Today is as hard as anything I’ve known, in either personal or national terms. As hard as the loss of love, as hard as a frightful diagnosis, as hard as learning of the death of someone we believe in.

In a way, it is all of those things.

We—the “we” that I thought was a nation—knew who he is and what he intends. We’ve been there before. He is the man who let Americans risk a contagion rather than make the choices that might protect us. He is the man who enabled and thrived on prejudice and low sentience in order to advance himself. He is the man who has made an ideology of that self—it’s his only true ideology—and he will abide by and abet the worst beliefs and ambitions among us if these things help advance that primary ideology of self.

In short, he is the man who will unloose hurt and hatred upon us because that is the means and cost of his power. Also, because he revels in doing so.

The much worse concern is: Who are we? We’ve seen and heard him—and we chose him. We’ve been through unnerving presidential choices before, but that was about presidential choice, about political views, about a party’s interests and aims, about the nation’s policies and laws. This is about national character; this is about a new national self-definition.

America chose him twice. The first time with some unknowing. The second time, with perfect knowing. The second time, in a way that says: He is us. This is what we want to be, no matter what it costs others, no matter what it costs us. This is America.

I’ve generally been disinclined to call him a fascist because that is such a horrid and haunting connotation. Then, the other day, my wife Elaine reminded me: The elections in Germany of 1933 certified the Nazi seizure of power—that is, those elections were a democratic action—and they proved the last such democratic actions in Germany until 1990.

Last night, when it was evident where this was heading, I went downstairs and talked with Aiden and Abigail’s parents. I told them what was happening. I told them I was shocked and heartsick about it. I watched Elaine’s grandchildren—Abigail, as she tottered around the living room, smiling, learning how to take steps in her life, and Aiden, playing on an indoor slide, helping Abigail to climb it—and I realized this is it: the protection of home and the promise of family. This is the certainty I trust right now. All the land outside is shifting around us. All the land outside is being painted in opaque colors.

I never before believed that this is what I’d see in my autumnal time. I have to learn again how to step around the map outside our front door. The problem is, these days I have trouble walking.

I don't know what more I will have to say about any of this for a while. I'm unsettled for right now.

I want to thank everybody who responded to what I posted the day after the election. When I wrote it, I felt it was barely adequate. It was a great surprise, then, to discover that others found something of the moment in it.

I’d been awake most of the night, with one dog’s nose on my cheek and the other resting her head on my knees. That helped.

Since Tuesday night I’ve avoided cable and online news sites, except for what occasionally penetrates by way of notifications. Instead, I’ve joined Elaine in her steady watch of Hallmark holiday movies.

I don’t need to read postmortems. They’re as beside-the-point as the polls that inundated us. I don’t want to scan the many opinions that will pillory Biden and Harris. Biden was a good president. I’m grateful for him. And Harris ran the best campaign she could against the monster. Nothing they did or didn’t do would have prevented this outcome, and neither would have any other Democratic candidate. The nation is simply not done with Trump. The nation believes it still needs something from him. Maybe he will satisfy those Americans’ grievances in the coming years. He damn will intends to satisfy his own.

For my part, I know where I cast blame: on every person who voted for him, and on those (too many) pundits and media exponents that treated him all along as a legitimate candidate. The Vanity Fair cover that many of us posted here last night makes plain who really was all along, and who he will remain every inch forward.

Make no mistake: Trump is a gigantic figure in America, the most imposing president of my lifetime. He has changed everything. And, again, make no mistake: He is just getting started.

My own views of him and his cohorts don’t amount to anything of real effect, but I’ll nonetheless express reactions if I feel it’s necessary. I won’t engage in argument or debate at those times, because I never do. I will express support for others when I’m lucky enough to see what they express, because what you express is meaningful. It helps me, that’s for sure, just like Wednesday’s nose nestled against my cheek for hours. It’s all affirmation.

Also—and I say this to be fair but I also say it to be adamant—I’m not open to the commentary of those who tell us we have to get along with and better understand Trump’s voters. I don’t have to do that. I won’t do that.

I also reject the position I saw by too many yesterday (though from only one or two here): Namely, that Trump is my president, that he is our president, and we owe it to our president to support him. I haven’t felt that way about my obligations to any president since I turned my back on a man who was indeed a great president—LBJ—and I wasn’t even old enough yet to vote in 1964, nor in 1968, when Nixon overcame Humphrey. (Presidential campaigns are often hard for vice presidents who come from administrations that have been judged to have fallen in some way.)

I actually once was willing to allow Trump a good-faith grace note. That was in early 2020, when the pandemic was beginning to sweep through America. I thought even somebody as craven as Trump would rise to that frightening and horrific occasion and do everything in his considerable power to advise and protect the citizenry of the land that he was sworn to protect. I have abided through the terms of a handful of presidents whom I’ve opposed, but even the ones I detested and mistrusted most would not have failed that moment: They would’ve done whatever it would have taken to help keep the people of this land safe. Whether they had the fundamental humanity or simply the political good sense.

Trump did not have the fundamental humanity. He did not try to take care of us, to protect us, because he couldn’t round Covid up into camps then deport it. If he couldn’t hurt it, if he couldn’t punish it, then what was in it for him?

Turns out, however, that his political sense was right. He got by with it—the worst thing I’ve seen any president do—and he got rewarded.

Does anybody believe he will do anything differently if another contagion threatens the lives of millions of Americans? Once they have voted for him they no longer have the same use for him. He would walk on their graves if necessary, and turn that walk into a photo opportunity.

The media would swarm to cover that walk.