“He has poisoned our water forever.”

As we live through what I hope are the last hundred-odd days of Trump’s presidency, I often think about what he’ll leave behind. I keep coming back to Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon:

Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives — whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin’s daughter or your fiancee’s 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

I’ll never understand why a crippling minority of Americans chose to entrust Trump—a uniquely cancerous human being—with the presidency. I hope we decide differently this year, but more than that, I hope we can begin to address the divisiveness that brought us to where we are.