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Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat. Almost everywhere, Donald Trump expanded his coalition, and this time, unlike in 2016, he didn’t have to thread the needle of the Electoral College to win: He can claim the legitimacy of winning the popular vote.

Trump’s opponents are now muttering about the choice of Tim Walz, the influence of the Russians, the role of the right-wing media, and whether President Joe Biden should not have stepped aside in favor of Harris. Even the old saw about “economic anxiety” is making a comeback.

These explanations all have some merit, but mostly, they miss the point. Yes, some voters still stubbornly believe that presidents magically control the price of basic goods. Others have genuine concerns about immigration and gave in to Trump’s booming call of fascism and nativism. And some of them were just never going to vote for a woman, much less a Black woman.

But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.

Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries.

And so it came to pass: Last night, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires grinned and applauded for Trump. They were part of an alliance with the very people another Trump term would hurt—the young, minorities, and working families among them.

Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power.

Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania. Biden, too old and tired to mount a proper campaign, likely would have lost worse than Harris; more to the point, there was nothing even a more invigorated Biden or a less, you know, female alternative could have offered. Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts.

No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic “I will fix it” solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs. (I knew Harris was in trouble when I was in Pennsylvania last week for an event and a fairly well-off business owner, who was an ardent Trump supporter, told me that Michelle Obama had conspired with the Canadians to change the state’s vote tally in 2020. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part of the conversation.)

As Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, put it in a social-media post last night: The election went the way it did “because America wanted Trump. That’s it. People reaching to construct [policy] alibis for the public because they don’t want to grapple with this are whistling past the graveyard.” Last worries that we might now be in a transition to authoritarianism of the kind Russia went through in the 1990s, but I visited Russia often in those days, and much of the Russian democratic implosion was driven by genuinely brutal economic conditions and the rapid collapse of basic public services. Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

The bright spot in all this is that Trump and his coterie must now govern. The last time around, Trump was surrounded by a small group of moderately competent people, and these adults basically put baby bumpers and pool noodles on all the sharp edges of government. This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create.

Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air.

Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

Related:

What Trump understood, and Harris did not Democracy is not over.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

George T. Conway III: What we’re in for Voters wanted lower prices at any cost. Blame Biden, Tyler Austin Harper argues. Trump won. Now what?

Today’s News

The Republicans have won back control of the Senate. Votes are still being counted in multiple House races that could determine which party controls the House. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a concession speech at Howard University, emphasizing that there will be a peaceful transfer of power. In an interview on Fox News, a Trump spokesperson said that Trump plans to launch “the largest mass-deportation operation of illegal immigrants” on his first day in office.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020,” Derek Thompson writes. “In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Night They Hadn’t Prepared For

By Elaine Godfrey

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.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Watching the Blue Wall crumble There is no constitutional mandate for fascism. The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa The tyranny of the election needle

Culture Break

Collection Christophel / Alamy

Watch. These six movies and shows provide a thoughtful or hopeful break if you need a distraction this week.

Adapt. Baseball is a summer sport—and it’s facing big questions about how it will be affected by climate change, Ellen Cushing writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

You know America’s most controversial appliance when you hear it: The leaf blower is loud, it’s messy, and it’s a hazard to the environment. But Ian Bogost recently argued that we’re thinking about leaf blowers all wrong: “Excessive use of blowers, not the tools themselves, should be taken as the villain here,” he wrote. A full ban on the appliance is impossible as long as yards are part of American life, so limiting its use would be the best path forward.

Today’s newsletter explores the appliances we’ve relied on for decades, and those that claim to usher in new ways of living—with varied success.

On Our Appliances

A Defense of the Leaf Blower

By Ian Bogost

Reassessing America’s most hated appliance

Read the article.

A $700 Kitchen Tool That’s Meant to Be Seen, Not Used

By Ellen Cushing

KitchenAid’s newest stand mixer seems like a great appliance—for people who don’t actually bake.

Read the article.

The Microwave Makes No Sense

By Jacob Sweet

Every kitchen appliance is getting smart—except one.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Your TV is too good for you: 4K resolution is a sham, Ian Bogost argues. KitchenAid did it right 87 years ago: Modern appliances are rarely built to last. They could learn something from the KitchenAid stand mixer, Anna Kramer argues.

Other Diversions

The silliest, sexiest show of the year Why you might need an adventure Why are baseball players always eating?

P.S.

Courtesy of John Ambrose

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. John Ambrose, 72, wrote that he took this photo “looking due west from my front door in Glastonbury, CT. The sky kept changing and went from an orange to a deep pink.”

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel

What happens when the owner of one of the most important news organizations in the country decides that the journalists are the problem? That’s the question I keep asking myself in response to Jeff Bezos’s op-ed explaining his decision to have his newspaper, The Washington Post, stop making presidential endorsements just days before it was reportedly set to formally back Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos argued that the press needs to accept reality about its unpopularity, and implied that journalists are to blame for our sinking reputation. He didn’t even acknowledge the concerted, multiyear campaign—led most recently by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel—to convince Americans that the free press is, to borrow a phrase, the “enemy of the people.” Bezos writes, “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased … It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

Not once did Bezos even try to explain why it is that “most people believe the media is biased.”

The decision to get out of the presidential-endorsement game itself is not problematic to me. In fact, I’ve always felt sorry for any working journalist who has to cover a candidate’s campaign the day after its opinion page comes out against that candidate. As NBC’s political director, I had to deal with analogous situations over the years, when campaigns refused to grant interviews to or even interact with NBC journalists because they didn’t like an opinion that was aired on MSNBC’s more ideological or partisan programs. For reporters who are simply trying to do their job—covering a campaign, reporting what’s happening, and writing the most factually accurate account of the day that they can confirm by deadline—it’s not a comfortable position to be in.

[Ellen Cushing: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

For years, I pushed NBC to invest in a conservative talk-show lineup on CNBC. I wanted to be able to say: We have a red cable channel at night and a blue cable channel at night, but here at NBC, we are stuck covering politics as it is, not as we wish it was. Covering politics as it is continues to be my mantra. Those who want to push their own politics should leave reporting and become activists; there are plenty of places where they can do that.

The real problem with what Bezos did was not the decision he made, but its timing and execution—rolled out on the eve of an election with little explanation. And then, when he did publish an explanation, he somehow made things worse. There are many legitimate criticisms of contemporary journalism, but Bezos didn’t level any of them. Instead, he wrote that media outlets suffer from a “lack of credibility” because they “talk only to a certain elite.” He betrayed no awareness that he was parroting a right-wing talking point, revealing his ignorance of the 50-year campaign to delegitimize the mainstream press—which arguably began when conservative supporters of President Richard Nixon vowed revenge for the media’s exposure of the Watergate crimes.

What Bezos failed to acknowledge is that a legion of right-wing critics—most notably the longtime Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes—spent decades attacking media outlets, repeating the charge that they are irredeemably biased. For Ailes and others, it proved a lucrative approach—when you hear something over and over, you tend to believe it. Trump and his team have used the same strategy, building their appeal by attacking the press. Social-media algorithms have only made this repetitive, robotic attack on the press worse.

But instead of defending his reporters against such attacks, Bezos decided to blame the victim in his extremely defensive op-ed. He is right to note that “complaining is not a strategy.” But neither is surrender. Six years ago, I argued in The Atlantic that media outlets had made a mistake by failing to respond to their critics. Many journalists feared that fighting back against bad-faith attacks on our work would make us look partisan. So instead, we chose not to engage when partisan actors at Fox News or campaign operatives used the charge of media bias against working journalists. And I wrote that this needed to change.

I thought that if journalists defended their work, at a minimum, the owners of media institutions would have our back. Boy, was that naive. It turns out that Bezos himself has fallen victim to the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise. His op-ed must have felt like a gut punch to reporters at the Post. Only in its final lines did he say that the journalists he employs deserve to be believed.

To Bezos’s credit, he has at least put his name on an op-ed and attempted a defense of his actions. The leaders of the publicly traded companies that happen to own major news organizations have not had the guts to explain publicly—either to the employees they’ve laid off or the ones they’ve kept—why they’ve decided to either “Trump-proof” their companies or to shrink their commitment to the news-and-information business.

And if you haven’t been paying attention to the accelerating contraction of major news organizations, just wait until the first quarter of the coming year, when many publicly traded companies may decide that news divisions aren’t worth the headaches they cause their CEOs. These companies have plenty of cash to help sustain their news divisions while they find their footing in the new media landscape. The fact they are choosing not to do so says a lot.

Part of me understands the logic of much of corporate America. The idea that Trump could use the power of the government to punish companies for journalism he dislikes is not hypothetical. Amazon alleges that he did this once already—interfering with the award of a $10 billion defense contract—because the Post’s tough reporting made the president see Bezos as his “political enemy.” Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ investment. If that means accepting the terms of coercion by Trump, apparently, so be it.

Bezos could have made the case that The Washington Post is not a partisan institution, but instead, he argued that journalists have to accept the perception of media bias as our reality. If that’s what we have to do, then perhaps Bezos should either sell the Post or put it in some sort of blind trust. Because he has created the perception—among both the public and his own employees—that his other business interests influenced his decision not to raise Trump’s ire with a Harris endorsement.

Bezos, who owns the space company Blue Origin, is in a rich-guy race with Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, to become the leader in commercial space exploration. That Musk has become Trump’s chief surrogate, and a leading financier of his campaign, must surely have made folks at Blue Origin nervous. Perhaps that’s why Blue Origin executives secured a meeting with Trump before the election. The timing of their meeting—the same day the Post made its no-more-endorsements announcement—only adds to the perception problem facing Bezos. But in the same op-ed in which he told his journalists that they needed to accept perceptions as reality, he insisted that the perception of a quid pro quo was wrong, and that he hadn’t known about the meeting beforehand.

[Robert Greene: Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris]

By Bezos’s own logic, how are the journalists at the Post supposed to be able to get out from under the perception that Bezos is hopelessly biased? What about readers? Do they now have to assume that the Post’s politics are Bezos’s politics?

I’m sorry that Bezos has not brought the same energy, focus, and innovation to the Post that he brought to Amazon. The man who built the “everything store” could have developed the Post into an “everything portal,” a model for information sharing. If he wanted to foster ideological diversity, he could have purchased multiple publications, each with its own editorial board. Instead, he apparently decided he wanted a trophy. And now that trophy has gotten in the way of another ambition—becoming a commercial space pioneer.

What chance do journalists have to regain public confidence if the person who owns one of the most important media institutions in the world doesn’t have the first clue about the long-standing campaign to delegitimize the very publication he owns?

Whatever the public perception, the reality is that most journalists, across the country, show up at work each day determined to be fair, honest, and direct. That’s what their readers expect of one another, and they should expect the same of the people who report the news they consume.

If only Jeff Bezos understood that.