I went to bed early last night, hopeful. As a A Man Of A Certain Age, that’s not terribly unusual, and with the time change, I’m following the majority of voters in this country into the 19th century, except I’m just ready to go to sleep when the sun goes down, and they’re ready it to be 1859, or whenever they think this country was last great.

My own Wayback Machine is taking me to 2016 and another November in a country where the isolationist policies of the last Trump administration led directly to its precipitous downfall, albeit with extensive help from every other American president that fomented the multi-decade debacle that was Afghanistan.

Stepping out of the machine, it’s the last time the United States elected a fraudulent xenophobic racist misogynistic caricature of character to the highest office in the land, and it’s Wednesday morning in Kabul.

The results of the 2016 national election are coming in, and while Trump’s racist rhetoric is still in its early dog whistle iteration, there are clear signs that the man has plans for anyone not as white as himself, which given his penchant for color matching his tanner with safety vests, is a level of irony previously unmatched by American political candidates.

I’m stopped by one of the staff, a young man who’d been accepted into a visa-based education program in the United States, who asks me what Trump’s election will mean for him, as an Afghan trying to provide a better life for himself and his family by taking advantage of what he believes America can offer him.

I tell him then what I’d tell him now: I don’t know what that would mean for him. There’s things I could speculate about, conjecture I could offer, prognostication that would only serve to further my own worries and fears, because like him, I woke up this morning to a world I knew was there, but was still playing the odds that I was wrong, and that’s my privilege.

“Not the odds, but the stakes,” is how Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, hoped the media would cover the 2024 campaign, making it not about the horse race (another phrase we can thank Rosen for), but what’s at stake for American democracy as a result of this election.

Which looks to be a landslide for a party led by a sundowner devoid of plans for the future, who only ran this time out of spite, leading a cadre of evangelical nationalists who think a woman’s right to choose is the greatest evil, followed closely by transgender persons wanting to exist at all.

This is the first election where I voted the stakes, not the odds. Not that my vote changed, just the reason for ticking the boxes that I did. There’s little at stake for me personally, because as a cisgender heterosexual college educated middle aged man so white it’s like they animated a stack of paper plates, I’m probably going to be fine, which statement that I’m making through the typing equivalent of gritted teeth, because for people I know and care about deeply, they don’t know that they’re going to be fine.

For them, they can only hope that Trump does what he did the last time around: fail to keep his campaign promises, running on the mantra “Promises made, promises kept,” except that this time he’s made it clear that he’s going to use his office for retribution, something made easier if the GOP controls both the House and the Senate, a likely outcome as I’m writing this.

Trump 2024 isn’t about making American great again, it’s about going after all those that slighted him in any way, which should be easy, because most of those people work for him now, from his Vice President to wherever Megyn Kelly ends up in this administration.

Rightly, there will be cries to get rid of the electoral college, and if that’s all this was, I’d feel better about my fellow Americans, but the 47th president of the United States won the popular vote. That’s going to take a while to sink in for those of us for whom privilege is something they can take away, because we were born to it.

For those who will be most affected by what Trump has planned in Project 2025, they knew that already. They knew that while yes, there are allies, those that want genuine diversity, equity, and inclusion, they knew that this country was founded by those for whom power was the point. It wasn’t just about throwing off an empire’s tyranny, but about making the space to build tyranny of their own.

Don’t ask me what this means, ask them. Ask your migrant neighbors. Find your LGBTQIA+ friends, they’ll tell you. And if finding any of those people is tough, since none of them are comfortable answering questions right now, I’ll make it easy: your wife, your mom, your girlfriend, your daughter can tell you.

The pundits are going to explain this to me, to us, tell us that this result was about American wallets, that Harris failed by not charting a course different enough from the Biden administration, and this election was about economics, not about bigotry or misogyny. Except those things are Trump’s brand, and have been for decades, long before he took the escalator to the food court to inform the world of his newfound political aspirations.

And his supporters got what they wanted, the return of the Orange Messiah, rising from the depths of 2020, ready to assume his role as their dear leader. I could see that as a remarkable political comeback, or as a validation of what I’ve known about this country but was too privileged to understand and too afraid to acknowledge: that we have chosen hate over joy. Looking into the deeps for a savior, democracy just raised its kraken, and what comes next is on us, America.