Trump won.
Not by a little, but by a lot: the Electoral College, the popular vote, the Senate, and the House of Representatives—all bathed in red. High and low across the country, virtually every demographic swung rightward.
There is much cause for celebration here, and indeed on the right there is gleeful gloating aplenty. There are dump trucks worth of schadenfreude to go around, our cups overflow with liberal tears, the feast of TikTok meltdown videos is bountiful and no one will leave the banquet hungry.
But this very celebration is also a sadness. While we may not be inclined to give much sympathy to the performative pain of the talking heads in the media or the attention-seekers who film their emotional outbursts for clicks on social media, these are real people. And there are many others out there, with no cameras pointed at their faces, our fellow Americans, for whom Trump’s victory is real a cause for sorrow and for profound fear. All they have been led to believe over the last eight years indicate to them that this decisive victory means that the country hates them and wishes them and their loved ones great evils. Trump, they believe, will very soon turn the country into a fascist regime in which their rights will be stripped from them, all they hold dear will be burned away—a wasteland in which nothing good will flourish. Even if they are wrong, they will believe it to be so, and that is very bad news, for “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
These people are our countrymen, our neighbors, our friends, and our family. They may be desperately planning this very moment—if they are wealthy enough—how to flee the country with their children tucked under their arms and their diamonds sewn into the hems of their wive’s dresses.
It may seem rediculous to us, but to them it is very real and very dire.
And yet, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in their respective concession speeches said they congratulated Trump on his victory, that this was Democracy at work, and they both assured the American people that the fight is not over and that “it will be okay.”
Others on the right have pointed out how strange it is to see these politicians who for years, and up until days ago, insisted vociferously that Trump was an existential threat to Democracy in America, a fascist, a would-be dictator, a Nazi-sympathizing white supremacist, can turn on a dime and act as if what just ended was a normal American election, and not the end of America as we know it.
But let us play this out.
This flip in rhetoric could mean that these Democrats were never serious to begin with. That they knew their rhetoric was grossly overblown, but they were willing to wield damaging words just to win an election. In that case, what they are saying now is true: it will be okay.
If so, then they are the worst and the most cynical, malicious liars that have ever presumed to rule over us. To convince their frightened subjects that we are on the brink of a fascist regime just to hold on to power a little longer is unforgivable.
Perhaps they are trying to course correct and pull back, trying to memory-hole what they said, because the fear-mongering did not work. They need to re-triangulate their persuasion, and go back to seducing rather than terrifying the voters in order to win the next election and get their power back.
On the other hand, suppose they are lying now. Suppose they really still believe, in their heart of hearts, that Trump will be a fascist dictator; that it will certainly not be okay. They are making placating sounds now, presumably because they fear Trump’s vengeance. They need to find a way to survive under an authoritarian regime.
In that case, they are cowards, and they are abandoning their voters, and indeed all the American people, even those foolish enough or mean enough or just plain stupid enough to vote for a dictator, in order to live another day. They prove themselves to be weak and feckless, running from the only fight that matters: saving the country, by any means necessary, from the rise of a Tyrant King.
I wonder what those whom I love who believed the rhetoric before the election will make of all this. I dare not call or even text them, lest the very thought of me cause them further pain. It will likely be a long time before I have any sense of how they will actually fair in the aftermath, but I cannot imagine that they can, like their leaders, flip their worldview so easily. The damage that the Democrat politicians and the “mainstream” news have done to many people’s sanity is likely a trauma from which it will take a long time to recover, if that is even possible at all.
One can only hope that the liars that made this mess will indeed bring down the temperature of their rhetoric in order to lie their way back to power over the next four years, using their occult psy-op powers to undo some of the damage they have done.
Unfortunately, it is likely that the conciliatory posture on their part is but a passing dream, and that they will very soon get back to pumping out a black cloud to further darken the minds and corrupt the hearts of their voters.
They have to beat J.D. Vance in four years, after all.
Until then: long live the king! May his reign be glorious and just!