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An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.

Trump’s opponents will also blame Russia and other malign powers. Without a doubt, America’s enemies—some of whom dearly hoped for a Trump win—made efforts to flood the public square with propaganda. According to federal and state government reports, several bomb threats that appeared to originate from Russian email domains were aimed at areas with minority voters. But as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.

So now what?

The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.

For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.

After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president, and obstructed him at every turn. McConnell, of course, cared only about seizing power for his party, and later, he could not muster that same bravado when faced with Trump’s assaults on the government. Patriotic Americans and their representatives might now make a similar commitment, but for better aims: Although they cannot remove Trump from office, they can declare their determination to prevent Trump from implementing the ghastly policies he committed himself to while campaigning.

The kinds of actions that will stop Trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

Related:

David Frum: Trump won. Now what?

Photographs by OK McCausland

The vibe shifted sometime around 10:30 p.m. eastern.

For several hours beforehand, the scene at the Howard University Yard had been jubilant: all glitter and sequins and billowing American flags. The earrings were big, and the risers were full. Men in fraternity jackets and women in pink tweed suits grooved to a bass-forward playlist of hip-hop and classic rock. The Howard gospel choir in brilliant-blue robes performed a gorgeous rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” and people sang along in a way that made you feel as if the university’s alumna of the hour, Kamala Harris, had already won.

But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable. As the evening drew on, the clusters of giddy sorority sisters and VIP alumni stopped dancing, their focus trained on the projector screens, which were delivering a steady flow of at best mediocre and sometimes dire news for Democrats. No encouragement had yet come from those all-important blue-wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Somewhere between Georgia turning red and Senator Ted Cruz demolishing Colin Allred in Texas, attendees started trickling out the back.

It was starting to feel pretty obvious, even then, that Donald Trump would be declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. And soon after 5:30 a.m. eastern this morning, he was, when the Associated Press called Wisconsin for him, giving him an Electoral College majority even with a number of states yet to declare. An across-the-board rightward shift, from Michigan to Manhattan, had gradually crushed the hopes of Democrats in an election that, for weeks, polling had indicated was virtually tied. But a Trump victory was a reality that nearly everyone at Harris’s watch party seemed to have prepared for only theoretically.

Before last night, Democrats felt buoyant on a closing shot of hopium. While Harris stayed on message, Trump had what seemed a disastrous final week: His closing argument was incoherent; his rally at Madison Square Garden was a parade of racism; he stumbled getting into a garbage truck and looked particularly orange in photos. Democratic insiders crowed that early-vote totals were favoring Harris, and that undecided voters in swing states were coming around. Then there was Ann Selzer’s well-respected poll in Iowa, which suggested that the state might go blue for the first time since Barack Obama’s presidency.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

On a breezy and unseasonably warm evening in Washington, D.C., thousands of people had gathered on the grassy campus at Harris’s alma mater to watch, they hoped, history being made. No one mentioned Trump when I asked them how they were feeling—only how excited they were to have voted for someone like Harris. Kerry-Ann Hamilton and Meka Simmons, both members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, had come together to witness the country elect the first Black woman president. “She is so well qualified—” Hamilton started to say. “Overqualified!” Simmons interjected.

Leah Johnson, who works at Howard and grew up in Washington, told me that she would probably leave the event early to watch returns with her mother and 12-year-old daughter at home. “It’s an intergenerational celebratory affair,” she said. “I get to say, ‘Look, Mom, we already have Barack Obama; look what we’re doing now!’”

Everyone I spoke with used similar words and phrases: lots of firsts and historics and references to the glass ceiling, which proved so stubbornly uncrackable in 2016. Attendees cheered in unison at the news that Harris had taken Colorado, and booed at Trump winning Mississippi. A group of women in tight dresses danced to “1, 2 Step” by Ciara and Missy Elliott. Howard’s president led alumni in the crowd in a call-and-response that made the whole evening feel a little like a football game—just fun, low stakes.

Several people I talked with refused to entertain the idea that Harris wouldn’t win. “I won’t even let myself think about that,” a woman named Sharonda, who declined to share her last name, told me. She sat with her sorority sisters in their matching pink-and-green sweatshirts. Soon, though, the crowd began to grow restless. “It was nice when they turned off the TV and played Kendrick,” said one attendee who worked at the White House and didn’t want to share her name. “Just being part of this is restoring my soul, even if the outcome isn’t what I want it to be,” Christine Slaughter, a political-science professor at Boston University, told me. She was cautious. She remembered, viscerally she said, the moment when Trump won in 2016; and the memory was easy to conjure again now. “I know that feeling,” she said. She was consoling herself: She’d been crushed before. She could handle it again.

Harris herself was expected to speak at about 11 p.m., but by midnight, she still hadn’t appeared. People bit their cheeks and scrolled on their phones. There was a burst of gleeful whoops when Angela Alsobrooks beat Larry Hogan in Maryland’s U.S. Senate election. But soon the trickle of exiting attendees became a steady flow. Potentially decisive results from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were not due soon, but Michigan didn’t look good. North Carolina was about to be called for Trump.

I texted some of my usual Democratic sources and received mostly radio silence in response. “How do you feel?” I asked one, who had been at the party earlier. “Left,” she answered. Mike Murphy, a Republican anti-Trump consultant, texted me back at about 12:30 a.m: “Shoot me.”

Donors and VIPs were streaming out the side entrance. The comedian Billy Eichner walked by, looking sad, as the Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache (Jump On It)” played over the loudspeakers. A man pulled me aside: “There will be no speech, I take it?” he said. It was more of a comment than a question.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

“I’m depressed, disappointed,” said Mark Long, a software salesman from D.C., who wore a T-shirt with a picture of Harris as a child. He was especially upset about the shift toward Trump among Black men. “I’m sad. Not just for tonight, but for what this represents.” Elicia Spearman seemed angry as she marched out of the venue. “If it’s Trump, people will reap what they sow,” she said. “It’s karma.”

Just before 1 a.m., the Harris campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond came onstage to announce that the candidate would not be speaking that night. The former Louisiana representative offered muted encouragement to the crowd—an unofficial send-off. “Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” he said, before adding, “Go, Kamala Harris!” The remaining members of the crowd cheered weakly. Some of the stadium lights went off.

The AP says Republicans have won back control of the US Senate, giving the party a major power centre in Washington DC.

For the third consecutive election, the nation remains divided almost exactly in half around the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.

Early this morning, the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump’s 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump held a narrow but clear advantage in all of them as of midnight.

In 2016, those three Rust Belt battlegrounds made Trump president when he dislodged them by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes from the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had won in all six presidential races from 1992 to 2012; four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he wrested them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Now, with Trump regaining an upper hand across Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden made inroads in 2020, the three Rust Belt behemoths appeared likely to decide the winner once more.

The results as of midnight suggested that those three states were tipping slightly to Trump; the patterns of returns looked more like 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in them, than 2020, when Biden beat Trump. Given that Trump appears highly likely to also win the Southeast battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump will likely win the presidency again if he captures any of the three Blue Wall states. He would become only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it again on a third try.

Not only are the same industrial-state battlegrounds at the fulcrum of Trump’s third race, but they remain mostly divided along very familiar lines. As he did in both 2016 and 2020, Trump is running up big margins in exurbs, small towns, and rural communities where most voters are white, culturally conservative people without a college degree. Harris is amassing big—though, in some cases, diminished—margins in the populous, well-educated suburbs around the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The one potentially crucial shift from 2020: The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed Trump making gains among Black and Latino voters, and especially men, not only in the pivotal former Blue Wall states but also elsewhere.

In many respects, the results available as of midnight were a reminder that even in a race involving a figure as unique as Donald Trump, in politics (as in Casablanca), the fundamental things apply. Since World War II, it has been extremely difficult for parties to hold the White House when an outgoing president was unpopular: The White House flipped partisan control when Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008. Popular presidents haven’t always been able to guarantee victory for their party when they leave (the White House changed hands when relatively popular chief executives stepped down in 1960, 2000, and 2016), but unpopular outgoing presidents have usually presented an insurmountable obstacle.

If Harris ultimately falls short, that pattern would represent a big part of the reason. Biden’s deep unpopularity at the end of his term operated as a huge headwind for her. In the national exit poll, only 40 percent of voters said they approved of Biden’s job performance as president. In the battlegrounds, Biden’s approval rating ranged from a low of only 39 percent (in Wisconsin) to a high of 43 percent (Pennsylvania). Harris ran better than usual for a nominee from the same party among voters who disapproved of the outgoing president’s performance. But even so, the large majority of discontented voters in all of these states provided a huge base of support for Trump. In the national exit poll, fully two-thirds of voters described the economy in negative terms. Only one in four said they had suffered no hardship from inflation over the past year.

A lot has changed for Trump since the 2020 election. He launched a sustained campaign to overturn the results of that election, which culminated in the January 6 insurrection; Supreme Court justices he’d appointed helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion; he was indicted on multiple felony counts in four separate cases, and convicted on 34 of them; and he was hit with civil judgments for financial fraud and sexual abuse.

Yet the exit polls, at least, found remarkably little change in his support levels from 2020 among white voters across the battlegrounds. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, his white support was virtually unchanged from 2020; he suffered a small decline in Pennsylvania, and a slightly larger one in North Carolina.

Compared with 2020, white voters with at least a four-year college degree moved slightly, but not dramatically, away from Trump in those five big battlegrounds. Harris won about three in five white women with a college degree, a big improvement from what the exit polls recorded in 2020. But Trump offset that by improving at least slightly since 2020 among white voters without a college education, who tended to give Biden especially low marks for his performance. Crucially for Trump, he retained overwhelming support among white women without a college degree everywhere except Wisconsin, where he split them evenly. Democrats had hoped those women might abandon him over abortion rights and a general revulsion to his demeaning language about women. Because those blue-collar white women appeared on track to provide Trump as big a margin as they did in 2016 and 2020, the national exit polls showed Trump winning most white women against Harris—just as he did against Biden and Clinton. That will likely be a subject of intense frustration and debate among Democrats in the weeks ahead, whether or not Trump wins the race.

Overall, the abortion issue benefited Harris substantially, but not as much as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates who swept Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. In that election, the exit polls found that Democrats Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania won more than four-fifths of voters who said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances; in Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers won three-fourths of them. But this time—with the economy weighing on those voters—Harris won only about two-thirds of those pro-choice voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. That slight shift might prove decisive. (In the national exit poll, Trump won almost three in 10  voters who said abortion should be legal all or most of the time; one-fourth of women who supported legal abortion backed Trump.)

Because abortion rights did not give her as much of a lift as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2022, Harris did not appear on track to expand on Biden’s margins in many of the big suburban counties key to the modern Democratic coalition. She looked to be roughly matching Biden’s huge advantages in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia. But she did not narrow the roughly 3–2 deficit Biden faced in Waukesha County, outside Milwaukee, perhaps the biggest Republican-leaning white-collar suburb north of the Mason-Dixon line, as of midnight. In Oakland County, outside Detroit, Trump appeared on track to slightly narrow her margin, perhaps dealing a fatal blow to her chances.

In the well-educated county centered on Ann Arbor, Harris’s margin of victory seemed on track to decline from 2020, in what might be a reflection of youthful discontent over the support she and Biden have provided for Israel’s war in Gaza. In Dane County, Wisconsin, centered on Madison, she appeared in line to match only Biden’s 2020 share and not the even higher number Evers reached in 2022. Overall, in several of the suburban counties across the Blue Wall states, Harris appeared on track to finish closer to Hillary Clinton’s margins in 2016, when she lost these states, than Biden’s in 2020, when he won them.

The failure to expand on Biden’s performance in suburban areas left Harris vulnerable to what I’ve called Trump’s pincer movement against her.

As in both of his earlier races, he posted towering numbers in rural areas and small towns. Trump posted his usual imposing advantages in the blue-collar suburbs around Pittsburgh, and appeared to gain dramatically in the mostly blue-collar counties including and around Green Bay.

From the other direction, he appeared to further narrow the traditional Democratic margins in heavily minority central cities. That was particularly evident in Philadelphia. Exit polls showed Trump slightly improving among Black voters in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; that contributed to his win in North Carolina and gave him gains that placed him on the brink of flipping Wisconsin and Michigan as of midnight. In the national exit poll, Harris basically matched Biden’s vote share among white voters overall—but she fell slightly among Black voters and more substantially among Hispanic voters.

Almost lost in the ominous news for Democrats from the battleground states was the possibility that Harris would win the national popular vote, even if Trump also appeared likely to improve on his showings on that front from 2016 and 2020. If Harris did win the national popular vote, it would mark the eighth time in the past nine presidential elections that Democrats have done so—something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system, in 1828.

Yet even if Democrats achieved that historic feat, they faced the bracing prospect that Republicans could win unified control of the House, the Senate, and the White House while losing the national popular vote. Until the 21st century, that had happened only once in American history, in 1888; if it happens again this year, it would mark the third time in this century that Republicans will have won complete control of Washington while losing the popular vote.

Trump isn’t likely to view losing the national popular vote, if he does, for a third time (something only William Jennings Bryan had previously done) as a caution light. If anything, he will likely view the prospect that he could win the decisive battleground states by bigger margins than he did in 2016 and gain among voters of color as a signal to aggressively pursue the combative agenda he laid out this year. That includes plans for massive new tariffs, the largest deportation program in U.S. history, a purge of the civil service, and the use of the military against what he calls “the enemy from within.” Unless something changes dramatically in the final counts from the decisive states, American voters will have chosen, once again, to leap into that murky unknown.

The BBC's Sarah Smith and Gary O'Donoghue reflect on the contrasting moods at the Harris event in Washington, DC, and the Trump event in Florida.

Russian Embassy in Washington, DC says insinuations of Moscow's interference in US election are 'malicious slander'.