It was fairly cold early in the morning two years ago when I went to drop off my shirts at the cleaners within the Randall’s.  There were few cars in the parking lot where I go every two weeks or so.  I had parked farther than usual from the grocery store to give a knee extra steps to work out the kink the passing cold front had induced overnight.

I walked in the chill past an older model car that had last seen a car-wash in several months but whose engine was running.  A man in the driver’s seat was slumped over the steering wheel.  I peered inside.  His right arm, dangling off the wheel, rested on the gear shift between the two seats.  What appeared to be a baby doll lay folded over on the passenger side.  I feared the worst and hurried toward the store.

Coming out of the store was a Randall’s employee heading to a rack of shopping carts at the side of the building.

“There’s a man in that car, and the engine is running,” I said in as unalarmed a voice as I could muster.  His lack of response instantly bothered me.  I stood there for a moment.  “He’s sleeping.”  I must have looked puzzled.  “Overnight job.”

The man in the car was cold and taking a nap, not attempting suicide nor suffering accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.  I surely took on the face of someone trying to shake off embarrassment. “Oh, okay,” I managed.

Okay was not what I was feeling after leaving my shirts and heading to the Starbucks next door.  I did not know what the man in the car earned; I presumed he had a family; and I did not know if he had the health insurance he would need soon, given his weight.  I have not seen him since.  But I thought about him the moment I heard that a federal judge had jumped ahead of Donald Trump and rolled back some of the minimum wage protections that President Obama put in place to protect workers, perhaps especially those with more than one job.

I wondered, too, if the man in the car had voted for Trump, and I wondered how many other two-jobbers like him helped put Trump in the White House come January.  I wondered if they were part of the 104,000 voters out of 135,000,000 who, had they voted differently in three states, might not have their wages so quickly endangered, barely two weeks after the election.

If some of them did vote for Trump, they do not deserve to be judged morally.  It would be sinful to do so.  They do not deserve what might happen to them and their families.  They deserve rather to be pitied, more so if they lose all hope, for they will have been taken, given Trump’s announced choices so far for the Cabinet and important agencies of government.

If they do not lose faith in the country once they realize they might erred, they might be the bounce-back opportunity the Democrats need for 2020 and even in the midterm elections in 2018 if Trump proves as incompetent a president as he is a businessman.  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

(It bothers me to use businessman to describe Trump.  I know businessmen and businesswomen who have worked hard to build their businesses and paid significant amounts of taxes while doing so without using the court or tax systems to gain an advantage while mistreating their employees.)

If the two-jobbers who voted for Trump knew nothing about his intentional failure to pay taxes and to use loopholes to game the system and exploit workers, then the Republic might be in real danger, for we are dealing with a truly uninformed lot.  But they might soon enough know that they might not ever recoup the wages they will start losing here pretty soon, judge or no judge.

We are in an unstable, dangerous predicament from which no one, worker or business owner, is exempt.

If I ever see that man again in the parking lot of the Randall’s, I hope his kids are not sleeping in the back seat.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

So in July I told a group of Hispanic/Latino professionals in Boston they could count on Donald Trump not ever being elected President.  I feel I owe them an explanation.  Simply put, had millennials and African-Americans voted at the same rates they did in 2008 and 2012 for the Democratic ticket, Hillary Clinton would have won enough of the close states to secure at least 270 electoral votes.

I assumed that President Barack Obama would want to protect his achievements and thus work indefatigably to elect her.  By his hitting the campaign trail hard he would make the millennial/African-American vote materialize on election night.  I was right that he campaigned tirelessly for her but we were all wrong to think he could recreate 2008 and 2012.

I was also wrong in that I believed that many white Republican voters would be so turned off by their crass, embarrassing nominee.  I thought the GOP ticket would suffer a 6-10 percent fall-off from 2012.  Not only did that not happen but Trump actually ran better than Mitt Romney’s numbers among white voters.

I am aghast that of white women who voted, 52 percent voted for Trump!  Who would have ever believed that?

Clinton did not lose the election because the Hispanic/Latino vote was not in her corner.  Hispanic/Latinos came out – in record numbers – to stand in line to support her.  She lost because the Democratic coalition splintered enough to cause three critical states to vote Republican.

Not once did I believe Trump could win — until Tuesday night about 7 p.m. when, with 25 percent of the vote still to be counted in Florida, a friend texted me from Miami.  She was on the ground.  “We lost Florida.”  This was someone who only seven days before assured me we were going to win there.  I went into near-shock.

In retrospect, blinded by Hillary’s qualifications, I did not give great importance to the baggage she carries.  People who know me know I am not an easy follower, but in this I lost my journalistic skepticism.  Her problems did weigh more on the electorate than on me.  Though she won the popular vote, it turns out that Democrats nominated the only person whom Trump could beat in certain states.  In the end, the Democrats did not follow the formula for winning:  run the right campaign with the right candidate and the right message with the right people who know the electorate making the decisions.

What happens now, though, is a more important question today than What went wrong. Today I am concerned that many Hispanic/Latino families are now under direct threat, as is the republic itself.

I wish I could be as sure as I was in July about the immediate future.  I am still numb.  I am not optimistic that Trump will make a better President than he is a businessman.  If so, we are in for a very tough time.  He might be our Hugo Chávez in that he screws up so quickly that there is no return from the chaos he unleashes.

I asked a friend of mine who travels in high business circles if anyone in his network knows Trump personally who can gauge what kind of man he really is.  Can he be checked by a competent staff?  Can he choose a competent staff?  At the core, does he really believe he knows more about ISIS than our generals?  Is he serious about building walls and deporting millions of our families, friends and neighbors?

My friend said no one of any consequence in the business world knows him, and my friend does not know anyone who can answer my questions.

My only sense now is not a good one, and on that I hope I am wrong.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

My God. They’ve got a madman on their hands.

Fans of the movie The Hunt for Red October will recognize the harrowing line uttered by a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he realized that a renegade Soviet submarine commander had stolen a new, silent Russian submarine on its maiden mission.   Its revolutionary silent propulsion system was designed to slip through American naval defenses with the capability to launch a sudden nuclear attack on the United States.

As it turns out, the captain of the sub wanted to defect and deliver the ship into American hands to equal the playing field.  To get complete command of the vessel and its nuclear capability, the captain had murdered the Communist party apparatchik with whom he shared the code to the ship’s missiles.

No one is suggesting that Donald J. Trump should be murdered.  But like Sean Connery in October, Trump will have, in fact, the sole power to launch a nuclear strike after Jan. 20.  Be careful what you wish for, Vladimir Putin.  You got what you wanted.

And so did the American people:  Donald J. Trump is going to be sworn in as the 45^th President of the United States in less than three months’ time.

How we got here is not as important as what happens next.  Truly, Hillary Clinton was a very flawed candidate and the Democratic Party has the opportunity now to remake itself outside the Clintons’ shadows.  But we will soon miss her competence, experience and intelligence – the three mainstays of the Presidency that Trump lacks.

It is laughable now that we were worried that Sarah Palin would have been a heartbeat away from the Oval Office had John McCain won.  And we 16 years ago also were petrified about George W. Bush taking office.  And we were right.  His lack of competence, intelligence and experience proved horrifically bad.

But we might have not seen anything yet.

We have arrived at a singularly dangerous moment in human history.  It could well be that Trump never wakes up one morning and plunges the country into a nuclear war or a constitutional crisis.  But his election does mean that other dangers will fester.  For one, the great, silent danger of global climate change will almost surely now accelerate.  It is the secret propulsion system that will take humanity eventually to the brink.

For the immediate future, an unwise Supreme Court will abet those in the voting minority who want to take the country back 100 years.  We in the voting majority who won the popular vote must suffer the hope that a Republican Congress will counterbalance Trump.  It is a faint hope.  House Speaker Paul Ryan has the opportunity to be the patriot he says he is.

But I doubt the voting minority that elected Trump will let him.

If he does his duty to protect the country from Trump, Ryan will have to sacrifice his political career.  Faint hope.  So this does not bode well, and it is not hyperbolic to consider the possibility of real civic strife.  This is no movie.

The results of the election sadden me because the sons and daughters and the grandsons and granddaughters of the voters who pushed Trump into office well could rue Nov. 8, 2016, the day the country elected  someone who might be the madman the founders feared.

At the end of October, Sean Connery eases his submarine into the safety of a harbor on the Maine coast, averting disaster.

We can only long this ship America finds a similar haven.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.