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That worksheet from Bolts is downloadable and printable here if you want to keep score tonight (and for the next few days.)

Jon Meachum in the NY Times: I thought I knew what we were dealing with. When Donald Trump began his rise to power in 2015, he struck me as a dangerous but recognizable demagogue. As a biographer of presidents, I tend to think historically and seek analogies from the past to shed light on the present. And so, for years Mr. Trump’s marshaling of fear, prejudice, resentment, xenophobia and extremism put me in mind of grievance-driven figures ranging from Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace. To me, Mr. Trump was a difference not of kind (we had long contended with illiberalism in America) but of degree (since the Civil War, no figure with such illiberal views had ever actually won the White House). Then he proved me wrong. His concerted efforts to overthrow the November 2020 election very nearly succeeded — tangible proof that he is in fact willing to follow through on the authoritarian threats he so freely makes. I now see him as a genuine aberration in our history — a man whose contempt for constitutional democracy makes him a unique threat to the nation.

I just didn’t want to believe it Mea culpa, I got this one very wrong. As someone wrote on twitter earlier: He was the worst President in history. And when he got voted out, he tried to stage a coup. Then he stole national secrets and sold the ones he didn’t store in the bathroom. He was convicted of fraud, found liable of sexual assault and convicted of 34 felonies. He is half a billion dollars in debt, owned by God only knows who, and the biggest national security risk the nation has ever had. But at least he’s not a Black woman. That was a bridge too far. She ran a good campaign, they did everything they could. Half the country just wants what Trump is offering: a strongman sideshow. The world is a much more dangerous place today than it was yesterday. The bad guys won.

I don’t have any idea Donald Trump has once more won the presidency. It’s as shocking as it was the first time and even more terrifying. We should have seen this coming from all the polling which showed that the race was tied nationally and in the swing states. Of course it was possible. But I think a lot of us, myself included, once again fell for the illusion that America is too fundamentally decent to elect someone like Donald Trump. We were wrong. In 2016 that starry-eyed naivete led to the deep despair that we all felt when Trump eked out a win over Hillary Clinton. And in 2020 we believed that dream was vindicated when Joe Biden turned the tables and eked out a win over Trump. And here we are again, caught in a swirling vortex from which we can’t seem to escape. The funny thing is that until recently I had assumed that the contest was going to be political trench warfare again and the result would be very close. It has seemed to me for a while that we’re in an ongoing war between two coalitions that can be defined as pro-democracy and anti-democracy and they have roughly equal political strength.

Be careful what you wish for, MAGA “Where do we go from here?” Digby asks this morning. She doesn’t know. Nor do I. Just as I don’t know how she had the emotional stamina to write it. All this time, I told friends last night, it seemed as if observers of the MAGA cult were studying the grotesque creatures of Looking Glass World. People such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and RFK Jr. Facing a second Donald Trump presidency, with J.D. Vance as heir apparent and a Supreme Court MAGAfied for the rest of my lifetime, it feels this morning as if Looking Glass World was, in fact, studying us. Except the image that came to mind wasn’t from Lewis Carroll, but Rod Serling. IMDB summarizes “Eye of the Beholder” from “The Twilight Zone”: Janet Tyler is in hospital having undergone treatment to make her look normal. It’s her 11th trip to the hospital for treatment and she is desperate to look like everyone else. Some of her earliest childhood memories are of people looking away, horrified by her appearance. Her bandages will soon come off and she can only hope that this, her last treatment, will have done the trick.

Try, at least Simon Rosenberg offers some advice I’m too obsessed and upset to take. Nevertheless: There will be plenty of time to assess what happened and where we go from here. I am going to go slow and take my time. I suggest you do the same. Take care of yourself and your friends. Take long walks, spend a little more time with your kids, call an old buddy. Return to a hobby you miss. Enjoy life. Enjoy it. Take your time, now, and avoid diving into a world of half-baked hot takes, bad faith commentary, angry Tweets and crowing MAGAs. I wake up this morning with one overarching sentiment – pride in all that you did this election to fight for your democracy and your freedoms. Our family left it all out there on the playing field. We gave more money than has ever been given. We built the biggest grassroots machine that’s ever been built. We wrote more postcards, made more calls, whipped off more texts and knocked on more doors than ever before. I wake up this morning with no regrets, knowing I worked as hard as I could over these few few years. I know many of you feel the same way, and I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22 I’m sorry to be sharing so many pertinent quotes today but it’s about all I’ve got the energy for. If the shoe fits… James Fallows has a good piece today which I don’t think he’ll mind my sharing in full: This time, it was not a fluke. When Donald Trump came to power eight years ago, there were countless what-ifs. What if James Comey had held his tongue? What if Clinton campaign emails, hacked by Russian operatives, had not been published on WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood video came out? (And distract attention from “Grab ‘em by…”) What if Clinton emails had not been such a media obsession? What if cable outlets had not found Trump rallies such useful audience draws?

Kara Swisher is one of the most astute observers and chroniclers of the tech revolution and politics. Her experience makes her particularly valuable at this moment because she knows all the tech bros who are now going to be in the inner circle of the highest office in the land. She wrote this today on threads: I got some kind of 24 hour bug and fell asleep early last night with a headache & slight fever and woke feeling better but to these truly heinous results. Obviously, a shock, given the blatantly misogyny, homophobia/anti trans, racist & anti-immigrant messaging. But unhappiness with the economy & an ennui with the general US direction prevailed. @profgalloway & I were wrong to believe in the kinder nature of Americans. Some short observations: 1. We still don’t have to like it at all. 2. The other side will not be magnanimous in victory at all. Too many of them are the people you think they are, so no need to try to reach across the aisle & hope for the best unless you want to. (I hear their caterwauling, but not me!) 3. This is the red wave we were all dreading, just a few years later.

All the way through the tape Heather Cox Richardson recounts how when in the 1850s it seemed “elite enslavers had become America’s rulers,” Americans (might we say real Americans?) organized and fought back, ending slavery once and for all: In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived. In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won. Now it is our turn.