I’m glad he won by a lot. That might sound odd, but here’s the thing: it makes it easier to move past the Denial phase. Imagine, for the moment, that he won by just a thousand votes or so in Pennsylvania, or some such noise. There would be so many different suspicions, including on my part. Maybe it was Russia’s influence. Maybe it was fraud. Maybe we should have tried a little harder to make a few more phone calls.
I’m also glad he was such a jerk leading up to the final vote. I mean, he didn’t pull any punches. He didn’t try to pretend he wasn’t a populist kiss-up. He put his full, rambling persona out on display - and he won, and won by a safe margin. There’s going to be a lot of time, later, for thinking about the details of why this happened. But there are, as far as I’m aware, no credible accounts of voter fraud or anything nefarious.
No, the cold, hard truth is: this is what America, by which I mean the majority of Americans, wants. They want this man and his promises. They know him fully, and they want him anyway. Oh, sure, some of them may have more subtle rationales. Some might have held their nose and voted for the economy, or for abortion. But by and large, I don’t see any way around this conclusion: This is what Americans, at least most of them, want.
And I think, for us to make any meaningful progress, both as a country and in our personal lives, we have to first accept this. We do not have to like it, to be OK with it, to approve of it. We can be very, very angry about it. But that is different than being in denial about it. We have to look it right in the eye and say that on that day, November 5th, 2024, America approved of Donald Trump. 51 percent of the country, or whatever it winds up being, think this is our guy. We cannot work to change that, or even process it, until we fully and completely acknowledge it. No Russia. No vote fraud. Not because people don’t know who he is, or what he stands for; not because we didn’t knock on enough doors, or raise enough money. Not even because of Kamala Harris. No, Donald Trump is what they want.
They want it, they want him, completely and wholeheartedly. And until we fully acknowledge and accept that as reality, we can’t make it change.