Abstract
The writer presents an autoethnographic account of the night of the 2016 presidential election and the days and months that followed. Tormented by the prospect of Donald Trump’s election, he expresses the feelings of gloom and doom that permeate the academic convention he is attending as he and colleagues from around the country respond to the menacing prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. Invited to speak at a postelection riff, he contemplates the ways in which Trump served as an ideal transference object for many White working-class people, providing a kind of heroic self-validation they lack. In the concluding sections of the article, he focuses on the question of Trump’s heralded “authenticity” during the campaign and the tyrannical threat posed by Trump’s failure to care about truth.
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