I Knew We Are Not A Trumpist Country

There is something incredibly heartening about what happened in America on Tuesday.

Donald Trump was, and to a lesser extent remains, a threat to American democracy. He attacked our elections in 2020. He tried to subvert them again this year, seeking to abuse the powers of the presidency in ways our Founders foresaw, warned against, and wrote the Constitution explicitly to prevent.

Trump tried to use the Postal Service, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Treasury Department, the FBI, ICE, the Social Security Administration, FEMA, the Election Assistance Commission and more to muscle a result.

And it was ordinary American voters, in their tens of millions, in blue states, purple states, and ruby-red states, who quietly and peacefully stopped him.

Yes, the courts played their role. And that matters enormously. But Donald Trump has evaded the impact of court rulings in other parts of his agenda. Had the election results been closer, he might have tried something similar with our midterms.

But the citizenry would not let him.

And I never really doubted that they would.

I knew we are not a Trumpist country.

That isn’t punditry or any kind of special insight or sophisticated analysis. I’m not really a pundit—or not a very good one, anyway. I think I’m more of a storyteller.

What an adventure she is. What a contradictory, sprawling, vulgar, idealistic, beautiful, ever-changing human phenomenon. The fact that America is my land—your land, our land, as Woody Guthrie grasped and sang—is something I've always understood to be a blessing.

I love this country.

I've never had much truck with liberals and progressives who reject outright the premise of American exceptionalism, who condemn the entire project as a charade, or who are painfully embarrassed by American vulgarity. I’m an unembarrassed Yankee Doodle Dandy.

I first discovered this fact about myself a long way from home.

It was in 1982, right after after college. I spent a year in the west of Ireland, in Connemara, and then left to travel across Europe for several months. It was the first time I’d been outside the United States.

I noticed that there was a kind of American abroad who didn’t want to admit it. In Ireland, they might slip into an awkward brogue. In London, they'd adopt Britishisms. Maybe you know the type. They try mask their Americanness, or soften it, to make themselves a little less conspicuous among the sophisticated Europeans.

In instinctive and almost unconscious reaction, I found myself becoming more American. A cartoon American. I'd come home to my bedsit apartment in Ireland after an evening out, a few pints in me, and I’d read Walt Whitman aloud—loudly—or maybe Carl Sandburg, bellowing out barbaric yawps into the night.

I started using words like "buncombe" and "vamoose." Truly.

It’s embarrassing to recall. I was performing, too. So be it. But something in me had rebelled against the idea that I should apologize for the country I came from. I missed home.

That was also the year of the great anti-nuclear protests across Europe, sparked by President Ronald Reagan's decision to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles on the continent in response to the Soviet deployment of SS-20s.

Young people I met in the hostels and bars were in a lather about it. Massive protests filled the streets in cities across Europe.

And I discovered two things about myself.

I was a hawk on the issue.

And I was a fervent patriot.

America, I believed, had saved Europe, and was continuing to save Europe. I thought that was pretty noble. And I argued about it constantly.

Once, in a conversation with two young German women who were excoriating the United States for its abiding racism, I lost my temper.

"I will not be lectured about human rights by a German," I barked.

That silenced them.

I’ve never forgotten that moment—and I regret it to this day. Writing about it here makes me ashamed. What a jerk.

Our conversation had actually begun in agreement, because I shared their revulsion at America's racism. But at some point, it felt to me as though they were asking me to join them in a broader, more fundamental condemnation of my country, and I snapped.

I was young. I was arrogant. I was unfair.

But I was also discovering something about myself that has never changed: My relationship with America is not analytical.

It is personal.

Which brings me back to this election.

I've spent the past several weeks traveling around the country, reporting for a new series I'm calling America in Person. I've been to Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Texas. I've talked with farmers and fishermen, market vendors and small-business owners, recent immigrants and people whose families have lived in this country for generations.

I've listened to people who love Trump and people who despise him and people exhausted by the question.

And I've been reminded, again and again, that Americans are not, by our nature, wild ideologues.

Unlike the right-wing podcasters, the integralist academics, the techno-futurists, the groypers, and Elon Musk—

We want to get on with our lives. We want to raise our children, make a decent living, enjoy ourselves a little on the weekend, and we want to be able to believe that the future might be better than the past. Like we used to.

We aren’t always wise. We can be angry, fearful, selfish, credulous. We have as a nation committed our own fair share of terrible wrongs, and sometimes we have celebrated them.

But by and large we are a decent people, capable of looking at the world in front of us and making a judgment.

Is this working?

That was the question Americans put to Donald Trump this year, the pressing question they wanted answered.

So the voters went about their political business as they do, without great fanfare, evaluating Trump's new approach to the presidency with a cold and practical eye.

Were prices coming down? Was life getting easier? Were their communities safer? Was the country becoming a better place to live?

And underneath that practicality, I believe, there was something deeper.

We love this democracy, we love what our ancestors have given us here. And deep down we understand, perhaps without being able to articulate it in the language of constitutional law, how rare and precious it is.

On Tuesday it became clear that ordinary Americans—blue, red, purple, whatever—rightly bridled at Trump's casual corruption of our civic treasure, his bullying, his self-enrichment, his ham-fisted efforts to bend the institutions of our democracy—ours—to his will.

In Trump's grand, strong-man ambitions—and in his failure even to notice, much less effectively address, the problems in their lives—ordinary Americans saw something alien.

But the moment that stays with me most from these weeks of reporting was not a moment of political defiance.

It was a young woman crying in a market in Cleveland.

Her name is Jamie Ty.

I met her at the West Side Market, that wonderful old Cleveland institution, with its bustling stalls and high vaulted ceilings and great windows through which the late-afternoon sunlight pours.

I asked Jamie a question I've been asking Americans everywhere.

"When you think about your vote, why do you vote one way or the other?"

She began talking about rights.

"Everyone has the same rights as each other. That's important to me. There's a lot of things about immigrants and undocumented people. People come here for opportunity, and I want them to be able to get that, and I just..."

She couldn't finish the sentence.

"I'm sorry. I don't want to cry."

She was overcome.

We waited a moment.

Then she told me she was thinking about her mother and father, who had immigrated from the Philippines and are now American citizens.

"My parents did a lot for us. Just the fact that they came here for opportunities. I want people to also have that. And when I see people tearing each other apart, it makes me really sad. So, that's the reason I vote. I want people to have the same rights. Yeah."

I was so moved by that. Jamie had captured, in a few halting sentences, one of the precise moral issues of our time:

The shame and fear and sorrow brought on by the brutalizing of immigrants, by the deliberate—and deliberately cruel—effort to make people who came here seeking a better life feel unwelcome, unwanted, afraid.

Here was this young woman, thinking about her mom and dad, and what they had done for her and her sister—how they had worked so hard to give their kids a chance in this good land, how those kids had made it and were on that day shopping together as American sisters in Cleveland’s West Side Market—and she was grieving for so many others who wanted the same chance. Grieving for our country, really.

There, in Jamie’s words, through her tears, was the original promise of our country, shining in the slanting light pouring down through the high windows of the market, maybe like a blessing.

That people can come here from anywhere. That they can belong, become Americans. That their children can grow up with opportunities their parents never had. That their rights are theirs by virtue of being human, all created equal.

And that the promise of the country must be kept by one generation for the next, and on and on.

I think something like this is what happened on Tuesday.

Not everyone voted for the same reasons, of course. Tens of millions of Americans still support Donald Trump. Others voted against him because of prices, or jobs, or healthcare, or simply because they were tired of the chaos.

Elections aren’t about virtue or philosophical ideas, much. And a landslide does not mean that all our troubles are behind us.

But I believe something profound happened.

For years, a movement that regarded much of our American democratic inheritance with contempt tried to remake the country in its own image. This movement had enormous power. It had wealthy backers—including a trillionaire who poured obscene amounts of money into our politics. It had sophisticated theorists, fervent believers, and the presidency itself.

But in the end, the American people said no. They stopped that movement cold. Kicked it to the curb, tossed it into the dustbin of history.

And they accomplished this victory not with violence. Not with some grand ideological uprising. Not by waiting for a savior.

They went to the polls. And they voted.

Sometimes, in the darkest times, when we seem to have lost our way, the people themselves remind us what it is, this miracle of a republic.

I saw it in Cleveland.

A young woman, thinking of her immigrant parents, trying not to cry.

"I want people to have the same rights,” she said through her tears.

There it was.

The country I have loved all my life.

—Terry