From the Los Angeles Times:
Cartoon by Shadi Gahnim for The National
Even if Joe Biden ultimately becomes president — and he appears, as I write this, to have a pretty strong path to 270 electoral votes — millions and millions of people will have again pulled the lever for Trump.
For the United States to have elected Donald Trump once can perhaps be written off as an aberration, a dreadful mistake. Maybe voters in 2016 — a more innocent time! — thought he wouldn’t really follow through with his irresponsible campaign promises, or that he’d be sobered by the awesome responsibilities of the office or held in check by others.
But for tens of millions of people to double down and vote for him again in 2020 is entirely different. It is an assertion by those voters that, yes, this is who we really are — and that what the United States has become over the last four years is really what we want it to be. Their votes send a message to the world that this bizarre and untrustworthy man didn’t weasel his way into the most powerful job in the world by fooling the great American people. Rather, he was — and remains — the conscious choice of too many.
That does not bode well for the months and years ahead. Even if Trump is gone, Trumpism, I’m afraid, is not going away.
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