Last night, as the results of the 45th presidency came in, my sisters and I frantically texted back in forth. We were all incredulous, it was almost unbelievable to us to see how Donald Trump was capturing so many of the electoral votes, especially in those swing states. It’s hard to summarize how I feel right now so I’d like to quote Dave Pell, Managing Editor of NextDraft. He sums it up well.
“As the red tide swept across the nation on Tuesday, I was thinking of the night before when, in the last hours of the race, we saw two wildy different campaigns. Hillary had the force of her party, celebrity performances, a former president, a current (and popular) president, a well-oiled ground game, the support of every newspaper, and what almost every pollster thought was enough momentum to win. Donald, who famously said ‘I alone can fix it’ was in many ways alone. He had virtually no party or establishment support. In the final weeks, he was essentially running as a third party candidate. The Party of Trump. Add these factors to an untraditional campaign, poor debate performances, a lack of experience, and everything we thought we knew about politics, and there was no way he could win. And yet he did. (Now the pundits who got it all exactly wrong will tell you what it means.) In coming days, we’ll get a better understanding of the frustration and anti-establishment factors that drove these results, and try to comprehend why those who felt left out of the American dream and jilted by the system expressed that anger by voting for a billionaire from Fifth Avenue. For now, we just know we witnessed the most remarkable American political story of our lifetimes. Many of you probably opened this issue hoping to find some salve for your fresh wounds. I wish I had something more, but this is about all I’ve got: Trump has surprised us at every turn. I hope he surprises us and is a great president. But I’m the progressive son of Holocaust-surviving, immigrant parents, and the father of a couple of brown kids, and this is without any doubt the hardest sentence I’ve ever had to type: Donald John Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.”
If you’d like to see how the night looked like in pictures, go to The Atlantic website.
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