American elections are free and fair. They are so free and fair that even a convicted felon who supported a violent attempt to overturn the results of the previous free and fair election can take part. If the American people support him, he can even win.
For the third time in three presidential elections, we were faced with a choice between a competent candidate and a con artist. Yes, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all had flaws, just like every presidential candidate in American history has.
But Donald Trump is the only contender for the highest office in the land who has ever bragged on tape about committing sexual assault, publicly suggested using household chemicals to treat a viral infection, or claimed that immigrants were eating hardworking Americans’ dogs and cats. Donald Trump was not a normal candidate in 2016, when he won nearly 63 million votes, and he was an even less normal candidate in 2024, when he won more than 72 million.
Not even the Russian electorate, which has expressed rhetorical support for Trump since the start of his political career, has demonstrated itself to be as easily manipulable as America’s. The Kremlin, in its own elections, makes its predetermined winner appear more palatable by deciding who is and who isn’t permitted to run against him. In 2000, 2008, 2012, and 2018, one of those acceptably unattractive challengers was the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader of the comically misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. In both style and substance, Trump and Zhirinovsky were remarkably similar. And yet, the Russian clown candidate’s best ever showing in a presidential election was 9.48%, attained when running against Dmitri Medvedev in 2008. When juxtaposed against Russia’s Trump-like figure, Putin came off looking sane.
America’s real-life Trump, on the other hand, continues to drive just about everyone in the country crazy. One minute, he can be heard recounting the graphic details of heinous crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and the next, he begins making calls for national unity, claiming that his opponents’ rhetoric has been unjustly demonizing. One minute, he can characterize Joe Biden as being too old and out of it to string sentences together, and the next, he can blame Biden’s incendiary rhetoric for inspiring would-be assassins to take shots at Trump. One minute, he can hint that he will not accept the result of any election that does not declare him the winner, and the next, he can complain that his opponents call him a threat to democracy. Somehow, right around half the electorate looks at the former reality TV star and sees a serial liar whose chief political aim is to avoid being sent to prison, while the other half looks at the same thing and sees a genuine patriot who sacrificed his life of luxury to fix up the land he loves.
There is no reliable formula for figuring out who will see what. College-educated women of color appear to be least susceptible to Trump’s charms, while blue collar white men tend to be the most enthusiastic suckers — but exceptions abound among all demographic categories. Democratic competition is, almost by definition, a divisive process, but the rifts Trump causes are of a different nature than those that arose between, say, supporters of Barack Obama and those of John McCain. In 2008 there were certainly Americans who entertained the idea that one or the other presidential contender might turn out to be the Antichrist, but those Americans were mainly fringe weirdos.
Of course, Trump did not appear out of nowhere. His immediate precursor on the American political scene was Sarah Palin, McCain’s folksy, unqualified running mate in the 2008 presidential election. For a sizable faction of the Republican party’s base, Palin really did come out of nowhere to become more popular than the decent, establishment figure at the top of the ticket. Trump then won over the Palin portion of the electorate by pushing the “birther” conspiracy theory, which alleged that Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be President of the United States. And yet, even in 2015, when Trump first became a serious contender in the Republican primary process, it was widely believed that the party’s fringe faction was too small to deliver victory to its chosen candidate. After Trump became the nominee, most establishment Republicans expected him to lose badly in the general election. Instead, tens of millions of former McCain supporters backed “their” party’s candidate, and then that candidate turned “their” party into his cult of personality.
Objectively speaking, Trump really is dramatically different from any major party presidential nominee in the country’s history. It isn’t normal for a presidential candidate to make up stories about immigrants in Ohio eating domesticated animals, or to reminisce about the size of a golfing legend’s genitalia, or to reference fictional psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter in convention speeches. Saying such things does not mean Trump is the embodiment of evil, but to tens of millions of Ameircans, the stream of absurdities disqualifies him a priori as a potential steward of the country’s nuclear codes, and it comes as a shock to us that so many perfectly capable dentists and accountants disagree. The resulting divide is almost religious in nature. Unbelievers cannot fathom how their neighbors could possibly fall for such obvious mythmaking, and the devoted cannot comprehend how those outside the flock fail to see the divine truth.
Most phenomenally of all, Trump’s cult is actually getting bigger. On Nov. 5, for the first time, he won the national popular vote, increasing his share among African-Americans, Latinos, and all Americans under the age of 30. Commentators will point to his challenger’s gender, her ethnicity, and her laugh as potential explanations. They will cite exit polls showing that Trump voters by and large named “the economy” as their top priority when making a choice for commander-in-chief. They will speculate on what might have been if Joe Biden had withdrawn from the race in time for the Democratic party to hold an actual primary process. But the most pressing problem of all is not that Trump won 50% of the vote instead of the expected 47% — the real issue is the fact that he could make it into the double digits in the first place.
America gets what it deserves, no matter how self-destructive those just deserts might be. Donald Trump will be America’s next president — again — and it is difficult to imagine how the country’s divided political poles might eventually come back together. Trump appears to have found a powerful formula: behave so badly that his exasperated opponents start to criticize his supporters, then use their criticism as evidence that he and his supporters are being persecuted by “the enemy from within.”
Of course, the formula only works if the quantity of supporters remains large enough to offer a reasonable chance at electoral success. Perhaps, when Trump leaves the White House in four years at the age of 82, no successor will prove capable of repeating the trick. Perhaps Donald Trump really is a once-in-a-century talent — a phenomenal demagogue whose hypnotic spell over half the electorate will simply lift when the shiny object is removed, opening a political path for a new generation of McCains and Romneys to take back the Republican party with promises to lower marginal tax rates by a percentage point or two while pursuing the sorts of rational, small-government reforms that scholars from the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution might once again monotonously debate from the studio of a C-SPAN call-in show, just like in the good old days.
But today, it is the vision of the boring, predictable, median-voter American future, that looks like the absurdist fantasy. At this moment, it is difficult to imagine that J.D. Vance will not become president in four years. But whatever does happen next, it will be exactly what we, collectively, deserve — no matter how many tens of millions of us did not want it.