At around 11 p.m. on November 4, 1980, I found myself drunk and stoned, sprawled across the hood of a red Ford Mustang in the parking lot of a two-star motel in Key West, Florida. No, I wasn’t trying to pay tribute to Hunter S. Thompson. My condition was a direct response to Ronald Reagan winning the presidency earlier that evening. His landslide victory had precipitated the consumption of four Hurricanes (2 oz light rum, 2 oz dark rum, 1 oz lime juice, 1 oz orange juice, ½ oz passion fruit juice, simple syrup, grenadine) and the smoking of a rasta-style blunt filled with prime Afghani weed.

I was upset.

Jimmy Carter was a good man. As president, he always tried to do what was best for the country. He signed the Camp David Accords, created a more efficient government through civil service reform, and championed human rights and the environment. He had his failings, for sure—he handled the Iran hostage crisis poorly and failed to get stagflation under control, just to name two. But you always knew he was a man of substance—someone who used his brain and tried to do the right thing.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t a bad man, but he lacked substance. He was 98.6% sound bite and packaged charm. He made people feel good, but I had grave doubts about those he invited into his party tent: evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who believed the U.S. should be a “Christian” nation; Phyllis Schlafly, who didn’t believe women deserved equal rights; and the National Right to Life Movement, which wanted to restrict women’s reproductive healthcare rights. Worse, he was selling a lie—trickle-down economics. The core of the idea was: feed the rich and they’ll feed the rest of us. I didn’t believe it then, and time has proven that feeding the rich mostly benefits the rich.

The reason I bring this all up now is because the person who tried to talk me off the hood of that Mustang was my ride-or-die, Richard Magrath. May 19 marked the fifth anniversary of his death, and May 21 would have been his 69th birthday which would have amused to him to no end and the source of too many bad jokes. So ou can understand why I’ve been thinking about him a lot this week, especially what he said to me that night to calm me down: “Paul, it’s going to be a helluva party, but the hangover is going to be a bitch.”

He was, of course, right. The hangover from Ronald Reagan is Donald J. Trump. And Rich knew it. In the years leading up to Trump’s presidency, and during its first few years, we talked a lot about “Delta Tango” and what kind of greedy con man scammer he was—and still is. At one point, Rich even tried to convince me to start a website called ohthatdonald.com, a place to post all the stupid things #47 had said and done. (I demurred. I shouldn’t have.)

My hangover on November 5 was epic. Even lying under a blanket in a shaded room, wearing dark glasses, was too much light. A mouse fart was too loud. Two IV bags and a tank of oxygen couldn’t have revived me. It was so bad, I never got that drunk again. (Okay, that’s a lie—but never that drunk, and the number of times since could be counted on one hand.)

But the political hangover we’re still living with—from Reagan to Trump and this current version of the Republican Party—is far worse. They want everyone, regardless of religion, to adhere to Christian principles despite what the Constitution says about separation of church and state. They believe LGBTQ folks belong in the closet, are broken, or are somehow less than. They believe the burden of taxation should fall on the middle class and poor, while clinging to the myth of the benevolent rich. And they believe our borders should be open only to wealthy white people, because apparently we already have “too many” poor and brown people.

I could go on. But you all know the symptoms of this hangover. The worst part, though, is that I don’t have Rich to bitch about this with anymore. We talked every day. We didn’t always agree, but he always made me laugh when I started taking this stuff too seriously. Still, there’s a part of me that’s glad he’s off exploring a different level of existence. At least he doesn’t have to suffer through the hangover the rest of us are still trying to