Voters gave America’s rudest man permission to return to the White House; what else have they given permission to? Michael Che has one idea. “So y’all gonna let a man with 34 felonies lead the free world and be the president of the United States?” he asked during last night’s “Weekend Update.” “That’s it. I’m listening to R. Kelly again.”

The joke captured a feeling that’s been circulating in America ever since last Tuesday’s election: silver-lining nihilism, a relief that we can stop trying to be good. Kamala Harris lost probably because of the economy, but the Republican campaign did effectively leverage widespread exhaustion with identity politics, inclusive speech, and perhaps even civility itself. Some of Trump’s supporters have celebrated by crowing vileness such as “Your body, my choice.” Some of Harris’s fans have openly denigrated the minorities who voted for Trump.

Eesh. But if this is, as my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams posted on X, the “post-woke era,” then perhaps at least comedy—the entertainment form that’s grouched the most about progressive piety—will be funnier now. Maybe someone will channel the spirit of Joan Rivers in her prime, turning nastiness into a high art. But judging from last night’s SNL, we will not be so lucky.

The episode’s host, the comedian Bill Burr, seemed well positioned to interpret Trump’s win. With his Boston accent and stubbled beard, he has long drawn upon his white-working-class bona fides to critique both sides of the partisan divide. When he hosted SNL shortly before the 2020 presidential election, he mocked wokeness in a somewhat sneaky way: By accusing white women and gay people of hijacking the posture of oppression from people of color, he in effect co-opted the logic of intersectionality to call out its own excesses. Whether you were offended or amused by his monologue, it at least had a point.

Last night, however, Burr just seemed ornery. He opened with a promise to avoid talking about the election, and then said he’d just gotten over the flu. When you’re sick, he observed, you lie awake “just going through this Rolodex of people that coughed on you. Sniffled near ya. Walked by an Asian or something.” Smattered chuckles. “You try to fight it. You’re like, ‘They say on the internet that’s where all the disease comes from.’” Almost no laughs.

Eventually he got to the election. “All right, ladies you’re oh-and-two against this guy,” he said, referring to Harris’s and Hillary Clinton’s losses to Trump. “Ladies, enough with the pantsuit, okay? It’s not working. Stop trying to have respect for yourselves. You don’t win the office, like, on policy, you know? You gotta whore it up a little.” He added, “I know a lot of ugly women—feminists, I mean—don’t want to hear this message.”

Maybe in those oh-so-woke times a week ago, I’d feel compelled to spell out how repeating stereotypes about Asian people and reducing women to their looks effectively makes life harder for Asian people and women. Other pundits would have then defended Burr on the grounds that he’s mocking his own racism and America’s sexism. Let’s skip all that and agree that Burr’s attempt to push the line of acceptability led him to bomb in a way that was horrible to watch. He created the same sucking feeling that Tony Hinchcliffe did when he made an arena of MAGAs groan at the idea that Puerto Rico is floating garbage. There’s no wit, no passion, no aha to this kind of comedy. It’s just guys flailing about for a reaction.

To be fair, Burr might have just been tired. This election cycle “took forever,” even though most voters made up their mind long ago, he complained. Their choices were two “polar opposite” candidates: “It’s like, ‘Let’s see. What does the orange bigot have to say? How about the real-estate agent that speaks through her nose?’”  (“Orange bigot”—is this The View in 2015?)

The rest of the episode was a bit better than the monologue. Burr’s presence pushed the writers to focus on sketches about masculinity, an apt subject given the role that male voters played in the election. A segment in which young guys tried to get their dads to open up about their feelings by talking about sports and cars was oddly touching. A bit featuring a self-pitying bro at group therapy was amusingly deranged. In the edgiest sketch, Burr played a fire fighter with a fetish involving children’s cartoons, leading SNL to air an image of the dad from Bluey in a ball gag. Was this post-woke Hollywood vulgarity or what comedy’s always been—the search for surprise?

The truth that SNL and the culture at large must now wrestle with is this: Trump may be back in office after four years away, but the world only turns forward. Wokeness has not been some fad; it hasn’t even been a movement that can be defeated. It’s been, as the term itself implies, an awakening—reshaping how people think about the relationship between the words they use and the society they live in. The case it made was so persuasive that it altered the English language likely forever. It also spread shame and overreached in a way that created backlash—but that backlash will cause cultural changes that build off what we just lived through, not reverse it entirely. The way to fully get back to a pre-woke time would be through actual Orwellian fascism.  

SNL isn’t counting that possibility out. Last night opened with the cast members speaking to the camera, telling Trump that they’d supported him all along, that they shouldn’t be on an enemies list, and that they’ll help him hunt down any colleagues who voted for Harris. Their tone was light but the satire was dark, highlighting the way that leaders—in politics, media, and business—who were once critical of Trump have taken to flattering him out of fear of retribution. The sketch anticipated a future that would make recent speech wars look quaint. But for now, as for long before, we can say what we want to say, not only what we think we should say.

View from Baku: We must wash away division at COP29

Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that won him a return trip to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was on flagrant display in the past couple of weeks of the campaign. But Trump consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical. For example, Trump promised to both whip inflation and also institute enormous tariffs, a combination nearly all economists agree is impossible. The mass deportation that Trump has promised would also likely drive up prices, rather than soothing the economy. But in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump promised a way out.

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump said in remarks early this morning. “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”

You can contrast that with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps unfixable, flaw.

[Read: The night they hadn’t prepared for]

Harris won praise for her positive campaign message, especially in the immediate weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she became the nominee. Biden had spent months warning darkly about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking—explicitly. “We’re not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative answer, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become strikingly conservative, but it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take seriously the economic pain of inflation. In its first two years, the Biden administration was single-mindedly focused on revving and restructuring the economy after COVID, and treated inflation more as a transitory annoyance than a long-term danger. But also, it seems to have concluded that it lacked a good answer to inflation. The administration argued with frustration that inflation was a worldwide trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that inflation in the U.S. had dropped faster than in peer countries, and that the American economy was running better than any other. All of this was true and also politically unhelpful. You can’t argue people into feeling better with statistics.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats are now America’s conservative party]

In theory, the mid-summer switch from Harris to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris struggled to create distance from Biden. When she was offered chances to do so, she demurred. In early October, the hosts of The View asked her what she’d have done differently from the president, and she replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Republicans were delighted and made that a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it’s not clear that Harris would have been able to pull off a more radical switch. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbent parties in recent elections. Her coalition meant she couldn’t run an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign, even if she had been so inclined. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters closed off moving very far to the left on economics, though past campaigns do not offer clear evidence that would have been a winner either. Besides, Democrats had a good empirical case that what they had done to steward the economy was very successful. They just had no political case.

In a bitter turn for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes. If he truly attempts to, or succeeds at, speedily deporting millions of people or instituting 60 percent tariffs, he will drive inflation higher and wreck the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may temper that. Having clearly promised to fix the problem and vanquished his enemies, he’ll now be able to declare a swift victory.