Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:
Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.
Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was no upset, nor was it as unimaginable as when he beat Hillary Clinton, in 2016. But it was no less shocking. For much of the country, Trump’s past offenses were simply disqualifying. Just a week ago, Harris gave her closing argument to the nation in advance of the vote. Trump “has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other—that’s who he is,” she said. “But, America, I’m here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.” Millions of voters in the states that mattered most, however, chose him anyway. In the end, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy simply resonated more than all the lectures about his many deficiencies as a person and a would-be President.
More here.
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