I already miss Barack Obama, the best president of my lifetime.

I will miss having someone in the Oval Office with his calm intelligence, wry humor, empathy and pragmatism. I always felt comfortable knowing he would be at the other end of that proverbial 3 a.m. crisis phone call for the country.

All of Obama's qualities of intellect and character have helped him drive us out of the ditch America was in when he took office, leading a successful recovery from the Great Recession and closing the unnecessary war waged by his predecessor.

I remember the pride I once had when I got a glimpse of him up close at a Coast Guard Academy graduation and could hear him personally congratulating the fathers of female grads accepting their commissions from him that day.

"Aren't daughters great?" the president said quietly to each, leaning in to gleefully share and enjoy a parent's moment of soaring pride.

I already know enough of Donald Trump's character to know that I will never respect him in the same way, no matter how good a president he might turn out to be.

Like many friends of similar political outlook, I still have not recovered from the notion that the country elected as president someone who bragged of sexual assault, a boast that, for many of us, was proven true by the credible women who later came forward to corroborate it.

And yet I take to heart the advice of my respected president, who this week beseeched the disappointed half of the country that did not vote for Trump to give him a chance.

I will. Really, we have no choice.

And to those who have taken to the streets in protest this week, I would suggest giving it a rest. There may be opportunities soon to howl and protest, and protest we should when we see the first trace of racism and hate we feared actually surface in new law or policy.

But those protest signs that say he's not your president are wrong. He is indeed soon to be everyone's president. That's how the system works. The election wasn't rigged. It was fair and square, as we always knew it would be.

I devised what I called the Trump Test this election for local Republicans, to be sure and put them on the record whether they supported the unorthodox candidate at the head of the ticket.

I thought Trump support would hurt them here in blue Connecticut. It turns out most of the candidates who I thought of as flunking the Trump Test ended up winning their own races.

Boy did I get that wrong.

Congratulations to those who won here. And know we will remember, for better or for worse, your support for candidate Trump when we see how President Trump governs. You own him.

Indeed, Trump almost carried New London County. If not for Norwich and New London, and the shoreline-hugging towns from Old Lyme to Stonington, where Clinton eked out a win, Trump would have completely triumphed here.

In talking to voters on Election Day I came to see how many were able to look beyond the candidate's obvious character flaws, the pandering to hate and divisiveness, to reach for his message of change, of blowing up the status quo.

It turns out it wasn't the Republican Party that imploded this week. The Democrats did. They've got a lot of work to do and it starts with listening.

I am mad at the Democratic establishment, including the hierarchy here in Connecticut, for pushing a highly qualified but flawed candidate on us.

I cringe, at the precipice of a Trump presidency, at the notion of an Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani or a Secretary of State Newt Gingrich. Bridgegate Chris Christie in the Cabinet? As the New York Times wryly observed, these are hardly good choices to "drain the swamp" in Washington.

I take the cue of my respected president and wish the new Trump Administration the best of success. We all depend on it.

I worry for all the Trump supporters, when they eventually learn their candidate is not going to be able to turn the steel ovens back on, or reopen the coal mines, or put people back on assembly lines now manned by robots, or build the wall.

He likely will continue deportations at the rate Obama has, but he will make more of a show of it.

What will happen to those Trump voters when they discover that the campaign was the crafty illusion of a reality television star, as empty as the promises made to those who matriculated in Trump University?

And what will happen when the big Trump promises for grand new infrastructure spending hits the same wall — a refusal to invest by a Republican Congress — that Obama did?

In fact, you have to wonder about the epic clash sure to ensue when the much-bankrupted Trump, who lives and breathes debt, runs up against politicians who have made careers out of railing against it.

But I really do hope I am wrong about all this, too.

Trump is savvy and clever and a survivor. His attainment of the presidency was nothing shy of brilliant.

Maybe he will pivot to become the great uniter and a fine president. I hope all we losers give him a chance to try.

I hope Trump will indeed make America even greater.

It's already pretty damn great.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com