I love my country and my people even when we make a mistake. And you really see people for who they are when they are at their lowest.
On Clinton:
On Obama:
They lose with grace and class. Not what I wanted, but who they are.
And then our side didn’t turn out. And now we have a president with no history of governance and with a penchant for vengeance.
As painful as it is, we have to look at what happened to see where we need to go from here.
Jonathan Capehart/WaPo:
The frightening thing about Trump is that he has a penchant for retribution. One campaign aide, Omarosa Manigault, told the Independent Journal Review, “It’s so great our enemies are making themselves clear so that when we get into the White House, we know where we stand.” And she added this: “Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list.”
Yes, revenge is a dish best served cold. And when you’re president of the United States, it could come under the color of law.
WaPo:
America woke up Wednesday as two nations.
One jubilant, hopeful, validated. The other filled with fear, pessimism, abject horror. And both staring at an uncertain future in light of the vast chasm now revealed by this election.
For many, the unexpected elevation of an insurgent Donald J. Trump has shaken their very concept of these united states and forced them to consider whether they are living in an America that is not what they thought it was.
In Middletown, Ohio, a 26-year-old wife of a Pentecostal pastor woke up beaming at the possibilities of Trump staging an economic turnaround and opposing abortions.
In Dallas, a 51-year-old immigration lawyer fielded panicked calls from clients fearing deportation, believing that their refugee applications are now imperiled and losing hope over the possibility of reuniting with spouses and children.
Jonathan Chait/New Yorker:
Never in my lifetime has the United States seen a period of darkness like the one that lies ahead of us. But we have seen periods of darkness before — segregation, McCarthyism, the internment of the Japanese, the Civil War, slavery. The American story is fitful progress punctuated by frequent reversals, some of which appeared at the time like they would last forever. None of them did.
OTOH there’s this approach from Catherine Rampell:
Fortunately, I retain faith in another powerful tool: democracy. By which I mean democracy as defined by H.L. Mencken: “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Maybe the only way for Americans to really, truly understand how toxic, wrong-headed and futile Trump’s policies are is to let him provide proof of concept.
That is, to give us Trumpism, good and hard.
Maybe the only way to prove that Trump can’t bring back manufacturing jobs, or coal jobs, or other jobs displaced by technology and productivity gains, is to let him try to do so through his ill-advised tariffs.
Yeah, this a position of privilege, I get that. So does she:
Most disturbing, while the public is busy formulating its own first-person, expert-free verdict on his policy experiments, those experiments could do a lot of harm. They could put people’s lives at risk, both here and abroad, if he carries out his intentions to punish political enemies, double down on torture and other human rights violations, scale back civil liberties and encourage despots to roam (and bomb) freely.
So I guess that leaves me back where I started: wielding my almighty pen, hoping someone across the divide reads my scribblings, trying to read more carefully theirs, and urging Trump to do better, even if I know he’s not really listening. Maybe I’ll just be screaming into the void. But hopefully, on occasion, the void will scream back.
But her piece raises the important point of what happens if and when Trump can’t deliver. That’s when it gets scary. He generally blames others.
Yascha Mounk/Slate:
And if one thing is clear about Trump, it is that his instincts are deeply authoritarian. The political scientist Juan Linz listed the warning signs long ago. As described by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, they include “a refusal to unambiguously disavow violence, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of an elected government.” Trump, they write, passes this anti-democratic litmus test with flying colors
Leonid Bershidsky/Bloomberg:
Trump's Victory Proves the U.S. Is Unexceptional
Many will say Trump's victory was fueled by racism and xenophobia. It's more complicated than that.
The pro-Trump Orlando crowd wasn't an all-white, all-male audience. The day before, when Orlando government relations consultant Bertica Cabrera Morris, a Trump surrogate, told me the Republicans hadn't really botched Hispanic outreach and would deliver plenty of votes to their candidate, it was all I could do not to show disbelief. Yet she was right: Spanish was heard in that hotel ballroom. Women, too, were well-represented. Clearly, enough Latinos and enough women didn't believe Trump's words about them had been particularly offensive.
This is just anecdotal evidence, of course, and so is the fact that, in my travels around the U.S. this year, I met far more people who were enthusiastic about Trump than about Clinton. But then, do we have anything but anecdotal evidence to go on anymore?
Clearly, most pollsters and pundits were so wrong that everything they said all year should have been disregarded. I am sorry I didn't have the courage to do so, unlike some people I met -- for example, Las Vegas lawyer Robert Barnes, who has, since the primaries, consistently predicted a Trump victory and who has now made hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself and the clients he advised to place bets on Trump with European bookmakers. The sign she and other gamblers saw -- many of them rather unscientific -- turned out to be more valid than the arrogant opinions and authoritative-looking calculations of pollsters, academics, political operatives and veteran commentators.
Ishaan Tharoor/WaPo:
Last week, even as most pundits and election prognosticators assumed Hillary Clinton was in poll position to be the next American president, Steve Bannon, the chief executive of Donald Trump's campaign, seemed confident.
“I still think that most of the people in the establishment don’t realize how deep this movement is and how powerful it is,” he said in an interview with a right-wing radio show, where he suggested that, no matter the outcome of Tuesday's election, the politics unleashed by Trump's campaign were here to stay. And not just in the United States.
“This whole movement has a certain global aspect to it,” Bannon said, linking Trump's rise to a constellation of populist revolts across Europe. “People want more control of their country. They’re very proud of their countries. They want borders. They want sovereignty. It’s not just a thing that’s happening in any one geographic space.”
Scott Alexander/Slate Star Codex:
I’m worried that one of these two things will happen on Wednesday:
Either Hillary wins, and everybody agrees that Jon Wiener and various other people like him were right, that the fundamentals made a Trump win impossible, that Trump was a random clown who never had a chance anyway, that the people who warned us to beware of Trump were crying wolf, that this proves that nationalism is a spent force in politics, et cetera.
Or Trump wins, and everybody agrees that Scott Adams was a genius, that Wiener was an idiot, that Trump is a brilliant “master persuader”, that this proves that the 21st century will be a century of renewed nationalist power, that the white working class is sexist, that elites need to realize the precariousness of their position within a democratic system, or whatever.
Imagine that the deciding factor really is a rainstorm in Philadelphia. There was a rainstorm in Philly, therefore nationalism is one of the great motivating forces in human affairs? It was a clear sunny day in Philly, therefore nationalism doesn’t matter anymore? The difference between nationalism being all-powerful and irrelevant is whether there was a cold front over the mid-Atlantic region?
But with a race this close, any deciding factor is going to be about as random as a rainstorm over Philadelphia. Maybe the pollsters made some kind of big mistake and missed shy Trump voters, and the vote goes Trump 47% Hillary 45% instead of the predicted Hillary 47% Trump 45%. So what? The difference between a proof of nationalism’s vigor versus proof its impotence is which candidate gets 47% vs. 45%? Really?
Current Affairs:
WHAT THIS MEANS, HOW THIS HAPPENED, WHAT TO DO NOW
This morning, the people of Earth awoke to find that the fate of the human species has been placed in the hands of reality television mogul and unconvicted sex criminal Donald J. Trump, who has been given access to the nuclear codes. This is, to somewhat understate things, a deeply troubling development. Trump is a man embodying every single noxious trait in the human character, a man that even Glenn Beck finds unhinged. For those of us who abhor white supremacism and sexual assault, or who believe that climate change and nuclear war threaten the survival of the planet, this is a state of emergency.
There is no time to sit around goggle-eyed and slack-jawed. We should ask a number of straightforward questions, and try to figure out what’s what. First, how did this happen? Second, what are its implications? And finally, what the hell do we do now?
But first, let’s take a breath….
This was what Democrats did. This was a campaign of mockery: Trump voters were treated with disdain. Hillary Clinton dismissed huge swaths of them as a “basket of deplorables.” To be a Trump supporter was to be dumb, a redneck, a misogynist.
Here’s the problem: if Democrats had actually spent time with Trump voters, as opposed to judging them by polls, they would have found this theory incomplete. They missed the fact that many Trump voters had a kind of undirected dissatisfaction and anger at the Establishment. For some, the source of this was most likely economics. For many, immigration. For others, it was probably simply an existential despair at the hopelessness of modern life, such as we all feel. But many of them simply didn’t know what they were angry at. They just knew they were angry. Trump came along and gave them a convenient narrative: the source of this anguish was ISIS, Mexicans, and Hillary Clinton. This was very powerful. Democrats didn’t have a good counter-narrative. They lost.
I wish that were true, but I don’t believe it. We have no checks and balances.
What Digby in Salon said:
When I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Yesterday I woke up thinking that the United States would elect a new president and remain a mostly respected world superpower and a reasonably stable global economic leader. I looked at the polls and believed that the chances of Republican nominee Donald Trump winning were so remote that it was not worth thinking about. So I wrote a piece assuming that Democrat Hillary Clinton would win, something I am usually careful not to do. So, of course, the unthinkable happened.
On the news that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, stock market futures nosedived, the dollar plunged and the whole world is in shock. We wake up today to a fundamentally different world than the one in which we woke up yesterday. The nation our allies looked to as the guarantor of global security will now be led by a pathologically dishonest, unqualified, inexperienced, temperamental, ignorant flimflam man. Things will never be the same. And we have no idea at the moment exactly what form this change is going to take, which makes this all very, very frightening.
This recent Storify goes back to 2010 history:
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was crippled by voters who stayed home
On Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton appears to have been the choice of a plurality of voters to be the next president of the United States. As of writing, she leads Donald Trump by about 35,000 votes nationally, a margin that will likely climb as more votes from heavily populated, Democratic-leaning states are added.
But Hillary Clinton will not be the next president of the United States because those voters didn't live in the right places. Clinton won big in states that Democrats usually win and closed the gap in big states that Democrats usually lose. But in smaller states where Democratic victories have been narrower in recent years, Donald Trump got more votes and therefore got the electoral votes and therefore won the presidency.
Data from overnight shows how the electoral map changed between 2012 and now. In a broad swath across the upper Midwest, Donald Trump outperformed Mitt Romney by a wide margin.
We lost the Midwest and did not replace it with the New South.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
How the Rustbelt Paved Trump's Road to Victory
The president-elect won by locking in support from traditional “blue wall” states Hillary Clinton thought were in her corner
Marc Fisher/WaPo with some optimism (myself, I’m not quite ready for it):
Every chapter in the American story so far has resolved into hope. The Civil War birthed Reconstruction. The riots and generational strife of the 1960s settled into sweeping social and cultural change.
Before the vote, the University of Virginia’s president, Teresa Sullivan, appealed to students to be civil to one another after the vote. She taught them about the bitter election of 1800, when a pro-John Adams newspaper warned that Thomas Jefferson would create a nation in which “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.” Jefferson won and set about trying to get people to “unite with one heart and one mind,” to restore “that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things . . .”
Daly, the evangelical leader, said he intends to reach out to gay activists and abortion rights advocates “to build bridges, just trying to create discussions and friendships. I don’t know if it will work. When you try to do that, you get killed by the extremes on both sides. The uncorking of incivility makes it hard: Discussions that used to die among friends now become unbridled castigating of other people. I’m hopeful that this election is a blip. We’re now at a point where we cannot say that civility is a shared value, and I don’t see how we can keep our democracy together without being able to talk to each other.”