Be honest, America. This is who we are: a bitter, broken land that wants Trump to lead us

It’s been a rallying cry for years — when the horrifying sight of white supremacists marching with their tiki torches through Charlottesville prompted Joe Biden to unretire and run for president, when we watched federal agents yank little kids from their mothers at the southern border, and finally when a mob of insurrectionists overran the U.S. Capitol in an attempted coup seeking to break a 231-year chain of peacefully transferring power.

“This is not who we are, America.”

But that was never true, and as I write this sentence in the dark at 5:38 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2024 — and as CNN just pronounced that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, literally as I was typing it — that cold, pre-dawn dose of reality has just slapped America in the face, hard.

The irony is that yesterday, Nov. 5 — another date which will live in infamy — played out on a canvas that practically looked like a Norman Rockwell painting of America. It happened on an unseasonably warm and beautiful autumn day as citizens of every stripe, from college students at Temple University who snaked around gritty North Philadelphia blocks to seniors tugging their grandkids into musty school-gym polling places, performed the ultimate act of democracy, and voted in what by all accounts was a free and fair election.

It was only 46 months after Trump, as 45th president, tried to stay in power by overturning the results of the last free and fair presidential election, and by egging on that deadly Jan. 6 coup attempt. But on Jan. 20, 2025, barring another unthinkable development in a year that has already been chock full of them, Trump — promising “I will be your retribution” against political enemies — will achieve his goal of returning to the White House, not through bullets but through ballots.

Trump will raise his right hand and promise to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution because all the right voters in the right battleground states — and quite possibly a popular-vote majority when all the ballots are finally counted — inked their square for a man under both a federal and a Georgia criminal indictment for interfering in the 2020 election, and who was convicted just this year of 34 felony charges in an election-related hush-money scheme.

The 78-year-old three-time Republican nominee won Tuesday in part because he dramatically increased his share of the critical Latino vote and may have even won a majority of Latino men — even after his campaign’s notorious Madison Square Garden rally featuring a comedian whose calling Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage” wasn’t even his worst joke about Hispanics, and even after Trump branded migrants from Central America as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of America.

And for the third straight election, exit polls suggested that Trump also won a majority of white women even after he was adjudicated the rapist of E. Jean Carroll by a Manhattan jury, after the infamous Access Hollywood braggadocio-on-tape of sexually assaulting women resurfaced as a TikTok meme, and after claiming from the campaign trail that he will protect women “whether the women like it or not.”

After a frantic final month of the 2024 campaign, in which Trump simulated oral sex with a microphone from the rally stage, told his supporters a story about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, swayed awkwardly on a stage in the Philly suburbs to canned music for 39 uncomfortable minutes, and found some time to hawk cryptocurrency, America chose this man — from a nation of 336 million people — as the one to carry the nuclear football.

Not because U.S. democracy failed — although, make no mistake, a Trump presidency will find many ways to stress and possibly break the American Experiment that was hatched here in Philadelphia 248 years ago — but because it worked. We woke up to a president-elect who ran a campaign that was openly misogynistic and racist, who threatened to use the military against his domestic political enemies, and who terrorized our transgender and immigrant communities — because it was the will of the American people.

Because this is who we are.

The brutal truth is that most of America has been sleepwalking in a delusional dream state, even as unreality looks very different depending on your zip code. The 75 million or so who voted for Trump came to thoroughly distrust the nation’s educated elites and their institutions after their jobs were downsized and outsourced and after perceived threats to their “way of life” that are intertwined with the patriarchy and white privilege. They have constructed a giant, anti-fact, anti-science bubble of misinformation, and the world’s richest people like X owner Elon Musk and our foreign adversaries like Russia — phoning bomb threats to U.S. polling places until the last possible minute — have been happy to help them make it bigger.

» READ MORE: For many people, Tuesday’s election is truly a life-and-death matter | Will Bunch

But those of us in the 70 million who voted for doomed Democrat Kamala Harris have been lost in our own world of delusions. The cliches about clueless, coastal cosmopolitan elites thrive because there is a lot of truth to them, describing a social class that rigged higher-ed opportunities through gimmicks like legacy admissions and then pretended it was a meritocracy, that dismissed way too much of America as “flyover country,” and that brilliantly constructed a Democratic Party around college diplomas without doing the 3rd-grade math that this is only 37% of the electorate.

America’s educated elites have been every bit as delusional in pretending not to notice that an elite gaggle of the richest men in the history of human civilization has been gradually buying control of Congress through unlimited campaign contributions, by buying influence with the Supreme Court justices who allowed that flood of political money to happen, and by buying our social media sites and our legacy newsrooms to control the flow of information about this.

On Tuesday, those billionaires — led by Musk, the richest of them all — did their part to install an authoritarian strongman in charge of the United States, because they believe that will make their life easier. But despite their endless piles of cash, that wouldn’t have worked if America were not a bitter and broken nation, worn down by the systemic dismantling of the middle class (which is what voters really mean by “the economy”), by decades of pointless and wasteful militarism abroad, and by the culture wars that started on a Berkeley campus and at a Greensboro lunch counter and an Atlantic City boardwalk and that seemingly have no end.

Some folks don’t want to hear this, but the Harris campaign could have knocked on 70 million doors this weekend, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Quibble all you want about whether the Harris campaign leaned too hard on Liz Cheney or should have spoken out on Gaza, or whether the editors of the New York Times should have more aggressively covered the threat to democracy, or whether the Washington Post should have published that endorsement, but none of that would have changed the outcome Tuesday.

Harris told the nation in her so-called “closing argument” on the D.C. Ellipse that “those who came before us, the patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms.” But Trump’s message spoke silently to the other America — the America of Colfax, Tulsa, Kent State and Ferguson that has never gone away, that is bearing us ceaselessly back into the past.

Because while Trump doesn’t know much about history, or climatology, he does instinctively understand that this is who we are.

And so the United States is following the path of Germany in the 1930s or Hungary in the 21st century, and turning to a strongman ruler through a democratic, constitutional process. But what about the millions of us who still dream of a better America, who don’t want the story to end here? Looking out my window, the sun did rise — brightly, in fact — this morning. Take a moment to grieve what has happened to our nation, and then let’s not delay the conversation on what comes next.

I’d strongly recommend against protesting Trump’s inauguration, or (heaven forbid) on Jan. 6, or anything like that. We asked for a democratic election, got one, and this was the result. But that doesn’t give the 47th president the right to violate the Constitution or commit illegal or immoral acts, and when those happen — and they will — they should be resisted by any and all means. We need to build both a culture of democratic resistance and also a new political movement that provides a true alternative to Trump’s reactionary autocracy, and we need to start quickly.

We need to remember what Winston Churchill — a man every bit as complicated and deeply flawed as the America of his own mother — told Britain during its darkest hour, that now is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

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