Cast your whole vote, not just a strip of paper, but your whole influence.

—Henry David Thoreau

I began this section on my blog in the lead up to the 2016 election, the first time that Trump was on the ballot. Like many Americans, I was depressed about the possibility of a Trump presidency, even though I doubted that it would really come to pass. I went to bed on election night (Spain is six hours ahead, so the result was not announced yet) comfortably sure of Clinton’s victory. When I opened my phone, the following morning, the news was so shocking that I could hardly even understand it.

I walked to the bus stop on my way to work, where I normally would run into my other American coworkers. They were there, red-eyed, fighting tears, and the reality then began to sink in that the next four years would be dominated by a man I found, and continue to find, repulsive.

Admittedly, the first three years of the Trump administration were more annoying than anything else. The tone of the news coverage was frantic, bordering on hysterical. These were the years of midnight tweets, of tell-all memoirs, of constant White House staff churn, and of so many scandals, big and small, that it is impossible now even to call them to mind.

But it must be admitted that, for these first three years, the country was basically okay. The economy chugged along, there were no new foreign wars, and it looked as though America could survive with a peevish child as the commander-in-chief.

Yet this veneer of adequacy was stripped away when the COVID pandemic hit. When decisive leadership was needed—somebody the country could look to for clarity, strength, and calm—Trump gave us what he always gave us: bluster, boasting, and bullshit. The spectacle of him suggesting on national television to use light or bleach to combat the virus seemed to be enough, however temporarily, to wake the country up to the fact that the presidency is a serious job.

When Biden won, it was an amazing sense of relief. Trump’s ban from twitter, however brief, did more to reestablish sane public discourse than all of the sober talks from talking heads. In the words of Gerald Ford, I thought that our long national nightmare was over. It wasn’t.

I spent the holidays back home, in New York, savoring the newfound ability to travel to the US after the pandemic travel restrictions were lifted. On January 6, I was puttering around my mom’s house, trying to tune out Trump’s election denialism, and the fake controversies he was drumming up. My mom, true to form, had the news on, though the proceedings in the Senate seemed too boring to pay much attention to.

This changed, of course. A mob, whipped up by Trump’s lies, stormed the Capitol in an attempt to reverse the outcome of the election. I watched, stunned. And as the attack dragged on, the absence of any words from Trump—of any solidarity with his fellow politicians, or concern for their safety, or disapproval of lawless violence—became deafeningly loud. A message eventually came from the White House, far too late to make a difference, in which he called the rioters “beautiful people.”

Trump has been wrongly counted out many times, and I admit that after January 6 I thought his career was over. By the time his plane carried him away from Washington D.C. (refusing to wait for Biden at the White House, as per tradition), I felt a wonderful lightness, as I witnessed a moment I had dreamed of for four long years. Goodbye, and good riddance, I thought.

Here we are, four years later, and Trump is once again on the ballot. And by the looks of things, he has a decent chance of winning. Biden has proven to be an unpopular president. And because of Biden’s stubbornness, Kamala Harris had to step up at almost the last moment to replace him, depriving voters of a chance to pick their candidate. And she has not been able to distance herself enough from the policies that have made her boss so disliked.

Even so, I would urge any of the few Americans still wavering to choose Harris. While I am not certain Harris will be a wonderful president, we already know what Trump is like. He is simply not fit to lead the country. Trying to overturn an election is disqualifying. He still insists he didn’t lose; he is unrepentant, and is gearing up to try to overturn this one if it doesn’t go his way. A second Trump presidency might not end American democracy as we know it, but it will damage it, more than he already has.

During the 2016 election season, I found myself incredibly disheartened that the country could fall so low. Nowadays, I’m not so judgmental. The political establishment has let the people down for so long, in so many ways. It is genuinely disheartening to have to continue to vote to preserve it. And yet, Trump is not the kind of man to solve long-standing problems. He is an impulsive narcissist, a compulsive liar, and manifestly unfit for a job requiring measured words, self-control, and logical decision making. For the third election in a row, I will cast my whole influence against Donald Trump.