsburgh in a black hour if a pregnancy threatened her. I still didn't want a constitution that pretended it had a trimester chart in invisible ink. Hold both or don't talk to me about complexity.

The tariffs talk gets sold here like a hymn. Some of it is a hymn. Some of it is a guy who never welded anything promising a museum of factories. I would like the factories. I would also like a politician who can say China is a problem without turning every price at Walmart into a morality play. My customers will not thank me if a condenser coil costs a second mortgage. Nationalism that cannot count is just a rally.

I am not a saint for voting for him and I am not a fool. The fool is the person on TV who thinks Beaver County is a psychology experiment. We can see a crowd. We can see a motorcade. We can also see a man who would sell a friend if the friend had a bad night on television. I do not want that man as a model for my apprentices. I tell my apprentices: do the work, don't become a clip.

January 6th. I can do that too, without the costume. It was a disgrace. Cops got hurt. A lot of tourists got stupid on someone else's adrenaline. He lit a fuse and then watched the weather. If your whole politics is that it was a peaceful stroll, you are lying for a team. If your whole politics is that it was worse than a war, you are lying for a different team. I want a country that can punish a riot without turning half the map into a permanent defendant.

The other side's real point — I'll say it before the comments do — is that character is policy when the job is a thousand small permissions. A president who humiliates people for sport will hire humiliators. He did. Some of them could run a meeting. Some of them were loyal the way a dog is loyal, which is not how you want nuclear permissions to work. I hated the staff chaos. I still preferred his judges to the other set. That is a crude ledger. Crude is how a lot of us actually vote, and the consultants who pretend otherwise are paid to smell better.

2024's aftermath in my shop was jokes and a little fear. Fear that the losing side would never come back to a normal conversation, fear that the winning side would get drunk on it. Both happened, in miniature, on the radio. I changed the station to a game. The game was also a fight. There is no clean audio anymore.

I don't go to the rallies. I went to one, years ago, in a hangar, and I left early because I don't like chants. I like a load calculation. I like a duct that's honest. If he is the instrument by which we got a border bill that wasn't a press release, fine. If he is the instrument by which we got a style of politics that makes my kid think government is a show, that cost is real too. We don't put it on the yard sign.

People ask, would you do it again. I might. I might not, if the other ticket was a person who could walk into a union hall without a translator from a foundation. Personality vs policy is a false split they teach in colleges. Personality is how policy gets sold, delayed, wrecked. I wanted policy. I bought a personality. That is on me as much as it is on him.

He will not be at my dinner. I will not pretend he is a good man so that strangers on the internet can call me consistent. Consistency is for furnaces. For presidents I will take a mix of outcomes and a private, permanent wince. The wince is the part my party would like me to retire. I am keeping it. It is the last proof I still have eyes.

If you need me to say I regret the vote, you need a priest, not a contractor. If you need me to wear the hat in the grocery store, you need a rally, not a neighbor. I am a neighbor. I fixed Mrs. Petrillo's AC on a Sunday because she is 81 and heat is not a partisan weather. She voted the other way. She still made me sit for coffee. That is the country I actually live in. The other country, the one on the phone, can keep yelling. I have a call at 7 a.m. in Center Township and the attic is going to be a mouth of insulation.

He won. The dinner table is still mine. Those two facts are the whole essay, and I am aware they will not satisfy anyone who needed a conversion or a hymn. I don't do hymns on a weekday.