The Trump Thunderbolt

I woke up yesterday morning, Nov. 9, and went outside. There were no glass chards on the sidewalk and it was raining on Hillary Clinton’s parade. The glass ceiling remained firmly in place.

A checker at the Safeway in Adams Morgan walked by me and shook his head: “Total shock, man, total shock.”

It’s true. Get used to it: Donald Trump, President-elect of the United States of America.

Another election, another surprise. This one is just about the biggest upset in the history of American presidential elections. It easily surpasses President Harry Truman’s improbable victory over Republican Thomas Dewey — he who was not comfortable milking a cow and wearing a suit at the same time — in 1948. “Dewey Wins,” blared the Chicago Tribune banner headline mistakenly the morning after. No, he didn’t.

Something similar was at work as the last day beckoned in the long, fractious, ugly, often hysterical and dramatic and extremely partisan election campaign that began a year and a half ago, when Donald Trump, the mogul, reality-show host, developer, announced that he was running for president.

The campaign, a lot of which was the daily Trump show, tweet hour and rally covered avidly by ratings-hungry TV networks, had in its last days wandered into a kind of cul-de-sac, after the October surprise set off by FBI Director James Comey on the further investigation of new Clinton emails. The news did not so much shake or even doom Hillary’s candidacy, but it had the effect of galvanizing Trump, who, as one observer said, “ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” It electrified the base and had GOP regulars, often disturbed by Trump’s methods and manners, returning to the party, thanks to their distaste for Hillary Clinton. 

But by Monday, a kind of fuzzy feeling surrounded the campaign, with most polls showing a small but steady national edge for Clinton, and similar things appeared to portend in the so-called battleground states of Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, as well as Michigan, freshly added to the list. Clinton, the conventional wisdom went, seemed, if not all the way home, fairly safe — if two-to-three-point margins can be safe. 

Some pollsters showed different things. There was a rush for Trump in Virginia, and Michigan was in play. John Zogby called the situation “unsettled,” and Nate Silver threw all his data out and started over, ending with the possibility of a Trump victory.

On Tuesday, the pollsters and gathered army of experts had their colored crayons at the ready, their minions prepared to dig deep, like surgeons looking for tumors or a heartbeat, into the data. They detected huge surges of Hispanic voters, a less-than-large turnout among African American voters in key states (Michigan), a big lead among educated women voters, but also huge turnouts of white, male voters with something less than a college education. Or, as Clinton unfortunately and to her sorrow called, “the basket of deplorables.”

That was some big basket. Early on, dissecting the electoral map of Florida, one pundit discovered something. “She’s getting big turnouts, huge turnouts,” he said. “But so is he.” And that’s when, if you were a Clinton supporter, your stomach found new knots, and you got that queasy feeling that something seriously was wrong. 

While the shoo-in states fell, right and left — New York to Clinton, Texas to Trump and so on — the battleground states remained in a holding pattern: too soon to call, too close to call. But they were also following a familiar pattern: big, early Clinton leads, whittled away gradually and then with speed. Finally, Florida — around the time there were not enough voters left to fill a single-story Howard Johnson’s — went the way of Trump. Ohio fell to Trump and so did North Carolina and, in the end, into the morning wee hours, so did Pennsylvania. Clinton had survived in Virginia, but just barely, and Colorado as well, but none of that was enough. 

Around 3 a.m., introduced by vice president-elect Mike Pence, the entire Trump clan marched onto a podium: the daughter(s), the sons, the in-laws and the smaller offspring. “I have just received a telephone call from Secretary Clinton,” Trump said. The crowd cheered, and it was over.

People had gone to bed, stunned already, even if they had not known the outcome, but guessed its direction. No alternative outcome made itself felt in dreams. We woke up to rain and confirmation of a singular fact: Donald Trump had been elected President of the United States.

Trump was gracious, even humble in victory — no mention of walls, or send a special prosecutor after Clinton or a rigged system (how could it be?), but a call for all people to unite behind him. “It’s for us,” he said, “not me.”

He had done it, to be fair. He had singlehandedly discovered a group that everyone else had given lip service to, had ignored, a group that was seething with anger and frustration. It was identified as mostly men, almost all white men, among the rural and depressed area of the rust belt, the great suburbs, small-city, factory-less, mines-disappearing areas of the country, where jobs were scarce, raising a family was difficult and deeply held beliefs were under attack. That, at least, was the way it seemed if you listened at Trump rallies, checked out the polls and ate in diners. 

Some pundits and intellectuals derided his constituencies, noting the overheated, sometimes violent vitriol at Trump rallies, but it’s also unfair to dismiss the real desperation and honest frustration that exists and to which Trump gave voice. “He’s like us,” “He understands us” and “He says it like it is, he talks like us” were common threads among Trump supporters (along with “Lock her up!”) At some point, in their minds, they had become invisible to a large part of America. It was as if only Trump recognized them and waved.

At the early-morning speech at the New York Hilton, Trump pledged and promised to bring America together. He praised Clinton in ways that he never had — at least not since the Clintons attended his and Melania’s wedding. It remains to be seen what comes next. For now, Trump should get the benefit of a doubt, but not an erasure of his lifelong behavior, the exposure of his character, especially during the course of this campaign.

Clinton gave a heartfelt speech before her supporters, graciously saying that she hopes “he is a successful president.”

One could only imagine the emotional immensity of the disappointment that Clinton experienced through the course of her political life, twice running for president and losing to men who captured the imagination of people and media in a way she did not, for better or worse. We saw and heard her concession speech in the race against Barack Obama in 2008 in which she referenced the thousands of cracks in the glass ceilings and seemed optimistic about the future, as she was at her nominating convention this year.

Trump may try to rally the nation behind him — so far the Republicans appear to have bonded once again with him — but it will be harder to assuage the hearts of his fellow Americans as a whole.

Meanwhile, it was morning in America, but it was raining in our part of America, when Donald Trump was declared the president-elect. We can be comforted perhaps by one thing. Surely, but not necessarily, this campaign is over.