I Left When America Went Full Handmaid's Tale After Trump's Win

America didn’t lose me in a comment thread; it lost me in a living room.

The night Donald Trump won again, the TV was doing that grotesque victory glow, anchors talking about “unity” with the same tone they use for hurricane coverage. Somewhere between the red counties and the sanctimonious calls to “heal,” it hit me: the country had gone full Handmaid’s Tale and still insisted on calling it democracy.

So I did what everyone on social media threatens and almost no one actually does. I left. Not for a “sabbatical.” Not for content. I walked away from a 10+ year marriage, four sons, three grandchildren, a career, a house, and all the little comforts you cling to when you’re trying to convince yourself things are “not that bad yet.” Being a 56‑year‑old gay man watching the same voters who would happily strip my rights away congratulate themselves on “civility” was not a political disagreement; it was a nervous system emergency.

People assumed I was overreacting. Drama. Midlife crisis. A phase. They were wrong. And AI helped prove it.

When vibes lie and data doesn’t

I’m a "neurospicy" clinical therapist with a PhD in applied mathematics and AI. Translation: I spend my time in two very different rooms.

In one, people tell me their stories—how they justify staying in relationships, jobs, and countries that are slowly erasing them. They say things like “It’s complicated,” “It’s not that bad,” “It’s always been like this.” Those phrases are emotional duct tape. They hold the denial together just long enough to survive the day.

In the other room, I stare at data: voting patterns, policy shifts, engagement metrics, revenue curves, the subtle ways people move when they’re afraid. I’ve built AI‑driven systems that generated more than 48M in revenue by spotting what humans didn’t want to see—where their stories about themselves didn’t match their behavior.

Here’s the uncomfortable overlap.

The same psychological gymnastics an abused partner uses to explain away the first shove? The same tricks a C‑suite uses to rationalize layoffs as “strategic realignment”? They’re the exact moves a country uses to convince itself that rolling back queer rights, women’s autonomy, and basic civil protections is just “a difference of opinion.”

Once you’ve seen enough of that—clinically and in code—it becomes impossible to pretend democracy is fine because everyone is still saying the word “democracy” out loud.

America as a product that stopped working

If democracy were a product and you were my client, here’s how the conversation would go.

You:

“We’re the leader in freedom and opportunity.”

Me, looking at the dashboard:

- Rising attacks on queer and trans people.

- Lawmakers openly promising to legislate certain identities out of public life.

- Entire regions where education, voting access, and bodily autonomy are being treated as negotiable line items.

- A culture where people are told to “calm down” as their rights are actively debated on television.

That’s not “product-market fit.” That’s churn.

In business, when customers start quietly leaving, you don’t gaslight them into staying by insisting the brand is still iconic. You figure out why they’ve decided their dignity is worth more than your loyalty program.

But in American politics, anyone who leaves—physically, mentally, or emotionally—is framed as the problem. “If you don’t like it, leave” has always been the taunt. So I did. And suddenly everyone wanted to talk about “nuance.”

Brand safety, but make it democracy

My day job is building AI‑driven marketing systems and growth engines for companies that say they want transformation—until the data starts telling a story they don’t like.

I’ve watched C‑suites look at clear evidence that their messaging is harming marginalized customers and respond with, “We need to be careful; we don’t want to alienate anyone.” They don’t mean “anyone.” They mean the people whose comfort they value most.

They call it “brand safety.”

What they’re often protecting is not the brand. It’s their own refusal to choose a side when harm has already been done. It’s cowardice with a legal budget and a PR team.

Now zoom out.

Politicians talk about “law and order,” “traditional values,” and “finding common ground” while actively eroding rights and protections. They say they’re protecting “the country.” What they’re protecting is their coalition—the bloc they can’t afford to lose, even if it costs entire communities their safety.

That’s not leadership. That’s political brand safety.

And political brand safety, just like corporate brand safety, will burn the most vulnerable people first because they’re easiest to frame as “edge cases.”

Why I walked—and why I’m not asking you to - Leaving wasn’t noble. It was self‑preservation.

I was a gay, neurodivergent, middle‑aged man being told, again, to wait my turn. To give the system “time to work.” To believe that people who openly campaigned on limiting my existence would somehow moderate once in office because “institutions.” If I said that to a client in therapy—“stay with the partner who keeps threatening you; maybe they’ll change”—I’d lose my license. If I coded that logic into an AI system—“keep investing in the strategy that keeps losing money; maybe it will turn around”—I’d get fired.

But when the stakes are democracy, we treat that same magical thinking like maturity.

So no, I’m not going to tell you everyone should leave.

Some people can’t. Some people shouldn’t. Some people are called to stay and fight from the inside. I respect that deeply.

What I am going to tell you is this:

If you’re queer, neurospicy, politically awake, and still trying to convince yourself it’s “not that bad,” I know exactly how much it costs to hold that line in your body. I left because my nervous system understood something my patriotism refused to admit: love does not require you to stand in a burning house just because you helped decorate it.

The experiment I’m running now

I treat exile as an experiment.

What happens to a person’s creativity, clarity, and capacity to tell the truth when they remove themselves from a system that insists on their gratitude while debating their humanity?

What happens when an AI‑trained brain and a therapist’s heart look at democracy not as a sacred myth, but as a product with features, bugs, and a very real possibility of failure?

What happens when we stop treating people who leave as disloyal, and start treating them as early adopters of a different way to live with their values intact?

I didn’t leave America because I hated it.

I left because I loved what it could have been and refused to keep beta‑testing a version of “freedom” that treated my existence as a negotiable feature.

This Vocal space is where I’m going to keep pulling that thread—at the intersection of data, trauma, queerness, and politics. If that makes you uncomfortable, good.

Discomfort is usually the moment the story finally starts telling the truth.

Make it sharper, keep the spine:

Written where human nervous systems and machine logic collide. AI‑assisted, human owned.