The Grinch is dead. Long live the Donald, who left his slimy trademark on every awful thing this year

How bad is Donald Trump? We’re suspending our annual Grinch awards in (dis)honor of the alpha and omega of all things gross and contemptible. This year, every sucky thing that happened felt supercharged by the racist bully in chief. Sexual assaults at the state Capitol and in every professional industry? Look to your naked emperor, Donald Trump. Local residents and merchants vilifying homeless people on Facebook or putting down the Women’s March? Credit your source, Donald Trump. Vandals who targeted mosques, temples and churches with their odious incitements? Every swastika you paint is a hieroglyph spelling the name “Donald Trump.”

It’s not like bad things didn’t happen before this idiot wind swept to power. They did. And we called them out. But Trump’s repulsive rhetoric and reckless behavior has exposed and empowered the very worst in what we’ll call humanity for lack of a better term. All the terrible crap this year had Trump’s seal of approval. His greasy, stumpy fingerprints. His bankrupt brand.

Like few before him, Trump has inspired a gleefully cruel religion in his image—of rapists and sexual abusers following his boastful example; of public officials who can’t take criticism yet feel emboldened to publicly mock; of a subterranean culture of pervs, trolls and Nazis who feel safe to skitter out into the open like the cockroaches they are.

We say good. It’ll make stomping them that much easier.