EXCERPTS
Andrew Sullivan on the winner.
This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him.
The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept. But hope fades in turn when you realize how absolute and total his support clearly is. It is not like that of a democratic leader but of a cult leader fused with the idea of the nation. If he fails, as he will, he will blame others, as he always does. And his cult followers will take their cue from him and no one else. “In Trump We Trust,” as his acolyte Ann Coulter titled her new book. And so there will have to be scapegoats—media institutions, the Fed, the “global conspiracy” of bankers and Davos muckety-mucks he previewed in his rankly anti-Semitic closing ad, rival politicians whom he will demolish by new names of abuse, foreign countries and leaders who do not cooperate, and doubtless civilians who will be targeted by his ranks of followers and demonized from the bully pulpit itself. The man has no impulse control and massive reserves of vengeance and hatred. In time, as his failures mount, the campaigns of vilification will therefore intensify. They will have to.
A country designed to resist tyranny has now embraced it. A constitution designed to prevent democracy taking over everything has now succumbed to it. A country once defined by self-government has openly, clearly, enthusiastically delivered its fate into the hands of one man to do as he sees fit. After 240 years, an idea that once inspired the world has finally repealed itself. We the people did it.
Rebecca Traister on the loser.It is a piteous irony that in finding a way past the specific hurdles long set before women with presidential ambitions—fund-raising and the support of a major party—Hillary Clinton also offered up to her opponents, on the left and the right, the ammunition to undercut the historic nature of her candidacy. The very fact that she had close relationships with big donors and garnered the support of major political institutions made her part of the political elite, vulnerable to the anti-Establishment rhetoric of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. It also kept her from being understood or celebrated as the historic outsider that, as a member of a gender historically denied access to executive power, she was. In debates, when attacked as a member of the corrupt global oligarchy, Clinton would bleat about being a woman, a grandmother, different from literally everyone else ever to have been on a general-election presidential-debate stage, yet her claims never really landed. Perhaps it is a remarkable twist of fate that the outsider candidate was too much of an insider for the election she ran in, or perhaps part of today’s fury at insider institutions stems from a resentment that women like Hillary Clinton can infiltrate them. Either way, in figuring out how a woman might win, she lost.
Frank Rich on the new civil war.We’ve lost a lot of illusions during the resistible rise of Donald Trump. An entire political culture has been leveled; it’ll be a long time before we hear about the virtues of a “ground game” or the nerdy brilliance of data-driven poll analysts without laughing (or crying). The “values voter” is dead, and so is the quaint conviction that newspaper and magazine editorials might somehow save the world. But some of these illusions were due for demolition anyway. What makes this election soul-sickening is how it has crushed our most romantic ideals about America itself.
This was no 9/11. The terrorist attacks on America, after all, did not come from within, and for a while at least, they brought the country together. What awaits us now looks very much like a protracted civil war—indeed a retread of our previous Civil War. We have a Supreme Court whose Chief Justice has already hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, giving permission to the voter-suppression efforts that went off the charts in 2016 and that now will continue unchecked. We have a president-elect who has seemed to endorse discrimination by race, religion, and ethnicity, and who wants to give police more sway over the “inner cities.” Next up: Attorney General Rudy Giuliani.
I keep thinking of that old Twilight Zone episode where the panicking neighbors on a bucolic all-American Maple Street become so fearful of an alien invasion that they start shooting each other and destroy their neighborhood before any invaders arrive. Not even when the towers came down did America feel as vulnerable as it does on this 11/9.
Lisa Miller on the results.Our 12-year-old daughter, Josephine, found an interactive electoral map online, and on Election Night she was settled on the couch, snuggled in an old fleece blanket, watching TV with the map booted up in her lap. Earlier in the evening, we had dinner with friends, and she had been manic with excitement, running laps around the dining table with the dog, but now, sometime around ten o’clock, she was all business, clicking on states, turning them red or blue, and announcing the electoral tally from the calculator on the app. Okay, she would say, Florida is lost, but if Hillary gets Michigan and Wisconsin, she’s fine. Click. Or Michigan and New Hampshire. Click. Or Michigan and Nevada and Arizona. Click. Click. She was like a girl in a maze, trying to escape the trap before the exits were blocked. Eventually, finally, we coaxed her to bed, but only with a promise that we would wake her if Hillary pulled through.
All three of us had gone to vote very early that morning— Josephine, my husband, Charlie, and me—and we were high, ebullient, at the prospect of electing the first woman president. We stood in line at the polling place laughing, and making the people around us laugh, and when my turn came to enter the private booth, Josephine came with me and filled out the Hillary bubble herself. Josephine is our only child, and we raised her to speak her mind and to expect to be heard. We did this on purpose, without ever discussing it directly. My husband, a Midwesterner, has five strong-minded sisters: Neither one of us ever entertained a single thought about what girls could not do. Voting for Hillary was, quite literally, a vindication of all the life choices we had ever made.
Josephine is a girl with superhero dreams. When you ask her what she wants to be, her answer has, for years, been the same: a fashion photographer, a lawyer, or president. She understands that president is a stretch, but the point is, it’s always been one of the options, a possibility in her mind. So when we woke her up, and it wasn’t with happy news in the middle of the night, but in terrible full daylight, Josephine understood. “Trump won,” she said, and I said yes. And we lay there for a while. And then she started to cry.
“It’s not possible,” she said.
“What’s not?” I asked, dreading her reply.
“It’s not possible: A girl can’t be president.”
David Wallace-Wells on the morning after in New York City. New Yorkers woke up on November 8 in what seems now like a fairy-tale fog, convinced, as ever, that the future belonged to us. By midnight, the world looked very different, the country very far away (and the future, too). Eighty percent of us had voted against the man who won, and 80 percent, it seemed, were already hatching plans to leave—for Canada or Berlin or anywhere else we imagined we could live safely among the like-minded. That was when the text messages began coming in from old friends in Wisconsin and Texas and North Carolina and Missouri. They were watching the same returns we were, in the same apocalyptic panic, and all making desperate plans to come to New York. For them, the city was still the same fairy tale.
And for us, those 80 percent in denial and despair, the city itself was a consolation. The human traffic on the streets that next morning was funereal, but it did proceed, commuters stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder on subway cars, crying. More amazing, here: They were looking each other in the eye as they bawled. There were hugs among strangers, and many more bleary-eyed nods, on streets that seemed dusted with ash. It was a bubble, of course, but after the election, the city unbubbled us too—popped us out of our blister packs of despair. An endless campaign that had unfolded mostly in the privacy of our screens was mourned outside, communally, socially. Street life was a comforting orgy, and the smallest things turned into talismans—the MetroCard, the fruit stand. It was easy to imagine the world ending when the world was a relentless cascade of panicked tweets. It became a lot harder, actually, once you stepped out your front door.
The news was full of hate—beginning that morning, with students marching through hallways chanting about white power. The city had flare-ups, too, but when swastikas showed up in Adam Yauch Park, of all places, the graffiti was plastered over with hearts. Apartments turned into little crèches: sisters coming together for quick comfort and staying over for three days; black families shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at the disbelief of their white friends. A stern male co-worker of mine made a beeline for a younger female colleague and repeated the words he’d told his daughter that morning: “It’s always been this way, it always will be, and I’m so, so sorry.” A West Indian immigrant asked three strangers he’d just met how he should have answered when his 8-year-old came to him, the next morning, saying plaintively, “I thought we weren’t supposed to bully.”
Life went on. There were babies born that day in our hospitals, half of them girls, to mothers who thought their daughters’ first memories might star a female president. There were boys born named Barack. The market rallied. Pedestrians yelled at truckers for their bumper stickers, and the drivers yelled back, and that was kind of great, too. We’d almost forgotten where Donald Trump came from.
Jonathan Chait on the resistance. Trump’s loyal opposition has a duty to respect the law. More than that—for all those who are wondering, everyone must hope he can avoid the worst. It might help Democrats regain power if Trump throws 20 million Americans off their insurance, dissolves NATO, or prosecutes Hillary Clinton, but that is not an agenda to root for. Less horrible is better. At the same time, Americans who did not support Trump have no obligation to normalize his behavior. To the contrary: Upholding the dignity and value of the presidency means refusing to treat the ascendancy of a Trump into the office as normal. Trump is counting on a combination of media weariness and Republican partisan solidarity to allow him to grind governing norms to dust. Two days after the election, his attorney reaffirmed his intention to have his children run his business even while he serves as president—an arrangement creating limitless opportunity for corruption, as his use of the presidency enriches his brand and foreign leaders strike deals that curry personal favor.
Whatever signs of normality he has given since Tuesday’s triumph are, thus far, purely superficial. To submit to a world where we say the words President Trump without anger or laughter is to surrender our idea of what the office means.
Trump’s election is one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worth recalling, however, that history is punctuated with disasters, yet the country is in a better place now than it was a half-century ago, and a better place than a half-century before that, and so on. Despair is a counterproductive response. So is denial—an easy temptation in the wake of the inevitable postelection pleasantries and displays of respect needed to maintain the peaceful transfer of power. The proper response is steely resolve to wage the fight of our lives. 