It wasn’t the usual kind of fear that struck me when I woke up in the middle of last night. A lifelong Democrat, I sat bolt up in bed at 3:30 in the morning, with the frightening reality that I was facing down something bizarre, something I hadn’t seen in four years……….Winning

And yet I was in a cold sweat.

We were entering the fourth day after the 2020 Presidential election. And it was taking a LOT of time to count the votes. But it sure looked, for the prior two days, like we were going to win.

We have been so conditioned to watching President Donald Trump, time after time over the past few years, manage to rescue his own presidency from scandal after scandal. Our body is programmed to expect these emotions to be quickly followed by massive disappointment.

Each time he would deflect the impact of some disastrous negative action — a campaign manager indicted, a cabinet member convicted, reports of an insulting comment he had made about a person, reports of an insult to a country or an ethnic group. Then, predictably, he would say or do something news that so outrageous he would make the public forget about the last atrocity at hand, and move on to the next scandal.

Over time, we were conditioned to just keep a level of anger going under the assumption that all he had to do to refuel our frustration was issue a tweet. And time after time, when we would believe he was finally too far behind the 8 ball and about to be reckoned with, he would merely point out that “I won the election” and that ,in itself, was enough for him to end any argument. Often, with the support of his own Justice Department backing his every move, that became the final word. Suddenly he had become an “untouchable,” and we were even paying huge departments of people to protect him, .

So as you can imagine, it is very confusing for Democrats to feel the way they do right now. On the cusp of defeating Donald Trump, there is, and will be, a sense of disbelief that this is really happening. Despite the frustration about how this election has dragged out, there is also a weird sense of confusion about how we should react to that.

Of course, some of that confusion has to do with Trump himself, who continues to behave as if the election is not even close to over, and won’t be until he is the winner. That is such an outrageous attitude — along with his insinuations about the election process — and yet one we have all been conditioned to understand weirdly just accept as “Trump just being Trump”.

Fortunately, the one person who doesn’t seem phased by all this is the one man who actually defeated Donald Trump. Joe Biden is behaving incredibly calmly and professionally, a hopeful sign of what we might be able expect in our lives sometime soon.