I have a confession I don’t enjoy making, mostly because it scares the hell out of me.

I have never wished death on anyone. Not an ex. Not a bully. Not the people who have hurt me deeply. I’ve always believed that once you cross that line—once you genuinely want someone erased—you’ve lost something important in yourself. A kind of moral tendon snaps, and it never quite grows back the same way.

And yet.

I find myself thinking about Donald Trump dying. Not quietly. Not peacefully. Not as some gentle slipping away into history. My mind goes darker than I’m comfortable admitting. Always the same theme. Always the same justification I offer myself like a flimsy legal brief scrawled on a cocktail napkin.

Executed for treason.

And I hate that part of my brain.

Let me be clear before anyone lights a torch: I am not advocating violence. I don’t want vigilantes. I don’t want chaos. I don’t want bloodlust dressed up as justice. What I want—what I’ve always wanted—is accountability. Real accountability. The kind that says no one, not even a former president with a cult and a merch store, is above the law.

But here’s the problem: when accountability never arrives, when consequences keep slipping on banana peels and falling down the courthouse stairs, something ugly starts to ferment inside you.

Rage doesn’t announce itself politely. It sneaks in wearing the clothes of logic.

I tell myself the fantasy isn’t about death, really. It’s about closure. About drawing a thick, immovable line under the sentence this can never happen again. About a world where democracy isn’t a suggestion and treason isn’t just another cable news talking point to be debated between commercials for erectile dysfunction medication.

Still—fantasy is fantasy, and I don’t like what it says about me.

Because I know this: once you start imagining someone’s death as a solution, even symbolically, you are flirting with the same moral shortcuts you claim to despise. You’re letting yourself believe that removing a person removes the rot. History tells us that’s bullshit. Rot survives just fine without a single host.

And that’s the real dilemma. Trump didn’t invent the cruelty, the narcissism, the casual contempt for truth. He just took the lid off the jar and let it breathe. Killing the jar doesn’t kill the smell.

So I sit with the discomfort. I interrogate it. I don’t sanitize it, but I don’t indulge it either. I remind myself that wanting someone held responsible is not the same as wanting them dead—even when my imagination tries to blur the lines out of exhaustion and fury.

If democracy means anything, it has to mean resisting our worst impulses even when they feel justified. Especially then.

I don’t want Trump to die.

I want the system to prove—loudly, unmistakably—that no one gets to set fire to the house and then complain about the smoke.

And if I’m being honest, the reason this thought haunts me isn’t because it makes me monstrous.

It’s because it shows how close all of us are, when pushed hard enough, to becoming exactly what we’re fighting against.