“It’s bitter in the mouth, the racial and gender dimension of this.” This was Van Jones, the CNN political analyst and a Black American, speaking at 3.10am EST the night of the US election. To his right, David Axelrod, the former senior adviser to Barack Obama, maintained what in the circumstances looked like a supernatural composure, as if through sheer civility he might put this right. The CNN anchors, 14 hours into their marathon shift, were deep into that adrenalised territory where no human sentiment survives. Jones looked as if he was going cry.
I had woken at 4.30am GMT, glanced at the blizzard of messages stacked up on my phone, and had the thought that for as long as I didn’t know what had happened, nothing had happened at all. Isn’t this a basic philosophical principle? The night before, things had looked good. In the past two weeks of the election Trump had seemed, even by his standards, to have gone completely off the beam. The shock poll in Iowa had augured a popular swing from the right towards Harris. Men, who support Trump in larger numbers than women, can sometimes be relied upon to skip voting.
In New York, a city I left this summer after 17 years, the single Trump enclave of Staten Island had shown signs of a shift when the borough’s local newspaper, the Staten Island Advance, endorsed Harris. All of which pointed in one happy direction. At 5am, I looked at my phone and saw the top message, sent five hours earlier from a friend in Long Island. “We are going to lose. Fucking insane.” And so it began.
News of Trump’s victory was impossible to absorb, particularly in front of children. As they got up and blamelessly ate their breakfast, Trump was making his victory speech in Florida. He said of Elon Musk “a star is born”. He flapped on about the border. He beamed. It took every shred of self-restraint not to say out loud the bitter profanity flying back and forth on our phones, and merely to spit “go to hell” at the TV.
Also: “God, I hate men.” This was the beginning of a blame spiral that will take a long time to play out. A friend on layover at San Francisco airport sent photos of a group of men, and a single woman, high-fiving each other at the gate. It was noticeable on the news panels how eager the white male guests were to describe Trump’s success purely in economic terms. People had more money during his time in office and whether or not Trump had anything to do with it, Americans had voted for him on the strength of the association.
This was fine and true, up to a point. But it also denied a basic reality: that American men couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman. Latino men flocked to Trump at a greater rate than in previous elections – according to NBC exit polls, Trump led Harris in that demographic 54%-44%. Meanwhile, 59% of white men voted for Trump, and 52% of white women. A whopping 92% of black women voted for Harris, compared to about 80% of black men.
On CNN, a GOP talking head made the point that Trump’s win was a sign of how crucial it was to listen to marginalised communities, by which he seemed to mean poor white folk. Guess who else, historically, haven’t been listened to? “Black women,” said Van Jones, a demographic nobody gave two shits about before – I’m angry, paraphrasing – and hey-ho, no one’s listening to them now.
The reason this felt so much worse than 2016 was because it was impossible to say Americans didn’t know what they were voting for. After the initial shock had subsided, that first Trump victory had been easy to excuse and rationalise. Hillary Clinton had too much baggage. Trump was absurd, but in novel ways that turned the heads of people who thought reality TV was real. After 6 January, after his indictments and convictions, after the attention given to Project 2025, none of these excuses wash. And, of course, this time, lining up behind Trump comes a caravan of the worst people in the world. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley both returned to the Senate; Lauren Boebert winning a seat in the House. On X, Elon Musk took a victory lap. The New York Post published a photo of Trump grinning.
For a small demographic – American citizens outside the US – there was a ping of tiny, consoling relief. An American friend messaged from Norfolk, where she moved with her family last year. “We got out in time. Fucker says he’s got a mandate from God.” For everyone else, it was terrible. A friend working overnight as a medic at one of the news networks had, at 7pm the previous night, been joking that her biggest problem was the makeup artists on straight 24-hour shifts kicking down her door for hard drugs. Now she texted, “this doesn’t feel real”.
It didn’t. Not the result, or the volley of gut punches. The only thing that came close to the feeling of unreality on Wednesday morning was how the world felt in the hours after 9/11. “Trump storms back,” screamed the New York Times headline that Americans woke up to, and the word “storm” was aptly chosen. At the end of his victory speech, Trump said that this moment might turn out to be one of great historical importance, a piece of flattery thrown in the direction of his supporters, but that remains deeply – and terrifyingly – true for us all.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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