The election is over. In January, Donald Trump will place his hand on a Bible, pledge to protect and defend the Constitution, and reenter the White House. Apparently nothing enthuses the electorate more than a boorish, bloviating bigot.
Mr. Trump can rest assured that there will be no insurrection at the Capitol that day, no one threatening to hang Mike Pence, no riot, no drama. How long it will take to heal the cultural and political tensions that have torn apart our country is anyone’s guess.
Someone asked me today if I thought that Joe Biden would have been a better candidate and perhaps have succeeded where Kamala Harris did not. My answer was “no.” Joe Biden would not have done better. In fact, the second coming of Jesus could not have done better. Trump’s base would never vote for a Democratic candidate, not because they didn’t like the candidate but because they hate liberal democracy. Any figurehead campaigning on preserving liberal democracy would have lost.
They were sick of refugees; they were sick of paying sky-high prices at the grocery store; they were sick of trying to figure out which pronoun to use; they were sick of college-educated “elites.”
While the candidate they elected is, in fact, a college-educated elite, it was, in his case, immaterial because he speaks and acts like a brute. They wanted a brute, and they got one.
Trump will be cheered for deporting millions of brown immigrants. He will be feted for withdrawing support for Ukraine. Thousands will applaud as he underwrites Benjamin Netanyahu’s utter destruction of Palestinians by sending him unlimited weaponry to finish them off. The end of gay rights, trans rights, civil rights, and women’s rights will be celebrated, too.
His second term will look much like a revenge tour. He intends to seek out and punish his political detractors: punish news organizations who refuse to lie on his behalf, journalists who tell the truth, historians who have identified him as the worst president in the history of this country, former employees who sounded the alarm on his unfitness for office, and social critics. And I absolutely believe that he will remain in office until he dies. He will never face accountability for a first term that looked more like a crime spree than a presidency.
Unfortunately, MAGA is the kind of animal that won’t perish if its head is severed from its body—a new head is likely to grow, perhaps with no physical resemblance to the former head, but with a mouth as vicious, eyes as blind, ears as deaf, and a soul as rotten as its predecessor. I predict that many iterations of the MAGA monster will appear before the electorate during the foreseeable future, which means that our work is nowhere near done.
It will be up to that segment of the electorate that still values diversity, still values empathy, still values immigrants, and still values basic human decency, to defend a liberal democracy against a rising authoritarian tide. If it appears that the current battle has been lost, rest assured that there are other battles to come.
In the meantime, we must be both vigilant and patient, calling out the hypocrisy when we see it and hear it and never giving up on the belief that the United States of America is, and has always been, worth the struggle.
Welcome to the resistance.
