I feel like I need to make something clear before we get started. I will not be voting for either major candidate this November. I don't trust Hilary Clinton enough to vote for her. After all, someone who the FBI calls "extremely careless" doesn't seem fit to hold the office of the president. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is simply a maniac whose hate filled rhetoric can do nothing but hurt the US both domestically and internationally. I don't know who I will vote for yet, but there's still plenty of time to figure that out.

So how did we get here?

There's plenty of blame to go around, but I think the media played a major role in getting us into this mess. Like any other TV channel, news networks need to attract viewers so they can sell advertising time. The problem is that the news has resorted to fear mongering to increase their ratings. Its important to know whats going around us, but the sensationalization of violence and terror doesn't help anyone. Despite what we see seemingly every day on TV or on Twitter, it's a pretty great time to be alive. When people are frightened they are willing to go to extremes to find a sense of safety, and Trump has taken advantage of that. From a distance, Trump's popularity makes sense. He's attracted people weakened by fear and anger. He has simplified issues by defining a clear enemy, even when that enemy is largely innocent. Trump supporters don't have to think about complex issues when a charismatic figure is telling them to hate someone who looks different and follows a different religion. Racism and Islamophobia can be comforting ideas to some people in an increasingly scary world.

Some fault also lies with the Republican party itself. Lets think about all the candidates who participated in the Republican primaries: Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Jim Gilmore, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. That doesn't even count Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, and George Pataki who dropped out before the primaries. I'm exhausted just from typing that list, let alone trying to remember what each person stood for. Each candidate spent time trying to yell over each other. Messages got watered down and confused, and perhaps most importantly, no one took Donald Trump seriously. The other candidates spent millions of dollars attacking each other and waiting for Americans to get tired of Trump, but that never happened. Trump got his foot in the door because he was loud, obnoxious, mean, and even idiotic. At times he could be genuinely funny. He wasn't a robot like Cruz, and supremely confident unlike Rubio. By the time the Republican party realized he was a real threat, it was too late.

So where do we go from here? If we're being honest, the future looks pretty bleak. There's not much you can say when the election features the two most hated candidates in the history of the US. If there is a silver lining for the near future, its that the upcoming presidential debates will be spectacular from an entertainment standpoint. Its somewhat surprising no one has run as a 3rd party candidate, considering any semi-competent politician would stand a decent chance of winning the election. The smart Republicans are the ones who are distancing themselves from Trump. If they can survive the backlash now, in 2020, the party can point to someone and say, "Hey at least we weren't all terrible back then."