Sitting in it
It hurts. Let's talk about it.
As I write this early Wednesday morning, the presidential election hasn’t yet been officially called. But it’s not looking good.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around how we got to this place. Donald Trump lost in 2020, incited a coup attempt, was convicted of 34 felonies, is an adjudicated rapist — and yet it appears he’s on the cusp of beating Kamala Harris, the VP of an administration that did a good job under extremely difficult circumstances. And Trump isn’t just poised to win the electoral college — for the first time in three tries he’s likely to win the popular vote too. From the standpoint of January 7, 2021, what’s happening right now is unfathomable.
And it’s not like Trump ran a brilliant campaign. The key planks of his platform were mass deportation and bigotry. Even if you don’t pay attention to politics, it was damn near impossible to escape his grossly transphobic TV ads. If you tuned in to even a minute or two of one of his campaign rallies, you likely saw him slurring through his plans to round up immigrants (and not just those who are here illegally). For God’s sake, the guy closed his campaign talking about how he wants to put serial adulterer and creep RFK Jr in charge of overseeing women’s health.
That voters are choosing to put him back in power … whew — words fail. And unlike 2016, nobody can say they don’t know what they just signed up for. As we wrote many months ago, Trump didn’t try to hide his plans to abuse power and brutalize outgroups.
In the wake of a disaster of this sort, it’s natural to play the blame game. I’ve already seen people nitpicking the campaign Kamala Harris ran, opining on what President Biden should’ve done differently, sounding the alarm about the role Russian interference played, and so forth. These are all legitimate things to talk about. But I also think we need to process the reality that even if it still doesn’t have majority support, fascism is far from a political loser in this country. Deportation raids will almost certainly be unpopular in practice, but the idea of them isn’t. Misogyny and a skewed media environment were factors working against Harris, but ultimately a huge chunk of American voters simply are buying what Trump is selling.
We’ll of course have a lot more to say in the weeks and months to come about what Trump’s victory means and where we go from here. But for now, I just want to take a moment to sit in this feeling while also recognizing that the sun will rise again and the fight for justice and inclusion will continue. This is a crisis, but it isn’t the end of history. We have plenty of allies to help us through, and it’ll be important to maintain a sense of solidarity with marginalized communities that wind up in Trump’s crosshairs.
That’s what I’m thinking about at this late hour, but I’m curious to hear from readers. How are you processing this? What conclusions are you drawing? Sound off in the comments and we’ll talk about it together.
It's not even that he won; I was prepared for that. The margin of victory is absolutely staggering to me. All polls and surveys (including the Selzer poll, which was off 17 points) might as well have been conducted on a different planet.
And unlike other times when Republicans took control, straight white men won't be able to say "well, it's fine for us!" When tariffs drive up the price of everything, and food isn't safe to eat and medicine isn't available because RFK Jr. is in charge of the CDC and the FDA, and their favorite foreign-born athletes get deported, they might have some buyer's remorse. But by then, it won't matter.
We don’t share reality with our neighbors. I am stunned there is this much hate and ignorance.
We have an economy that’s the envy of the world.
The thing that voters say they care about.
We almost didn’t survive last term.
I don’t know how the disabled, elderly, poor are going to make it.