Donald Trump didn’t steal the 2024 election. He has won it — clearly and comprehensively.
Democrats warned that Trump and his supporters are prepared to hijack democracy. Now they must ruefully acknowledge another reality: The Trump movement, no matter how much this appalls opponents, is a powerful expression of democracy.
Vice President Kamala Harris may have been an imperfect candidate — the postmortems are vigorously underway on Wednesday morning — but she delivered the essential Democratic argument perfectly well: The Trump Era was something to be scraped off the national shoe.
Instead, there will be another helping placed on the national plate. His adversaries don’t have to pretend it tastes good. But, for now, they need to eat it.
It is not Harris alone who must reckon with the reality that Trump responded to the national mood more credibly for a larger share of Americans than she did. (For now, he is on track to win the popular vote as well as a solid Electoral College victory.) Trump is anathema to a solid majority of college graduates, including to large numbers of conservatives and traditional Republicans. These voters send their children to campuses where Trump revulsion is an article of faith. The news media broadly concluded that the gravity of Trump’s threat to American norms — including the fact that he is a convicted felon — meant doing away with weasel words like “misled” and instead flatly called him a liar and a would-be despot.
Tuesday night gave an answer to how much the politics of denunciation would dilute Trump’s support. And it posed a new question to his opponents: Now what?
2024 surely must persuade the last doubters of something that was evident to Trump partisans from the moment he first sent his presidential ambitions aloft in 2015: He is not simply a celebrity candidate but the leader of a political movement.
The distinction is important. Conventional politicians can see their careers wilt in a moment before controversies and setbacks. Movement leaders — rare figures in American history — draw their energy from deep wellsprings of cultural identity, grievance and aspiration. Like a hurricane over tropical waters, they actually grow stronger from controversies and setbacks.