<p>November 8th may just be the start.</p> 
<p>By now, you know that walking Illinois-Nazi-rally Donald Trump is finished. His polls are shit. His reputation is somehow worse than it was when he started running for office. His spokespeople are imbeciles. His ground game is <a href="https://twitter.com/ericgeller/status/786904136696467456" type="external">nonexistent</a>. He has a record of scandal and disgrace that will NEVER be matched by anyone ever again. (I feel like I&#8217;m watching Cy Young pitch when he opens his mouth.) He&#8217;s gonna get trounced.</p> 
<p>And I wish the prospect of a Trump defeat offered us all some measure of relief. I wish I could point at November 8th on the calendar and tell you, definitively, that this living nightmare will finally be fucking over. But I can&#8217;t. I know that isn&#8217;t true at all. I know that November 8th is only the beginning of our miseries, because one of the most depressing things about this election season&#8212;which has already put America on the brink of suicide&#8212;is the fact that it isn&#8217;t gonna end on Election Day.</p> 
<p>We know Trump will lose, and we also now know that Trump and his acolytes have <a type="internal">NO plans to lose graciously</a>. Trump isn&#8217;t gonna concede, and he isn&#8217;t gonna go away, not when he&#8217;s already achieved the wet dream of seeing his every word move mountains. He will do his best to undermine the election results, and stoke violence, and gin up perpetual outrage against the media, and he will appear on your television screen every hour on the hour&#8212;summoned like a fucking genie&#8212;to rail against the legitimacy of a Hillary Clinton presidency.</p> 
<p>And he&#8217;ll have <a type="internal">the unofficial support of his estranged party</a> when he does. As much as the GOP establishment wants to treat Trump like a fart in an elevator, come November 8th they will share the exact same goal, and utilize the same truther news outlets to achieve it. It&#8217;s been discouraging to watch the GOP stymie Obama at every turn for the last eight years (with Obama, at times, being far too deferential to them), and it&#8217;s not like they&#8217;re gonna magically grow a heart once Hillary Clinton takes office. I promise you that dipshits like Mitch McConnell will declare it their mission to thwart Clinton, and then sit on their dicks for the duration of her stay in the White House.</p> 
<p>That&#8217;s how the GOP works. They deserve to go down with Trump and yet, somehow, they&#8217;ll <a type="internal">survive all this</a>, without being forced to learn a thing. Even if they lose control of Congress, they&#8217;ll find a way to regenerate and then fuck everyone. Everything Trump does in practice, they do in policy. And they&#8217;ll have the support of both their donors AND the pig voters they have nurtured for years (who have been granted more anthropological empathy than virtually any other segment of society), the ones who flocked to Trump this year but will gladly stick by the Republican party because they&#8217;ve been conditioned for the past three decades to cry out "BITCH!" any time anyone says the name Hillary out loud. These people are in each other&#8217;s thrall forevermore.</p> 
<p>Wait! It gets worse! Not only will Republicans re-litigate this election into eternity, but they will have the firm backing of cable news when they do it. This election is an industry now, and cable news has figured out how to frack it for maximum resources. CNN has finally hit upon a thriving business model by having insane people lose their shit on panel shows. Shitbag insiders like <a href="https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/786748166121095168" type="external">Mark Halperin</a> have mastered horse-trading access to Trump for &#8220;fairness&#8221;. MSNBC has paraded out a conga line of bozos like Chuck Todd (wistfully referring to Trump spokespuppet Kellyanne Conway: &#8220;She&#8217;s just a very good person&#8221;) and Chris Matthews and <a type="internal">Joe Scarborough</a> who are jussssst cynically balanced enough for the network to say, &#8220;We&#8217;re liberal but we&#8217;re not TOO liberal, you guys!&#8221; Like the GOP itself, these networks are TERRIFIED of alienating Trump&#8217;s base of <a type="internal">racist hicks and their QVC housewives</a>, so they bend over backward to accommodate them even as these loons scrawl <a href="http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/13/donald-trump-rally-swastika-media-sign-acosta-tsr-sot.cnn" type="external">swastikas</a> on the press table.</p> WATCH 
<a href="https://video.gq.com/watch/chris-hemsworth-wears-clothes-just-as-well-as-you-think-he-would-2018-08-16#intcid=recommendations_cne-interlude-gq-popular_71355687-2b2c-4c71-abbd-604b8481ed6e_cral-top1-1" type="external">Chris Hemsworth Wears Clothes Just as Well as You Think He Would</a> 
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<p>That&#8217;s why this election will be a never-ending hostage standoff. This is how a boob like Paul Ryan&#8212;he&#8217;s so emotionally torn here, you guys!&#8212;somehow engenders more sympathy from certain people than Trump&#8217;s victims do. No one ever gets written off for good the way they ought to be. During the second debate, Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/785449458720993280" type="external">lied nearly every minute</a>, threatened to jail his opponent, defended talking about grabbing women by the pussy by saying it was locker room talk, <a type="internal">humped his chair</a>, invited Bill Clinton&#8217;s accusers to the debate and planned to have them angrily confront him on camera, frequently pointed at Hillary Clinton like he wanted to stab her with his Tiny Tim finger, admitted once more to <a type="internal">not paying his taxes</a>, and generally made the whole world uncomfortable. And yet there was Matthews afterward, crowing, &#8220;This one had a far less clear outcome!&#8221; He really said that. Christ.</p> 
<p>I haven&#8217;t even gotten to the alt-right sites yet&#8230; sites that would likely benefit more from Trump losing than from him winning. Alex Jones will get to rip his shirt off nightly, to the delight of both the uneducated and Irony Twitter. Brietbart will continue to be its own political fiefdom. Fox News will eagerly patch up the schism between Trumpites and normal conservatives in order to sell you more fallout tents and safe deposit boxes. As <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-republican-party-created-donald-trump-conspiracy-theories?utm_content=buffer9d4bd&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer" type="external">President Obama</a> said yesterday, these sites are the byproducts of years and years of GOP handiwork. Debunking them is a full-time job. They won&#8217;t vanish in a single night. Pepe the Frog isn&#8217;t going away. The second Trump loses, he&#8217;s gonna appear on your Facebook Uncle&#8217;s shoulder and whisper &#8220;BURN IT ALL.&#8221;</p> 
<p>We will never be free of this election, not when there&#8217;s profit to be had from it, both financially and ideologically. The madness of 2016 will bleed into 2020, and then into 2024, and on and on with no rest. I hate admitting this. I genuinely believe that people are good, for the most part. But I&#8217;ve seen too much now. In a sane universe, the number of Trump supporters is zero. The fact that he has any support at all&#8212;much less from millions of people&#8212;suggests a brokenness in America that will take a long, long time to fix, if it ever gets fixed at all.</p> 
<p>Drew Magary is a GQ correspondent and author, most recently of " <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hike-Novel-Drew-Magary/dp/0399563857" type="external">The Hike</a>."</p> Find your happy place with advice from 
<a type="internal">the world's happiest man:</a>
The 2016 Election Will Never End