It’s not over till the senile guy talks gibberish. It might not be over for days. The election may shift to the courts, to be contested like history’s most important parking ticket. Regardless of who wins — and the true professionals of prediction, the bookmakers, now have Donald Trump odds-on — Donald Trump has already done the impossible. He has won the moral high ground.
Since 2016, the Democrats and most of the media have told us that Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was an electoral and moral aberration. That Trump was not Hugh Hefner, but ‘Drumpf’ the white supremacist. That the voters, chastened by four years under the orange flag of fascism, would recognise their error as a sin and repent. That in 2020 the United States would return to the old normal, and the permanent class of professional politicians could get back to its statesmanlike duty of soliciting cash in brown envelopes, signing off on idiot policies like invading Iraq and dismantling the industrial base, and telling the trash not to cling to guns, religion and other symbols of chronic whiteness.
Trump’s moral illegitimacy made his victory more of an insult to decency, and more of a threat to democracy, than the brawls over the hanging chads of Florida in 2000.
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