Welp.
Ughhhh.
So we ... ugh. Hold on.
I just need a second.
OK. Donald Trump is actually the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
For reals.
Lets face it: This is a scary time.
A guy with a real, honest-to-god shot at being the president of the United States is the same guy who once told a lawyer who requested a break to pump breast milk during a 2011 deposition in court that she was "disgusting."
It's a wild time to be alive. I'm scared. You're scared.
You know who's the most scared? Children.
Yep. Poor, sweet, innocent children. It's true.
Trump is scaring kids. As his campaign has picked up upsetting amounts of support across the country, parents have taken to Twitter to express their grief at the fact that the former steak salesman and reality star is giving their kids the straight-up heebie-jeebies.
Parents like these:
And these:
People who don't have children themselves have also noticed the fear Trump instills in our country's youth:
Trump even made one young "Star Wars" fan suspicious of her own Trump-supporter grandparents.
And he's certainly scaring kids from other countries, and those who have friends from immigrant families.
Which is something really worth thinking about.
We adults know that Trump can't really deport the millions of people that he says he wants to because we know how impossible enacting that plan would be. But kids don't know that.
Imagine being a kid, seeing an adult on TV talking about kicking families that look like yours out of the country. Of course you'd be terrified.
This is just a small handful of tweets. The truth is, Trump's rhetoric has been scaring America's youth for a while now.
There's been an uptick in violence associated with the Trump campaign, and many of the incidents have involved young voters — from the young woman who was repeatedly assaulted and called names at a Trump rally to the 26-year-old who was sucker-punched in the face ... also at a Trump rally.
Last month, The Huffington Post made a video highlighting instances of young people being negatively affected by the Trump campaign, and NPR's Cokie Roberts recently blasted Trump for creating an environment wherein kids can be hateful toward each other.
How do you make a child feel safe in a world like this?
In December, Melissa Yassini, a Muslim-American wrote on Facebook that she found her 8-year-old daughter Sofia distraught and packing a bag, terrified that Trump would kick all Muslims out of America.
The Facebook post caught the attention of Kerri Peek, a U.S. Army veteran, who rallied other vets around the country to respond using the hashtag #IWillProtectYou and let Sofia know that they would stand up to anyone who tried to hurt her family and other families like them.
Now that Trump is one of the two final contenders for next resident of the White House, there's a lot of questions we need to answer.
Some of them are big questions like, "WTF, America?" and "Is that really how a contested convention works?"
The most important questions, however, are often the ones asked by the smallest and most scared amongst us. Questions asked by children who don't want to be separated from their friends and family, who don't understand why a man who acts like a bully is so close to being president, and who don't get to vote but have to live in the world our votes create.
At the end of the day, what we really need to ask ourselves is this: Do we reallywant a president who scares our children?
GAAHHH!
Sorry.