It should not have been this close.
Although it took a few days to count them all, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump once all the votes came in. A lot of people predicted that this is what would happen, so this part's not a surprise. What is a surprise is that Trump did so well.
In a sane world, this election would have been a thorough repudiation of Trump. His incompetence, his cruelty, his corruption, his racism, his stupidity. All of it. It should have been a landslide, both in the popular vote and the electoral college. Instead, Trump got several million more votes than he did in 2016, and until the early/mail-in votes started getting counted, it appeared that Trump could win. Nearly 70,000,000 voters looked at his behavior and decided another four years of that seemed good.
Additionally, a cluster of newly-elected Republican candidates are bringing their unique brand of crazy to the table. Two QAnon-spouting wingnuts were elected - Lauren Boebert in CO and Marjorie Taylor Greene in GA, plus a suspected racist/sexual predator in North Carolina. Yes, there have been racists and wingnuts in Congress before, but it's hard to dispute the claim that they wouldn't be there if Trump hadn't paved the way.
Trump has poisoned the country's political process. Not that it was perfect before, but he made it exponentially worse. He co-opted one of the two major political parties and dialed everything repugnant about it up to 1,000. He allowed the Republican Party to unapologetically embrace its worst behaviors. He weakened multiple democratic safeguards against abuse of power, which will make it harder to block the next Trump-like figure from coming along. It will take a decade or more to undo the damage that Trump has inflicted on the country.
There's no justification for voting for him a second time, not after the last four years. 2016 can be partly excused, because everything bad about Trump was mostly theoretical. He had never held office, so voters didn't have a track record to judge him on. And the media did the country a disservice by playing up his most sensational failings while refusing to dig too deeply into the most unseemly parts of his life. We don't have that now. Trump has been an absolute failure and will go down in history as one of the worst presidents in the country's history.
Yet roughly one-fifth of the country saw that as a net positive. They were comfortable with Trump's many moral failings, so much so that they deemed him worthy to run the country for another four years. They were okay with the racism, the willful ignorance, the pettiness, the lying, the divisive rhetoric. Some explained it away, some ignored it, and some applauded it.
I feel like this election revealed the true character of a giant swath of the country.
And it breaks my heart.
