This is not the column I wanted to write, and it is certainly not the one you wanted to read today. Our long national nightmare is far from over, but NBC News projects that Donald Trump has beaten Kamala Harris.
I’ll leave it to others to engage in the post-mortem finger-pointing and second-guessing; and I won’t try to sugarcoat the outcome or what it means.
But I would suggest taking a very deep breath. And another one. Because the fights ahead will be even tougher and more dangerous than the ones we’ve been through.
I’ll leave it to others to engage in the post-mortem finger-pointing and second-guessing; and I won’t try to sugarcoat the outcome or what it means.
There will be the inevitable and immediate attempts to downplay the well-established threat of a second Donald Trump presidency. But this time we need to take Trump both seriously and literally. This includes preparing for the possibility of him initiating a massive purge of the federal workforce and the process of mass deportations. Stephen Miller, Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will likely begin trying to implement their variously damaging and possibly unconstitutional ideas.
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We can expect Trump will pardon the Jan. 6 rioters and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he may instruct the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents. He will likely abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump can, if he wishes, go about trying to gut or kill Obamacare outright, while also trying to impose massive new tariffs on the economy.
We also know that the guardrails will not be sufficient, because they were not before. If they had been, none of this would have happened. Neither the impeachment process nor the justice system blocked his return to power. And now the ultimate guardrail has failed.
Whatever the final outcome, the American people (or enough of them) have returned this unfit man to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual abuse, the fraud, the lies or the felonies. Not the bigotry of his campaign; not insults, not threats. In the most graphic terms imaginable, the American people were warned of the danger. His previously loyal vice president refused to endorse him; his top general called him a “total fascist”; some of his closest aides and Cabinet members described in detail his erratic character and his indifference to the Constitution.
But in the end, it seems Trump was right. Perhaps he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and still win a presidential election. Trump never fired a weapon on a New York City street, but he did help incite a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. And it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that a jury of his peers found him liable for sexually abusing a woman; and it didn’t matter that he had called for terminating rules found in the Constitution to restore him to power. And it didn’t matter when he lied about migrants eating cats and dogs; or called the United States a “garbage can for the world.”
This is perhaps the hardest part about today: realizing that our fellow Americans saw all of that; watched all of that; listened to all of that, and still said, “Yes, that’s what we want.” That’s who we are.
The whole world is watching. And that’s what they are seeing.
We can change that, of course, because this isn’t the final chapter. But the fight will be long and even harder now that we have been stripped of so many of our illusions.