Hillary Clinton has conceded, according to CNN. Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.
GQ has spent the better part of the past 18 months undermining the validity of his depraved, racist, misogynistic, flagrantly ill-informed candidacy, but we foolishly, naively sold short his supporters, both in their numbers and their desire to immolate the political status quo. We didn't underestimate the man; we underestimated our fellow citizens' anger.
So now those of us who reveled in Donald Trump's seeming fallibility are sitting here, paralyzed and dumbfounded, wondering how the rest of our countrymen and -women can willfully ignore what sexual-assault victims, people of color, Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, and countless others have feared all along: that America is still coursing with hate, and that Trump often seems to invoke this hate, to embrace it, to stoke it gleefully. This man is the opposite of hope! The antithesis of believing that yes, we can. Didn't they read our brutally funny tweets?
In the days and weeks to follow, everyone everywhere will reconstruct the timeline of the last few months, looking for the big bang and the minor inflection points that brought us to this moment. We will revisit, ad nauseum: James Comey, Florida voting, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, North Carolina, polling, overconfidence, Russia, Putin, coastal liberalism, “likability,” Bernie bros, and the media’s dangerous fascination with Trump the newsmaker (of which we’re as liable as anyone, no matter how much we argued otherwise).
But recent history can't teach us a damn thing, and this election makes only one fact clear: that Donald Trump, soon-to-be president of the United States of America, is himself a message from our angriest friends, family members, and neighbors, delivered with both middle fingers held high. You don’t understand us, they shouted. But you’ll hear us.
If there is a hope to be found here, it’s this: Donald Trump has dragged every one of America’s ugliest impulses into the sunlight and forced us to have conversations we’ve been too slow to have. He will be our chemotherapy. He will take us to the brink. If we're strong enough, we will survive. And if we’re smart enough, we—all of us—will use this opportunity to actually make America great again. Soon, we hope.
