“Let there be sung Non nobis, and Te Deum.” Donald Trump is again the president-elect of the United States of America.  

His was not an equivocal victory. At writing, as the last johnny-come-lately precincts submit their totals to state election boards, Trump holds a secure popular-vote majority. He has won every swing state, including North Carolina, where he shared the ballot with a gubernatorial candidate who said nice things about Hitler on internet pornography forums. While his winning coalition was majority white (as any winning coalition must be in America — our tortured national discourse makes it easy to forget that the U.S. is still two-thirds Caucasian in persuasion), he made significant inroads with black and Hispanic voters, posting double-digit gains in many districts. His characteristically rambling acceptance speech was a good-natured affair, featuring mentions and walk-on appearances from his rag-tag band of merry men and women — the rocket tycoon, the cage-fighting magnate, the golf podcaster. It was all very silly and, at least by 3 a.m. standards, pretty good TV. 

There were always suspicions that Harris was a bad candidate

Back at Festung DNC, the defeated Kamala Harris declined to address her supporters, a graceless echo of the candidate to whom she will spend the rest of her life being compared: Hillary Clinton. Not that her co-partisans necessarily wanted to hear much from her; indeed, many Democrats this morning may nurse a secret sense of relief. There were always suspicions that Harris was a bad candidate. She was compelled to drop out of the 2020 nomination race before a single vote was cast. The Biden White House, apparently due to the former Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s private hatred for the vice president, spent its first 18 months aggressively leaking embarrassing material about her dysfunctional office to POLITICO, CNN, and anyone else with an ear and an audience. A non-exhaustive list of her cons: an inability to speak off the cuff; an annoying laugh; a refusal to read briefing materials; an inability to maintain staff; a string of badly dated radical-sounding policies from her last run, including a ban of fracking and something that sounded an awful lot like near-total amnesty for illegal aliens; the refusal to espouse any policies on this run.  

In short, if she had made it to the winner’s podium, it would have been attributed to Republican weaknesses rather than her strengths. But now, having shunted Harris off to the Limbo of the Damned — that is to say, the grad-school lecture circuit — the Democrats can move on to telegenic, semi-youthful stars like California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The annals of Trump’s first term suggest that the incoming administration will show an ample talent for damaging itself; further, the conventional wisdom holds that the economy is due for a correction sometime in the next four years. I do not think it is too soon to say that, come 2028, the de-Harrised Democrats will be in the catbird seat. 

That is, assuming they learn some or any of the lessons this humiliating campaign has had to offer. The foremost is that — despite These States’ profound and ineradicable libido for stupidity — there is some stuff we, like Olaf, will not eat. The sudden public disclosure that the incumbent was a drool case whose incapacities were being papered over by smiling apparatchiks, including his chosen replacement; a southern border that was not only poorly enforced, but actively kept open by federal authorities; prices still elevated after a few years of once-in-a-generation inflation (“but the prices aren’t rising now,” the economists obtusely insisted); an improvised and blundering foreign policy; the miasma of domestic social radicalism and campus politics. The poor old Dems could have perhaps overcome any one or even two of these items, but the whole list was just too much for the American people to swallow.  

… the son of Queens is returning to Washington because he projected basic political competence

Trump remains divisive; a large chunk of the voting public just doesn’t like him, and there’s nothing he can do to change that. Nor did he this time sweep to power because of some new and revolutionary policy insight; as I have written in these pages, Trump’s current policy suite looks very, well, liberal. Rather, the son of Queens is returning to Washington because he projected basic political competence: He tried to get people’s votes by promising to do things for them and giving at least a vague idea of how he planned to go about it. Harris and the Democrats claimed the mantle of technocracy — we have been running the country while the president’s brain is kaput — without presenting much by way of explanation for why things seem to be going so very badly, let alone any kind of positive agenda. When policies were rolled out, they were mostly found feeble and quietly retired from the talking points. Harris’s most substantive economic proposal, a price-control scheme, met boos and hissing in even the friendly press. No wonder she preferred those strange, quasi-phenomenological flights of language. 

The case for Harris — and against her — was to be found in the rude eloquence of a bygone empire: “The country isn’t half worked out because they that governs it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can’t lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that without all the Government saying — ‘Leave it alone and let us govern.’” As we wrote again in these pages in the summer, Trump versus the Democrats was (for better or worse) republican, political government versus administrative or technocratic government. The American preference for the former is much decayed, but it appears the trappings of popular sovereignty are still better than rule by at least an incompetent camarilla. If, someday, competent technocrats have a go at it, the story may be different. 

But that is not today’s story. Today, America is not clean, progressive, and apolitical; it is weird, cranky, and, in broad strokes, accountable to the 140 million or so people who show up to vote. It may not be the world’s best system, but it’s at least a good show.