When Donald Trump invited Carlos Slim, one the world’s richest men and the single-largest investor in the New York Times, to dinner at his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, it became clear that Trump’s admiration for Mexican “leaders” meant businessmen, not politicians. “What President-elect Trump wants to do in coming closer to the Mexican business community has an impact, not only nationally but regionally with Latin America, and opens the doors for good business relations overall,” said Larry Rubin, president of the American Society of Mexico. 

For some, the hardest part is the realization that older Americans, who will likely be hardest hit by changes to health care and discretionary spending, were among the Republican president-elect’s biggest supporters. “I have worked in gerontology since the ’80s,” said Toni Miles, MD, who heads the gerontology department at the University of Georgia. “I feel betrayed because older people voted for a guy I couldn’t stomach.”

Indeed, it is an opportunity to have an American president in the Oval Office who wants to pick up the phone and speak with Mexico’s president to talk about solving problems. It is an opportunity to invite the young, dynamic, and intelligent Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau join that conversation. It is an opportunity to speak honestly and assess, two decades after it was implemented, on what’s good about NAFTA.

How do you grieve for something you’ve always known was there and is no longer.  For make no mistake.  In its place is something rank, rotten, and speaking with a seemingly forked, barely recognizable tongue.  It spews venom—the venom of divisiveness, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia.  And, yes, ignorance.  It’s a voice that has forgotten or never learned the plain-spoken eloquence of what it means to be America the Beautiful, the land that we loved.

Trump, an unconventional candidate who was caught on tape boasting about accosting women, who advocated banning Muslims from the United States, who has championed mass deportations and building a wall (that Mexico would pay for) to keep out undocumented immigrants, is on the precipice of becoming the most powerful man in the world—backed by a Republican-controlled Congress. 

The Hail Mary toss of casting more dirt and suspicion on Hillary in her email flap could do nothing to damp down black fury at Trump, let alone have any impact whatsoever among blacks about her candidacy. If anything, it simply confirmed the conspiracy notion that GOP dirty work was at play in trying to do anything at the 11th hour of the campaign to sabotage her run to the White House.

Then along came Donald J. Trump whose irrepressible spontaneity knocks much of this rosy vision about improv and democracy into a cocked hat. Presidential historian Jon Meachum calls Trump “unabashedly improvisational.” David Axelrod describes him as “an improvisational performer, long on chutzpah and borscht belt put-downs but short on facts.” We’ve all seen it. 

In the 21st century, the gold is the news media, and they cannot help but train their gaze 24/7 upon Donald Trump. Back in March, The New York Times estimated that “over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history.” Practically everything the man said is quoted. 

The time and hassle obstacles pretty much guarantee that the likely fill-in candidate would be GOP VP contender Mike Pence. Now the RNC voters don’t have to choose him just because he is the VP candidate, but the time factor, the fact that he got generally high marks for his one debate joust with Democratic VP contender Tim Kaine, and the fact that he’s a GOP party insider, make him a near shoo-in for the fill-in spot.

But beyond a VP debate, that still leaves the dangling question whether VPs really do count for much in the larger political equation. Yes and no. No in the sense that voters don’t vote for VPs, they vote for presidents first and foremost. Most know that a VP does not make policy, if lucky maybe consulted on a policy question, and certainly does almost nothing to implement it. It’s not exactly a ceremonial position but other than stepping in in the event of a catastrophic illness or death of a president, it’s not far from that.