Forget about 270. Today, the number that matters most is 92—former and future President Donald J. Trump will now be presidents 45+47.
But anyone who thinks the Republicans just won the election and the Democrats didn’t lose hasn’t been paying attention.
The Democrats outworked nobody in this election. All they did was outspend and out-fundraise by a truly massive margin. But the seemingly complete absence of strategy—beginning with the candidate they chose, the timing around her selection, and the complete absence of any selection process itself—is how we got to where we are today.
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Some will opine that Trump’s win is the Bat-Signal for fascists around the world to come out and play; that today marks the end of American Democracy. Factor into it that the Democrats have lost the Senate and will surely lose the House of Representatives, and then layer on top of that the sketchiest Supreme Court in the history of American Supreme Courts, and it’s understandable why people think this is a disaster stew.
I lived through this a few years ago as a Jew in Berlin when the formerly right-wing fringe party Alternative for Deutschland won the state elections. Things went from fine when I moved to Berlin, to a little uncomfortable, to let’s pack and go.
But if, today, we can just recapture the joy—nah, just kidding. This never should have been about joy. It never should’ve been about hope, and it certainly never should have been about anything aside from a solid strategy and daily execution on a plan that never was.
Democrats were outworked every day in every way. This was one of those times in life where it seemed impossible and impractical to lose, yet the Democratic Party again found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and to do it on a massive global stage.
I don’t believe that democracy is dead yet, yet I do assent to the assertion that if democracy dies in darkness, things just got real dark.
What matters most from here is whether the rule of law holds against whatever assaults Trump and Trumpism 2.0 launches against it. If laws are clear, fair, and applied consistently, protecting all of us from arbitrary power or injustice, the Republic will survive.
But it won’t help the cause that Trump’s baser instincts won’t be checked by Congress and even the old hands and former generals are unlikely to have much of a say in his next administration.
But here’s the thing: while the rule of law serves as a foundational principle, it’s been feeling increasingly distant to many Americans navigating today’s political turbulence.
The tension between our ideals and the reality we face makes it easy to see why people are ready to throw their hands up and vote for the Great Disruptor—or even look for an escape hatch, fantasizing about a new life abroad while grappling with the uncertainty of what comes next.
Social media today is going to be consumed with Americans angrily planning their move to France, Canada, or any other of a number of places they have no legal right to immigrate to, and that don’t want them.
But that’s not a way forward.
Instead, we should be focused on what Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro is surely focused on this morning, and that is 2028. The next four years are going to be an absolutely wild ride and we’re not going to have any seatbelts because I believe that we just entered the post-seatbelt age.
Still, not all is lost. The sun will rise again tomorrow—or maybe four years from now. In the meantime, let’s cling to the hope that America’s democracy is stronger than we even thought.
A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the chief strategy officer forAmplify. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Newsweek, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, Abogados, Today’s Esquire, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, and many other leading publications across the globe.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.