Answer:rom the start of his 2020 campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr. insisted that President Trump was an aberration, his norm-breaking, race-baiting tenure anathema to the national character.
“It’s not who we are,” Mr. Biden often said, “not what America is.”
And at the end of the 2020 campaign, an anxious, quarrelsome country seemed to be turning a question back at him: Are you sure?
For millions of Trump supporters, the last four years have been a time when things changed for the better, when they felt they had a president who knew exactly who they were. They cheered pre-virus jobs success, shifts in the tax code, trade fights with China and the emerging rightward tilt of the Supreme Court. But they often responded more viscerally to the fury than the finer points: Mr. Trump’s eager brawls against elites and institutions, against threats to conservatives’ preferred social order, against shared enemies.
For many Democrats, the story of this White House is far uglier: division for its own sake and for Mr. Trump’s personal aggrandizement, coaxing an American backslide that harnessed the levers of government to settle scores and buoy white supremacists, international strongmen and anyone else who spoke well of the man in charge.
On Tuesday, this abiding conflict — over which vision of America will endure, over whether this president is more protector or destroyer — was put to the voters at last.
Early returns produced no winner but affirmed the persistence of national fissures, as Democrats who had indulged in fantasies about the catharsis of instant victory were left once more to wonder if they understood America as well as they had assumed.
But even before any final verdict was to be rendered, this election season had already supplied some answers to the question of who we are — evidence of all that Mr. Trump has changed, and all that he hasn’t, and all the work that will await Mr. Biden if his bet is rewarded.
America is now a nation where businesses in many cities boarded up their windows in anticipation of election violence. It is a nation where partisans daydream about seeing their political opponents in jail and where the sitting president has pressed his own Justice Department to follow through. It is a nation where Black Lives Matter protesters have pressed their cause in the streets and where caravans of Trump backers have filled highways and waterways with a procession of MAGA flags.
pLS MARK ME BRANIST
