Trump's election is a dark night for America's soul

A silhouette of Donald Trump with the U.S. flag in background

Columnist

Nov. 6, 2024 Updated 6:35 PM PT

Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States after arguably the most stunning political comeback in America history.
Politically, we live in volatile times, and that makes the hair-trigger Trump a perfect totem for our unpredictable age.

A convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender is returning to the White House.

A candidate who spoke of using the military against political foes and called for the summary execution of his critics will again be commander in chief.

A 78-year-old man, at sea, who prattled on about Hannibal Lecter and Pavarotti and the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis will once more control the country’s nuclear codes, and with them the fate of all humanity.

Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States after arguably the most stunning political comeback in American history.

Read it and weep.

David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist, once said that “campaigns are like an MRI of the soul — whoever you are, eventually people will find out.”

The soul of America, on this November day of our Lord, is a dark and foreboding place. A place where the better angels of our nature have been outmatched by the dark impulses of hatred and fear.

Inflation has taken a bite out of our wallets. Restoring a brazen liar and criminal to the White House has taken an even bigger bite out of our nation’s honor and integrity.

Lady Liberty shudders.

In 2016, Trump won a seeming black swan election, scratching out victory by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states, even as he lost the national popular vote. He won despite a long, ignoble record.

Multiple bankruptcies. Thousands of lawsuits. Tax cheating. Business fraud. Draft evasion. Adultery. A boast of sexually mauling women.

He represented change, many voters said, as a businessman and reality TV celebrity who would bring long-needed disruption to Washington. If his puerile social media posts, uncouth behavior and playground insults were unpresidential, the thinking went, well, that showed a certain authenticity and a willingness to overturn convention and break some china that badly needed breaking.

What followed was staggering in its breadth, cruelty and recklessness.

Countless people died because of Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. He was impeached twice. Indicted four times. Convicted of 34 felony counts for covering up an extramarital dalliance that could well have cost him the 2016 election.

He summoned a mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol and tried to overturn the 2020 election, egged on by his unremitting and self-serving lies. He spent years sowing doubts and corroding faith in our judicial and political systems, spraying insults like a spiteful crop duster.

And he won Tuesday’s election in far more commanding fashion than his previous bare victory. He may become the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He made gains with just about every demographic group compared with his 2020 performance.

Washington and Lincoln turn in their graves.

Perhaps most noteworthy, the candidate with a long history of racist words and deeds, who slandered Mexicans and promised to deport dark-skinned immigrants who came to the country legally, managed to significantly grow his support among Black and Latino men.

The political pundits and armchair psychiatrists will be hashing that one out for decades.

What is immediately clear is that Trump’s victory was a reward for bad behavior at such a high level that — as the braggadocious Trump might put it — no one has ever seen anything like it.

The malevolent among us will surely take heed.

Politically, we live in volatile times, which makes the hair-trigger Trump a perfect totem for our unpredictable age.

For nearly two decades, from 1960 to 1978, there were three elections in which control of the White House, the Senate or the House of Representatives switched parties. Between 1980 and 1998, there were four.

Since the beginning of this century, there have been 10 elections in which power shifted, with Tuesday’s being the latest and third in a row.

The word “change” ranks right up there with “new and improved” as among the most powerful pitches in salesmanship, as well as flimflammery.

Exit polls showed by a crushing 73% to 25% that voters saw Trump and not Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate who could bring about change — which Americans desperately seek despite an economy that, by many measures, is firing on all cylinders.

That’s another disconnect that will keep the political seminar circuit abuzz for years to come.

Soon enough it will come time for Trump, a superlative self-promoter and indifferent executive, to deliver on his many extravagant promises.

To bring down grocery and gas prices overnight, end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine instantly, hermetically seal the U.S. border and fill our households to bursting with sudden and abundant wealth.

None of that will happen.

What very well might is a return to soaring inflation, if Trump manages, with a pliant Republican Congress, to impose the massive tariffs that set his heart afire. And a widespread uprooting of families and innocents as a heedless and heartless deportation policy drives a scythe through immigrant communities.

A more dangerous world as Trump coddles foreign dictators, severs critical overseas alliances and enables aggression like Russia’s rape and pillage of Ukraine.

A not-insignificant amount of Trump’s support is predicated on the notion that his outrageous rhetoric and belligerent policy proposals are merely performative — Trump being Trump, to use the shorthand.

We’ll see.

Those proverbial guardrails that kept him in check his first term may no longer be there — Trump has said he will see to that — and with carte blanche from a supine Supreme Court, his maliciousness may be limited only by Trump’s febrile imagination.

The acerbic wit H.L. Mencken once said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

And so, with Trump’s restoration, it will be.