Nostalgia can be a beautiful and dangerous thing.

It’s beautiful, because it allows us to revel in fond memories of simpler times: swimming at the city pool and then playing pickup baseball on the high school field; when a dollar got you into a matinee and it didn’t matter what was playing because the theater only had one movie anyway; riding bikes in the cool mist behind a mosquito fogging truck on a hot summer night; impromptu Sunday drives because gas was only 30 cents a gallon.

But nostalgia’s dangerous, because while reminiscing, we tend to forget the downsides: that the town had two swimming pools, one for white people and one for the “other” people; the movies were cookie-cutter creations that never challenged anyone’s assumptions about anything; mosquito fog was DDT mixed with kerosene and our big old V-8 Dodge was chuffing out immediate smog and what we later learned were climate-changing greenhouse gasses.

I bring this up today because Tuesday’s election was very much a nostalgia election.

At the heart of Donald Trump’s campaign appeal was the promise of returning to a past that never really was, unless viewed with rosiest of rose-colored glasses.

Over the course of Joe Biden’s administration, prices went up on a lot of things. I don’t think a day went by when I didn’t see a post on Facebook showing the 2020 price of gas around $1.50 a gallon (compared to the $2.62 I paid this morning).

There was a profound and collective amnesia surrounding the reason for the low gas prices four years ago, which was of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, and business closures that precluded driving to work or going on vacation. I sincerely hope we don’t have another public health threat like that, because 1.1 million Americans died for that cheap gas.

Today, I suggested to my friends on Facebook that they start taking pictures of price tags. Let’s revisit this four years hence, because I’ve been around a long time and can’t recall any four-year period in my life, except during the pandemic, when prices didn’t go up.

And Trump nostalgia was not just a longing for lower prices of yesteryear.

With its fixation on demonizing immigrants and others who are non-MAGA-conforming, Trumpism is also about going back to the days when it was OK to mock and belittle those who don’t fit the mold that his followers think we should — when minorities knew their place, and if they protested too much you could always turn fire hoses on them.

With that in mind, I offer this advice to specific subgroups of the Trump coalition, who exit polls show made a big difference in his victory Tuesday night:

• To my pro-Trump Latino friends, you might want to make sure you get your Real ID and don’t leave home without it. I have a feeling you’re going to need it. Because what did you think a million-person-a-year mass deportation campaign against people who mostly share your racial and ethnic background is going to look like?

• To the pro-Palestinian folks who dogged the Kamala Harris campaign with the drumbeat of “Genocide Joe,” do you actually believe the people you want saved will get a better deal from Trump? Every indication is he’ll let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do anything he wants in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump doesn’t respect you, your culture or your religion, although he showed he could fake it when it benefited him.

• To the women of MAGA, we’re sorry, but your purity robes and winged bonnets are on back order. There are supply chain issues because they’re made by the godless commie Chinese. In the meantime, you can sew your own.

But congratulations, we all woke up in a different country Wednesday morning because of you. You’ll have to forgive those of us who aren’t thanking you for it. We fervently hope it will be a learning experience for you.

It’s a sorry state of affairs when the best hope for the nation is that the president-elect is lying through his teeth about his plans for a second term, as easily as he lied about election stealing or Haitians eating pets.

And the funny thing about nostalgia is it changes over time.

Hopefully, sometime around 2028, millions of Americans will wake up one morning and think, “You know, times were a lot better back before 2016.”

Dion Lefler is the opinion editor of the Wichita Eagle.