By the time this publishes, you’ll officially only have four hours left in your presidency. “Good riddance” isn’t strong enough.

For you and your cabal of fascist, racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, classist, seditious sycophants, I would wish your souls the agony you’ve bestowed upon the world over multifold. When the substitute teacher across the hall from me yelled your name in triumph at my Latinx and Black kids, you smirked that your name could inspire such terror. When another adult used your name in an assembly to let students know to fear him, he got explicit permission from your own ill-wrought bullying and calls to violence. When an administrator clamps down on some of the strongest advocates for kids because of their explicit anti-racism, they’re using the loopholes and laws already in our policies to displace the already marginalized, creating conditions in schools where justice feels further and further away.

Yes, having that much power revealed much of who you always were, a cultish following flanking you through every move. Every time you lied about a pandemic, every family you intentionally separated, every bit of land you stole from Native American/indigenous peoples for profit, every woman of color you targeted with a tweet or a snide comment were a framework for the millions of lives you’ve made worse for having put your hand on a Bible you never read on Capitol steps you allowed your followers to smear with feces. Time went four years forward, yet seemingly a century back.

You and your administration bragged about not starting any new wars abroad, but the walls rose against the United States to keep us out. The walls closed in. The war is here.

Surely, you’ll make enough money (have made?) to cover your legal fees, and I understand you’re worried about your legacy. You don’t have to. It’s already served as an exponent for the horrid history America chose to wear horse blinkers about. Our definitions of greatness differ. Your definition harkens back to Reaganism, a framework for corporate malfeasance and institutional racism at best. My definition is the words of so many of the ancestors here who read the Constitution, saw life, liberty, justice, and simply want to hold America to what it says on paper.

Our definitions are incompatible. You can’t win. So you must go.

But it isn’t just you. You are a cause and a symptom at once, a panoply of America’s social and structural ills flouted for personal gain. While I wish it didn’t take this many catastrophes to rid us of you, I hope we only move forward from here on out. I hope the rancor and derision you’ve inspired in my students already cynical in governance can grow to do much better for us than you ever could. I hope adults who supported you and other fascist entities near and far will recant their ways. Healing can never be healing without disinfecting the wounds, then putting the proper enclosures on it, whether a stitch, a bandage, or a severance. I hope it doesn’t come to the latter of the three.

Mostly, I hope you continue to serve as a model for why we need equity and justice for all starting now. May your example serve as a curriculum to show how our country can start listening and acting with the most vulnerable and marginalized people. May the American experiment do right by everyone.

But you? You needed to go. You must go. It isn’t just that you lost. It’s that you can never ever win.