This joke of a man whose most famous quote was “You’re fired.” This man who unsuccessfully tried to establish his own university, airline, alcohol brand, but somehow successfully established his own TV show. This man who openly joked about how attractive his daughter was and that if they weren’t related, they would be married.

My friends and I joked about making America great again, imitated Trump’s speech patterns, made cracks at Trump’s bizarre physical appearance, and laughed at and even made memes about the craziness of it all. I think we, along with many other millennials and citizens of the United States, didn’t actually believe that Trump could become president. This was just another internet sensation that would rise up and fade away into the oblivion of the web.

But on Tuesday night, as I sat in front of my computer with the live election results rolling in, I began to see the efforts of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign become reality in front of my eyes. I repeatedly calculated the number of electoral college votes needed for each candidate to win, continually refreshed the prediction pages, and deadpanned to my friends throughout the night about the ending of the modern world as we knew it.

I nervously watched the vibrating dials of the New York Times live election results page, and my anxiety grew as the dial reading “Forecast to Win Presidency” was pulled toward the red side. I witnessed the dial cross the midway point to favor Donald Trump, and it never turned back. As each of the states’ votes was reported, I tried to console myself when a swing state was projected red, telling myself “it’s okay, not all the votes have been reported yet, there’s still a chance…” But as the night went on and as most of the swing states turned red, I felt as if each of the wins was an arrow fired straight into my heart.

By midnight, it had become apparent that the joke was going to become a reality. The final nail in the America’s coffin was the electoral votes that Wisconsin forfeited to Trump after an agonizing evening of reporting that had the two candidates with in thousands of votes of each other in many key battleground states.

I imagine the millions of people who went to bed early last night, thinking that when they awoke, they would be in a revolutionary new world with a woman at the helm. But instead it was a rude awakening not only for American citizens, but the entire world. It is a revolutionary new world, but it is one in where our elected president has admitted to sexually assaulting and demeaning the gender of people who have given him life. It’s a setback for all the women of today’s world, seeing one of the most qualified people ever to run for office be defeated by someone who treats women like second-class citizens, like inferiors, like objects. Despite the numerous steps women have made over the last centuries to right for their right to be able to vote, to own property, to demand equal pay, it seems that we have fallen a few flights. And it really hurts.

In the past twenty-four hours alone, thousands of stories have popped up as American women, people of color, and followers of various religions have been assaulted and insulted, being told to return to their respective countries and talked at with biting racial slurs. These attackers have cited the presidency of Trump as a legitimization for asserting their white supremacy, vandalizing property with Nazi symbols and images of the KKK, and threatening the foundation of the United States Constitution and our numerous freedoms. It seems that Trump’s rise to presidency has awoken the hidden monster within the American people, and it was this hidden monster that led to Trump’s shocking victory.

As a person of color, racism is no new issue to me. But it is more evident now than ever, that racism runs rampant in America, and anyone who denies its prevalence has their proof in Donald Trump. He has given racist and sexists and an excuse to assert their bigotry, and they are only following in the footsteps of their champion. The election of a man who believes it is okay to demean Hispanics and Middle-Easterners to one of the most respected positions in the world, has given his followers a platform to not only echo his sentiments, but also escalate them to a whole new level.

Looking back of some of the presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Regan, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama; it somehow doesn’t feel right with Donald Trump in the mix. A man who so strongly contrasts with the people whose footsteps he is following in. A man who will not defend the rights of his people from oppression. A man who fails to not only be honest with his own values and beliefs, but to the people under which he presides over and interacts with. A man who is the literal opposite of all the values our past presidents have tried to embody.

But now as the harsh reality of the next four, or even eight years settles in, we can already catches glimpses of what they look like. I fear not only for the safety of my fellow people of color around the United States, but for how the events and actions of the fallout of the recent election will affect people in countries all over the world. The United States has been celebrated as a mixing pot of every single race, religion, and orientation of people from around the world, but that balance is now under great danger. I can only imagine what the implications of this presidency will have on every single aspect of the world as we know it. I can’t imagine what it will be like in the next twenty to thirty years, when I have to tell my children what it was like when Donald Trump became our president.