“Ukrainians don’t care who will be president of the United States,” my boss, the editor in chief of one of the largest television stations in Ukraine, told me in 2012 as I headed overseas to cover the American election. I was at the Obama campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago, when the president gave his victory speech that year—but back then, Ukrainian television didn’t broadcast live at night, so my report didn’t air until the next morning, local time.

Covering the 2024 U.S. election for the Ukrainian media was an entirely different experience. People in Ukraine were following every turn. Multiple Ukrainian radio stations called me for reports from the rallies I’d attended in Saginaw, Michigan, and State College, Pennsylvania. Ukraine is at war, and the United States is its biggest provider of military aid; the future of that relationship was at stake. The contest’s eventual winner, Donald Trump, had promised to end the war in 24 hours—which Ukrainians understood to mean that he intended to sell our country out to Russia.

But for me, that was only one dimension of this election’s significance. I’ve covered five American presidential contests for the Ukrainian press, starting in 2008, and in that time, I feel that I have witnessed an American transformation that resonates uncomfortably with the Ukrainian past.

After Ukraine became independent, in 1991, our political parties were for decades run from the pockets of oligarchs. A handful of unimaginably wealthy men, each with holdings in media and industry, controlled factions of political representatives who competed almost exclusively with one another. Political campaigns lacked substance and consisted mainly of personal attacks. In the United States in 2008 and 2012, by contrast, the candidates had real constituencies and actual debates about health care and the economy. Many Ukrainians envied the strength of American institutions, media, and civic engagement.

[Read: ‘They didn’t understand anything, but just spoiled people’s lives’]

Sure, I was a bit stunned when, at a 2008 John McCain rally in Columbus, Ohio, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned voters that socialism was on the rise and would destroy America the way it had his native Austria. I had just been to Youngstown, Ohio, where I’d interviewed laid-off workers who lacked basic health care; Austria, meanwhile, was a country I knew well, and it had one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why would an elected official peddle such nonsense to this enormous crowd? Still, American democracy seemed, to an outsider, like the picture of health.

The roles had all but reversed when I came back in 2016. Ukrainians had risen up in 2014 against the corrupt, Russia-backed government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Our transition wasn’t perfect, but we elected a government that was at last serious about reform. The Kremlin responded by occupying Crimea and assaulting eastern Ukraine, where it backed separatists in the Donbas region. A low-level war would continue in the Donbas straight up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022. Even so, we were building up our democracy. Something was happening to America that seemed to point in a different direction.

That year, Americans were more divided than I’d ever seen them. And it wasn’t easy to talk with Republicans. Some Trump supporters told me that a European reporter could never understand their views on guns. One shut the door in my face at a campaign headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, explaining that he didn’t trust the foreign media. I’d reported from the rallies of pro-Russian separatists in Crimea and the Donbas, who considered Kyiv-based journalists suspicious if not outright enemies, and I knew when to leave.  

That feeling wasn’t the only disconcertingly familiar one. The worldviews of many Americans I talked with that year diverged starkly from the visible facts of their lives. Democrats scoffed that nobody would vote for Trump—but the excitement at his rallies was plainly evident. A man at a Trump rally in Wilmington, Ohio, complained to me about unemployment. Neither he nor anybody in his family had lost a job—in fact, the mayor of Wilmington told me that the town had more than 300 job vacancies. A retired prosecutor told me that the only media outlet he trusted was WikiLeaks. I was reminded of Russia’s coordinated disinformation campaign against Ukrainians: Since the start of the war, we’d been flooded with fabricated news. We had struggled to make the international press understand that high-profile politicians were simply inventing stories. Now something similar seemed to be happening in the United States.

As of this fall, Ukraine is two and a half years into an all-out war with Russia, and America is eight years into a style of politics that my American colleagues describe as substanceless. I listened for mentions of Ukraine at the rallies I attended, and heard none. The closest the candidates came was when Trump, in Pennsylvania, promised that his administration wouldn’t get involved in the affairs of “countries you’ve never heard of,” and Kamala Harris reminded a crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that Trump had a strange fascination with Russia. Nonetheless, the Trump supporters I spoke with assured me that their candidate would bring an end to all wars, including the one in Ukraine. I heard this from Bill Bazzi, the mayor of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. And I heard it from rally-goers, including an elderly woman at a J. D. Vance event in Saginaw, who told me that she’d persuaded skeptical family members to overlook Trump’s personality and focus on his leadership qualities and ability to bring peace to the world.

Harris didn’t speak much about foreign policy at the event I attended in Ann Arbor, but she did warn her audience about the risk of fascism. That word surprised me. Since the full-scale invasion of our country, Ukrainians have frequently used it to describe the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. The international media have been reluctant to pick up the term, perhaps because it is so heavily freighted with historical meaning. But now it has become part of the American political vernacular.

This American campaign season was rife with reminders of a politics that were once routine in Ukraine, and that we are now happy to be mostly rid of. We know very well, from our experience, what happens when billionaires own media platforms: They can withdraw endorsements written by their editorial boards and back political candidates in order to curry favor. In Warren, Michigan, I talked with a man who claimed that he’d earned $80,000 in one month for collecting signatures for Elon Musk’s petition to support the Constitution. In another echo, the Trump camp threatened that it would challenge the election results if they didn’t name him the winner: Ukraine has some experience with elections followed by months of litigation.

Some of the Americans I met on the campaign trail wanted to know if I found the situation in their country disturbing. Sure. But everything is relative. Americans are fortunate not to live through what we do in Ukraine. There were times in the past week when I’d be reporting in the Midwest and, because of the time difference, the air-raid-alert app on my phone would go off in the middle of the day, announcing another nighttime attack on my home city of Kyiv. In between interviews, I’d scroll through photos of the buildings hit, hoping not to see my family’s home.   

Trump has won the contest for the U.S. presidency. If he withholds military aid, Ukraine may suffer huge losses on the battlefield and enormous civilian casualties. But one way or another, Kyiv is going to have to work with his administration. My time reporting on the campaign has convinced me that this election was not an aberration so much as a reality to be accepted. For the foreseeable future, the United States will turn inward, becoming a country more and more focused on itself. Outsiders will simply have to take this into account.

[Listen: Autocracy in America]

As for the threat of encroaching authoritarianism, I remain an optimist. Take it from a member of the generation of Ukrainians who successfully defended democracy: To capture a state requires not just a strong leader but an apathetic society. Democracy survives when citizens actively defend their rights on every level.

I saw a lot of that in Nevada and Arizona, where I spent the last two days of the campaign following canvassers. I went door-to-door with members of the Culinary Union of Las Vegas—a guest-room attendant, a cocktail server, and a porter—and listened as they urged residents to pay attention to the Nevada Senate race. In Phoenix, I followed a group of volunteers from California who’d spent weeks trying to talk with people they disagreed with. They told me they had knocked on 500,000 doors in Arizona. Friends in New York and Washington told me that they or their relatives had done campaign work outside their cities—writing letters, phone-banking. Even those critical of both candidates and the system itself cared deeply about the country; some who were alienated from the national races focused their energies on local ones. I have never seen anything like this in Europe, where elections are all about going to the polls once every few years.

One thing we have learned in Ukraine, confronted with foreign invasion and war, is that life goes on. The same will be true for America after November 5. I’m reminded of the time a foreign journalist asked a Ukrainian general how Ukraine would survive the winter. He confidently replied that after the winter, there would be spring.

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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.”

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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

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

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Iowa Democrats had gotten their hopes up, and honestly, how could they not? On Saturday night, J. Ann Selzer—the most renowned pollster in Iowa, if not the entire country—released her final pre-election survey, finding that Kamala Harris was leading Donald Trump by three points in a state the former president had carried by eight in 2020.

The poll seemed to portend a big night for Harris not only in Iowa but across the Midwest, suggesting a surge of support from women that would virtually assure her election. It also found a pair of Democratic House candidates in Iowa leading Republican incumbents, pointing to a Democratic majority in the chamber.

On Monday night, as Democrats packed inside a gymnasium in Des Moines for a rally, Selzer’s survey was all anyone could talk about. “I know that was exciting,” Lanon Baccam, the Democrat running for the local congressional seat, told the crowd, which erupted in cheers at the mere mention of the poll, “but I don’t think anyone in this room is surprised.”

[Read: How to understand the election returns so far]

The following night, many of the same Democrats gathered for a watch party inside a hotel ballroom downtown, their hopes turning to nerves and finally to resignation as a far bleaker picture emerged. The Selzer poll was way off, and Trump was poised to win Iowa by his largest margin ever. Iowa Democrats haven’t had much to celebrate since Barack Obama’s victory in 2012, and last night wasn’t any different.

“Iowa has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Republicans are in the advantage right now,” Bill Brauch, the Democratic Party chair in Polk County, which includes Des Moines, told me. “We hoped that would change someday, but it isn’t today.”

Democrats had been optimistic about Iowa for the same reasons they were optimistic across the country. After foregoing most door-knocking due to the pandemic in 2020, they had built a robust turnout operation that dwarfed the GOP’s organizing efforts, which Democrats saw little evidence of as they canvassed neighborhoods. Enthusiasm, Brauch told me, was “through the roof.” And indeed, he said turnout was high in Des Moines. But more voters went Republican than Democrats expected, cutting into the margins that Democrats needed to offset the GOP’s strength in rural counties, where Republican turnout was also high.

The dynamic was the same across the country as returns came in: Despite strong turnout in many areas, Harris could not match Joe Biden’s 2020 performance in the counties that powered his victory over Trump. As of early Wednesday morning, the GOP had flipped at least two Senate seats, in West Virginia and Ohio, giving Republicans an all-but-certain majority, and they had a chance of ousting Democratic incumbents in several other battlegrounds that were too close to call. The House landscape was less certain, as Democrats still had a chance to flip enough GOP districts to recapture control.

They needed a net gain of four House seats for a majority, and although some of the party’s best pickup opportunities were in blue states such as New York and California, Democrats began seeing races in the Midwest trend in their direction in the closing weeks, opening up the possibility of more paths to the majority and larger gains nationally. But the Midwest surge did not materialize.

Democrats had poured late money into the two most competitive House races in Iowa, where they saw evidence that voters wanted to punish Republicans for enacting a state abortion ban—one of the strictest in the country—that took effect this summer following months of legal battles. In 2022, low Democratic turnout in places like Polk County helped Republicans flip a House seat, giving them all four in the state. The abortion ban, however, sparked hope among Democrats that Iowa would see the same blue shift that other states saw in 2022 after the Supreme Court overruled Roe—a belief that the Selzer poll reinforced.

Selzer has achieved a near-mythical status among political insiders. On Monday night, when I asked Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture and former two-term Iowa governor, whether he believed her latest findings, he replied with a detailed history of Selzer’s past predictive successes. In 2008, her polling correctly forecast that Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, and in both of the past two presidential elections, it came close to nailing Trump’s margin of victory when most other polls underestimated his support. “Anyone who doubts Ann Selzer when it comes to Iowa does so at their own risk,” Vilsack told me. “So do I believe it?” he added, referring to her Saturday poll. “Absolutely.”

On Tuesday night, the Democrats who showed up to rejoice instead realized that Selzer’s survey was just another poll—one of many that appeared to once again underestimate Trump’s support. As the night wore on, they held out hope that Baccam would defeat Representative Sam Nunn, a first-term Republican. (As of this writing, the Democrat in Iowa’s other competitive House race is narrowly trailing with nearly all precincts reporting.) But a podium set up for victory speeches stayed empty, and when, at around 11:20 p.m. local time the Associated Press called the race for Nunn, only a smattering of Democrats were there to see the news.

Brauch, the county Democratic chair, was at a loss to explain how his party fell so far short once more. “I don’t think any of us knows what the answer is,” he told me. “If we did, we’d be doing better tonight.”