The Absolute Last Advice You Should Listen to After the Election

Not long after midnight on election night, as the once unthinkable prospect of a Donald Trump victory was congealing into inevitability, former Democratic congressman Harold Ford made a rather fatuous plea on Fox News. “If it looks like what’s gonna happen happens, I do hope everybody can be gracious and magnanimous,” Ford said. In an evening’s worth of terrible news, it was perhaps the most aggravating thing I heard all night.

Ford’s pitch for magnanimity echoes similar calls for normalization, if not direct acquiescence, that some of America’s least compelling pundits have issued over the past 12 hours or so. “Donald Trump is my president—and he’s your president, too,” wrote columnist Marc Thiessen at the Washington Post; he went on to wonder whether Democrats would choose to work with Trump on common-ground issues, or “go into instant resistance mode again?” In the New York Times, Bret Stephens sniffed at liberals’ ongoing “insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance—capital R.” For these observers, it seems, the problem with the just-concluded presidential campaign cycle was in large part Democrats’ refusal to “tone it down”—and the question going forward is whether or not the left will grow up, stop whining, and start referring to Trump as “Mr. President.”

There are many, many things going through Democrats’ and Republicans’ heads right now. There are many, many feelings being felt on both sides. I feel pretty safe in saying that “magnanimity” is not one of them. To presume otherwise would be to pretend that, in the glow of victory, the petty tyrants of Trumpworld are summoning a nobility of spirit that, as far as I can tell, they haven’t manifested once in the past decade. To counsel magnanimity from the left is to smarmily suggest that Democrats ought to just ignore Trump’s manifest unfitness for office, the ethical bankruptcy of his campaign, and the dark promises he has vowed to keep upon retaking the presidency.

In life, there are plenty of times when it makes sense to be gracious amid the agony of defeat. Today is not one of those times. Donald Trump was the worst president in American history., and his upcoming term is likely to be even worse than his first. In times of true crisis, magnanimity is the privilege of those happy collaborators who are secure in the belief that they will be OK no matter what. For all the rest of us, now is not the time for magnanimity. Nope. Sorry. Screw these people.

If America is going to make it through the days, weeks, months, and—sigh—years to come, then you and I are going to have to hold on to the anger that we feel right now, and we are going to have to remember the many, many reasons why that anger is wholly justified. So remember this: After whipsawing the nation through his dumb and vicious shitshow of a first term, nearly capsizing the ship of state by inciting thousands of morons to riot over the false premise that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him, and becoming the first president in American history to be twice impeached, Donald Trump decided to run for president in 2024 primarily so that he might avoid facing punishment for his many alleged crimes. Those alleged crimes included falsely concealing a hush money payment he made to a porn star he slept with while he was married—he was convicted of this one, so it’s not alleged anymore—taking classified documents from the White House after leaving office and storing them in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago; and attempting to obstruct justice and overturn the 2020 presidential election. (He has also recently incurred millions of dollars in civil penalties for other offenses, such as sexually assaulting an Elle columnist in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s, and then defaming her repeatedly.)

So, in order to skirt accountability, Trump ran for president again. His campaign message was a shambolic tapestry of fearmongering, race-baiting, transphobia, dishonesty, and increasingly irrelevant mumbling. For about a month there he was acting as if the fictional character Hannibal Lecter was a real person. Recently he seemed to suggest that the Jazz Age gangster Al Capone was still alive. With increasing fervor as Nov. 5 drew near, Trump and his surrogates spoke openly of the nasty fates to which they hoped to subject their foes in the event of a GOP victory. He has spent years falsely pretending that America’s cities are crime-infested hellholes, and that the poor migrants selling candy bars on the subway are the violent vanguard of an invading army. He still has not admitted that he lost the 2020 election, and he refused to say that he would concede peacefully this year if the vote hadn’t gone his way.

Nothing that I mentioned above is a secret, and none of it should take you by surprise. All of us reading this right now were alive during Trump’s cruel, incompetent presidency, and all of us saw what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We’ve watched for a decade as the media has tried its best to document Trump’s dumbness and dishonesty, his self-dealing and his vanity, his total lack of any interest in or aptitude for governance, his evidently weakening grip on reality. We know from experience that he basically ruins everything he touches; we know from observation that he is exclusively focused on his own self-interest. You know this, I know this, and all of the smarmy pundits clucking about civility and counseling graciousness in defeat know this.

And you know what? A hell of a lot of the people who voted for Trump yesterday know it too—and they like it. They like the bluster and the imprecision; they like the bigotry and the transphobia; they like the obvious lies that flatter their own biases. They like that Trump seems to get away with every mean thing he says and selfish thing he does. They really like the fact that he is an old white man instead of a middle-aged Black woman. Trump’s voters watched his campaign, too, and many of them came away from it feeling empowered in their own bigotries and resentments. Many of these people seem to have lost the ability to differentiate between fact and fiction; many of them perhaps never cared very much about the distinction in the first place. They voted for Trump, many of them, because it was the best way to vote against diversity and tolerance, logic and reason, cities and universities, you and me.

And it is OK to be angry about all this right now. It’s necessary, even. The anger is righteous and justified and should not be tamped down, not just yet, possibly not for a very long time, if ever. There will be plenty of time for postmortems later on, and plenty of time to figure out precisely how the Democrats fucked this up. If you like, there will also be time for Democrats to grit their teeth and try to figure out how to work across the aisle. For now, though, there is no need to feign graciousness—and there is no need to pretend that any of this is or ever will be truly OK.