I didn’t think Trump’s second act would be that bad. Oh, how wrong I was | Arwa Mahdawi

The Maga kingpin has only been president for a couple of weeks, but the chaos he has unleashed is already much worse than I thought it could be. I'm genuinely frightened

The day after Donald Trump won the election, everyone in my liberal corner of Philadelphia seemed shell-shocked. At preschool drop-off, a mom burst into tears. At the playground, a gay parent I know told me that they were aggressively downsizing in case they had to flee the country. Meanwhile, I felt oddly sanguine and thought people were being a tad dramatic. I rolled my eyes about Ellen DeGeneres relocating to England. I was optimistic that Trump 2.0, while horrific, wouldn't actually be the end of US democracy.

This was an unusual attitude for me, because catastrophising is one of my main pastimes. I spent about 10 minutes this morning staring at a red dot that has appeared on my nose, wondering if it meant I was dying. But when Trump won the election, I was already too emotionally drained from a year of watching Joe Biden help turnGaza into an unliveable hellscape to worry about things gettingeven worse.