Op-Ed: A Decade of Hate. A Night of Reckoning. MAGA Is Over

This story originally appeared on The Advocate.Donald Trump has always been awful. And his followers have arguably always been worse.In 2015, when Trump mocked a reporter living with disabilities, it should have been enough to disqualify him from ever getting enough votes to even be considered a candidate for president of the United States. When Donald Trump and his immigrant wife descended an escalator for a racist attack on Mexicans billed as a press conference, the U.S. media should have stopped giving him the coverage he so desperately needs to survive.When a video emerged of Donald Trump openly explaining the vulgar way he likes to sexually assault women, he should have been forced to live out his days in social exile at some dictator-chic golf club where we would never have to hear from him ever again.When the tiki-torch khaki Nazis stormed Charlottesville, America should have said cut ties with MAGA for good. When Donald Trump lied about his whereabouts on 9/11 and claimed he'd witnessed Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the towers fell, he should have been laughed into oblivion.When Trump rallies turned into glorified KKK rallies, the media should have stopped airing them. When MAGA idiots started modifying their diesel trucks to spew black smoke because climate change is a hoax, we should have remembered that public shaming serves a purpose. When MAGA turned trans people into political targets, whipping up a nationwide moral panic with deadly consequences, we should have rejected the entire movement once and for all.But we didn’t. None of those course corrections happened. Because Donald Trump appealed to the worst of us. And the rest of us were forced into some distorted, pretzel-like posturing of faux civility with people we should have never normalized. People whose behaviors we should never have excused. People who would rather dismantle their own grandmother’s health care in a sick, sad attempt to “own the libs.”Donald Trump appealed to the rac