Headlines: ten days out

It's been ten tumultuous days since the 2016 presidential campaign came to an unexpected, shocking end. Tumultuous, and deeply distressing for the majority of Americans.

The level of distress is palpable whenever you talk to someone who believed that America would keep making progress toward equal opportunity, civility, decency and tolerance by electing a competent, qualified, experienced and compassionate successor to President Barack Obama -- and kept believing it right up until the night of Nov. 8, when a minority of voters won the Electoral College war and elected a racist, sexist, misogynistic, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, thrice-married cheat and womanizer, and tax-avoiding, vendor- and employee-stiffing, multiple-bankruptcies business fraud.

So it's no surprise that the day's headlines read as they do today.

In my hometown L.A. Times:
- From the world stage, a message for Trump: 'We cannot stand alone'
- L.A. lays out its Trump battle plan
- 'White pride' awakened: Election brings movement out of the shadows
- President-elect's tough talk sparks optimism in Iran (that its hard-line anti-U.S. candidates will win in Iran's May elections)
- Hearing echoes of a dark period in U.S. (Japanese Americans on calls to register Muslim Americans)
- Trump's victory puts net neutrality rules in jeopardy

In today's New York Times:
- Donald Trump's Plan to Purge the Nation (there aren't 3 million unauthorized immigrant criminals to deport - only the first flaw in his strategy)
- 1942 All Over Again? (on registering Muslim Americans)
- Silicon Valley Helped Create Trump, and That's Bad for It
- 'Is it Safe?' Foreign Students Consider College in Donald Trump's U.S.
- A 12-Step Program for Responding to President-elect Trump
- Donald Trump's Son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Tests Legal Path to White House Job (intent to put family on staff raising nepotism and blind trust questions)
- The Right Way to Resist Trump

In today's Washington Post:
- Trump pick for national security adviser brings experience and controversy
- Trump's embrace of Bannon sparks divisions, angst among Jewish groups
- Trump poised to learn the Pottery Barn rule of governing
- Republicans have heart disease, Democrats have a gushing head wound
- 'Who knows if Trump is even aware that he has a Secretary of Transportation?'

And in the Nov. 18 online issue of New Yorker Today:
- Jeff Sessions, Trump's True Believer: Turns bigotry into political action
- Obama Reckons With a Trump Presidency
- The Gathering Storm (will anti-Trump protests spark pro-Trump counter-demonstrations?)
- Giuliani, Drained With the Swamp?
- The Undocumented Ask: 'What Now?'
- A Rapper's Bold Anti-Trump Message

It's a safe bet that media outlets all across the country are posting similar headlines or on-screen crawls -- even in "red" states -- since the American media seems finally (but much too belatedly) to have come to its collective senses about the many devastatingly serious risks that a Trump presidency presents.

Seems to me that our media is now reflecting a new reality: the only way you can NOT be distressed about the pending presidency of this man is to be either deaf, dumb, blind, brain-dead, illiterate, on crack, an unabashed member of a right-wing hate group, economically selfish, stubbornly Republican-or-bust, or just blindly obedient to an irrational, unqualified, say-anything-to-win authoritarian whose mouth and hat both promised to make everything great again.

Yeah, sure they will.