Remember when there was no difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton?

Remember when progressives, and Berners, and Jill Steiners and 44 percent of voting millenials told each other that there was no difference between Hillary and Donald?

So. Here we are. In appointments and hearings, we can see the outlines of a Trump presidency. How do you feel?

If you are feeling a little sick in your gut, it’s because you now see what is true: there is a wide, cosmically wide, radically, republic-threateningly wide space between Trump and Clinton. And we can see it, now that the election is over and the actual governing has begun.

If you ever entertained, even in your quietest private moment, that there was no air between Trump’s and Clinton’s policies, please remember this moment. Do the best you can to take a snapshot of your regret and keep it with you. You see now, sitting on your doorstep, the package that you bought.

Over the last few days, the House and Senate passed bills to start dismantling Obamacare. There are not one, not two, but five Goldman Sachs heads in Trump’s cabinet. Our Secretary of State will be an Exxon chief, making explicit the implicit accusation that America’s foreign policy is born out of the basest greed.

Whatever we all believed during the election, whatever was said, these are the things that are actually happening. And really, this is only the preamble.

How did this happen? Why couldn’t we see it before? Because we weren’t watching an election. We were watching TV.

Mother Jones reported that millenials saw no difference between Trump and Clinton on Environmental Policy. Now, Trump has appointed a climate denier and an open enemy of the EPA to head the EPA. He has appointed a climate denier as Energy Secretary. He has appointed a fracking fan as Interior Secretary. Real people given real power over the land.

People believed both Trump and Clinton to be in bed with large banks. Now, Trump has appointed former bank chiefs to police the banks and write policy over Wall Street. Goldman Sachs employees will be in charge of policing their current friends and colleagues on Wall Street. Real men controlling actual money.

And of course, at the top of the pile is his Attorney General. The man who will set the national climate of what to prosecute and what not to prosecute at the federal level. Voting rights violations, EPA violations, civil rights violations, abortion rights violations, what happens at our borders, how we prosecute drug crimes — people’s live are already changed.

So how did we, two months ago, walk into this era so blithely? We got here because we were fooled. On the left and right, we were fooled because we weren’t watching an election, we were watching Television.

Because a campaign for the presidency happens on TV, there has been since 1960 an idea has taken root in our subconscious — never made explicit, but like air pollution, something we’ve been breathing for most of our lives. This is the gut feeling that because a president is something we only see on TV, only the things a president does on TV matter.

Being president has become a Television Job. Here I’m using television like its Greco-Latin ancestor, Tele Vision, because the internet is also pictures and words seen from far away.

Television is a flat, democratic medium. Now we’re watching the news, and now we’re watching Scandal. And now we’re watching the Presidential Debate, and now we’re watching Survivor, and now we’re watching a Survivor parody video. When we take in our images in such a fluid way, the first victim is our imagination — the imagined idea being something new or strange, the speed bump and the pothole on the road of smooth entertainment.

When we take in information this way, imagination starts to take the backseat to structure and form. This Presidential Debate is a competition show, The Bachelor is a competition show. This news network films people loudly disagreeing on camera, The Blacklist and The Crown film people loudly disagreeing on camera. Good TV is when the disagreements are big, the characters are big, the claims and counterclaims are big. The drama is big. But what does this show mean? What is it saying? What happens after the show? TV is built in such a way to deflect these questions and excommunicate the questioners.

Rather than stand as witnesses to actual events unfolding behind those scenes, we simply watched TV. As Americans we are born to either love or accept shitty television, and therefore our failure to foresee Trump’s presidency was a failure of imagination. A failure to see the story ending any other way than how it usually does on TV. We treated this election like a TV show: full of surprises but not surprising, new but not different, designed to be loved and then forgotten.

The difference between a TV show and a national election is that once the show is over, the winner has to go and do a job. A job that has literally nothing to do with Television. That seems like such an obvious thing to say, but how many times have we seen a salacious or terrible thing during the election, and then turned off our phones and went to sleep, easily slipping away from what we just saw? To some degree, we all treated the facts of the election like fictional drama. A drama with only fictional stakes. Only abstract importance.

So let’s return to the root. Television is not reality, just as campaigning is not governing. Campaigning. Is not. Governing.

Putting your mouth up to a microphone and saying words is not the same thing as being president. A plumber telling you what he will fix is not the act of fixing your plumbing. The flight captain speaking over the PA is not the act of flying the plane.

A TV show about a thing is not the thing. The thing itself is slow, and tough, and quiet, sometimes beautiful, and the show is a polished reflection, hollowed and cut to keep it light. The two are elementally different. Reality, and its many possible endings, is something that people on the Bernie Stein left and the Trump right both forgot. And this is why Trump is president.

If you said, coming from the left or the right, “Fuck it, they’re both the same,” then you were fooled. You were fooled if you stayed at home because you thought that Hillary would be just as conservative and corrupt as Trump would be. You were fooled if you voted for Trump because he’d really shake things up. Now we are all watching real people coming into power, real ideas coming into force.

This is governing, and the show is just beginning.