It happened. Again.
I would be lying if I said this was a totally unexpected outcome; but, at the same time, it almost felt impossible. Surely there was no way, for the second time in history, a candidate would be elected to a non-consecutive second term. And, surely, that candidate wouldn’t be somebody as abject and foul and loathsome as Trump. He lost the popular vote in 2016. We rejected him, in a popular vote landslide, in 2020. I knew there would be a chance he won; I knew Kamala Harris’ campaign wasn’t enough to ward off his threat, but it still doesn’t feel real.
Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election, and everything is worse now.
That phrase keeps racing through my mind. It’s from the Netflix show “BoJack Horseman,” though of course the part about Trump is my own. It feels apt: the prospect of a Trump presidency is so horrifying precisely because we’ve experienced it before. I’m not here to parrot liberal talking points about the end of democracy or the rise of a totalitarian regime; exaggeration doesn’t seem necessary because the actual material reality of the next four years will be bad enough. An extreme right-wing sect of the American electorate won, again, and that in itself is enough to warrant immediate, unbridled distress.
Make no mistake: this is, in part, the Democratic Party’s fault. In no reality was it ever okay to champion Joe Biden for as long as they did. It should not have taken an embarrassing debate performance for him to drop out of the race. The strategy afterward should have been to embrace progressive visions, to promote popular policies relating to college costs, healthcare costs and wages — not to march ever slowly to the right and rally on endorsements from people like Dick Cheney.
The Democrats were not the left opposition we so desperately needed this election cycle. They did nothing but confirm their own ineptitude and inability to read the room and change with the times. They disillusioned voters, and this is the result of that.
But, despite all of that, I was still hoping Harris and Tim Walz would win. Not because I have any particular affinity for either of them: I’ve been vocal about my distaste for her and the Biden administration for a long time. Still, I understand the threat Trump poses and the fact there are marginalized people who are going to be actually affected by his election. I empathize with the people who voted third party or refrained from voting entirely — I think they represent a very real electoral alienation we absolutely must contend with. But my choice to vote for Harris and Walz was strategic, their election being the only realistic alternative to Trump’s, and I don’t regret it at all.
It wasn’t enough though. And now, after a brief interlude, we return to the reality that is Trump’s administration. I want to say it’s surreal, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. The prefix “sur” literally means “above” — to say it’s “surreal” is to imply that it’s above the real, above our ability to truly understand. But I can understand. Trump, ever the demagogue, tapped into the concrete fears of an estranged population and employed conscious populist messaging. People are noticing an economic downturn, people want something or somebody they can blame. And, with no progressive alternative, a man like Trump fills in those gaps.
Unfortunately, it’s also true that the Trump campaign appealed to a young male bloc, preying on real issues of male loneliness and alienation and handing them a perverted, destructive solution. Joe Rogan, who is, not surprisingly, most popular among men, endorsed Trump on the eve of the election — it’s hard to argue this had any significant impact on the final results, but the implication it carries is heavy. His partnering with Elon Musk, his relationship with male influencers like Logan Paul and Adin Ross, were all an attempt to court the young male vote and place himself firmly within the anti-feminist manosphere.
Harris’ loss wasn’t entirely the result of misogyny. But it’s impossible not to take note of the misogynist sentiment that characterized much of Trump’s rhetoric toward her.
While we can understand the appeal Trump carries and the material conditions fueling this sort of extremist movement, the anger and sorrow and horror we feel are valid. We cannot tolerate the hate-fueled rhetoric he and his supporters spew. We cannot allow total disillusionment and alienation to consume us. We must remember that we the people have so much power, and we must continue exercising it. But damn it — it feels really hard, doesn’t it?
I’m thinking, specifically now, of the fact Trump has promised a mass deportation effort. I’m thinking of both the devastating effect it will have on our economy and, more importantly, the terror it will wreak on immigrant families.
I’m thinking of the Republican Party’s hostility to reproductive rights, of the fact people with uteruses across the country are going to continue to be hurt and die from a lack of abortion access. I’m thinking of people who live in states with total abortion bans, far from states with active clinics, who don’t have the same privilege as those who live in or close to blue states.
I’m thinking of the transgender community, who are continually positioned as the ultimate “other” as conservative politicians work to effectively criminalize their existence. I’m thinking of my two sisters who are transgender and how their lives are bound to get a lot harder.
I’m thinking of the people of Gaza, who continue to experience unspeakable horrors as our president-elect has signaled unconditional support for the Israeli government. I’m thinking of the ever-rising death toll there, which is currently standing at over 43,000.
I’m thinking, too, of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which was published in 1925 and reflected the feeling of hopelessness and dread in the years leading up to World War II. At the end of the poem, in the fifth part, there’s a total breakdown of language. And just as its syntactical structure grows almost completely incomprehensible, combining lyrics from “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” with the Lord’s Prayer, Eliot suddenly concludes his linguistic crescendo with a final stanza:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
There will certainly be protests across the country in response to this news. The public response to Trump’s victory will be anything but totally silent. But it still feels eerily procedural, like a predestined inevitability we couldn’t have done anything to prevent. It’s difficult to imagine what exactly is going to occur in these next four years, but we know now Donald Trump is going to be president. Again. And, from this fact, all else is going to follow.
Joey Sills (he/him) is a senior studying English, comparative literature and political science.
