BRATTLEBORO — All Donald J. Trump has ever wanted to be is loved, admired, and respected. He is driven by an emptiness of soul so deep as to be almost unfathomable.
A bully from his earliest years, Trump's natural cruelty is twisted with a voracious need to be accepted and adored. He depends on the adulation of others, however spurious or contrived, to feel good about himself. Anyone who deflates his grandiosity earns lasting enmity - his anger is as deep as his need.
For many of us, the news that he is our next president was like learning of a death in the family. Shock and dismay, denial, anger, sorrow. No acceptance yet. Watching his victory speech, I felt like I was hallucinating.
For a time on election night, I watched the returns with my mother, who is 87 and has voted Democratic in every election since Stevenson lost to Eisenhower in 1956. A lot of bad elections for progressives in those years.
“How can this be happening?” she kept asking. “How can this be happening?”
I think it is important to answer her question.
What is there to say about an election that in an instant propelled Trump from being a failed real estate developer and reality television star, a serial adulterer and self-admitted abuser of women, a man incapable of self-reflection and incapable of acting without cruelty and the swagger of a playground bully, a man utterly incompetent to be president, to be the leader of the most powerful nation in the world?
How could this have happened? What does it mean? And how does it reflect on us, as voters and as Americans?
* * *
It is easy to start with anger and shock.
Within the mainstream media, the dominant theme is a strange mix of technical analysis and mea culpas for the role of the press.
One narrative is that things are not so bad. Let's calm the waters before protests break out of control. Trump did not mean all the things he said. The peaceful transition of power. That sort of thing.
I know how to tell that story.
Another narrative is that the nation is being torn apart. Hate crimes are on the rise, fueled by Trump's reckless discourse. Protestors have taken to the street to express anger at the fact that Trump was elected. Some probably voted for Clinton, and some probably did not.
The anger in response to the election outcome is legitimate and righteous, given the Republican focus on voter suppression and the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of Trump's campaign.
I know how to tell that story, too.
But neither of these narratives satisfies me, true as each is in its own way.
* * *
Instead, let's start here: Trump is an outsider. He has always been an exile from the circles he wants to inhabit. Despite the appearance of success, he never managed to become part of the elite establishment that he sought to join.
Trump, a third-generation son of an immigrant family that got its start running saloons and brothels out West and then came back East to build middle-class buildings in the outer boroughs, was the personification of nouveau riche in a Manhattan culture still based on old money, one that reserves acceptance for those who learn to play the games of philanthropy and appreciation for the arts. His antics in the 1980s and 1990s won him regular notice on page 6 of the New York Post - a spectacle really no different from the Hilton girls, not a member of the club.
Trump's garish sense of design, all that gilt and marble, just looked pathetic to anyone who grew up in the monied class that has ruled the country through all of its history. The way the participants in the New York ritual of the Al Smith dinner a couple of weeks ago booed his clumsy attempts at humor and misreading of the event and audience just put a punctuation mark to how disparaged he is in that world.
One of the main mea culpas in the media is that they did not take him seriously enough early enough in his path to the presidency. Yet they gave him an audience.
Sure, Les Moonves, president of CBS, said that Trump was good for ratings, and he was. CNN made a comeback on the strength of their coverage of him and his campaign.
But the mainstream press is based in Manhattan, and no serious person in Manhattan has ever taken Trump seriously.
Until now.
We have to take him seriously now, this bitter, driven outsider who saw the green light across the bay and opened his arms to it, doing everything in his power to have it take him in.
Now he will soon be president of the United States, the ultimate outsider who finally is in a position to force the establishment to accept him.
And we do have to accept him. He is the president now; his victory is real. In a couple of months, he will have four years to do more or less whatever he plans to do, with an acquiescent Congress and a partisan Supreme Court.
There were Republicans who despised him but voted for him anyway. Despite the deep and evident disdain of the party elite, in the end he was the only game in town.
The Republican Party is so fucked up - pardon me, but there is no other phrase - that given the choice between Clinton and Trump, rather than vote for a centrist establishment figure with long experience and obvious credentials, well-educated men and women who knew better took a chance on the least qualified, most psychologically unstable person to ever run for the presidency in a major party, let alone win the thing.
This was not an election between Republicans and Democrats - not when these party designations mean less and less every year, and only half of those eligible to vote actually do so.
Clinton was the ultimate insider, a woman who has been part of the governing elite all of her life, one of the first women to achieve admission to the club, a political dynast whose daughter was able to purchase a home in Manhattan worth about $11 million not long ago.
And she was pitted against Trump, who ran under the banner of the same party that created our present economic situation.
None of us really knows what Trump believes, but whatever he is, he is not a Republican. He is a chameleon, a man of deeply potent political skills in our new era of social media and reality TV. No other Republican president-elect would have made rebuilding our national infrastructure the centerpiece of a victory speech given at 4 a.m.
And he, the rich white guy, nonetheless became the outsider in this election, the one to represent the cry of the dispossessed.
Most people feel like outsiders in this America of such great wealth and class distinctions. If your skin is brown or your name is strange, you are already an outsider. Most of these folks did stick with Clinton despite any evidence that the economic elite that controls that part of our two-party divide really has their interests at heart.
But Trump won more black American and Latino votes than Romney did in 2012, and he received a lot more votes from women than one might have expected, given his vile proclivities.
And what let Trump win was the shift among white voters who had voted for Obama in 2012 in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Even though Trump campaigned on an overtly racist and sexist agenda, it is impossible to say that his victory owed to that fact. The votes that put him over the top were votes that went to Obama in 2012 and then shifted to Trump or went for Gary Johnson. Or just stayed home.
And it is time for the white liberal establishment to take true note of this fact.
So many people voted for Trump because the middle class is dying. Real wages for many of those who voted for Trump have stayed essentially stagnant since the 1980s. The American dream feels like it is on life support for white Americans who used to believe in it.
If Trump were a typical Republican candidate, he might have won anyway. The facts of Clinton's gender and her long exposure on the national stage, her ineptness as a politician, and the typical cycle of which party controls the White House (two terms in, two terms out) all made the Democrats vulnerable this time around.
So maybe this is the best we could get - someone uniquely and deeply flawed, but obviously a smart guy who apparently has no ideology but simply wants a certain kind of adulation and gets wounded deeply and gets angry when he does not receive it.
He is a child in arrested development in charge of our nuclear arsenal. He clearly has no conscience, just a sort of calculating self-interest to guide him. He is almost unmanageable, and his appetites and angers are large. His language has sowed hatred in the land.
* * *
The fact that Trump was elected president almost entirely by white people, that he did so by the narrowest of margins in each key state, and that he is aligned with a party which wants to send the U.S. back to the 1950s means that anyone who cares about this country must join with those he has insulted and dispossessed with his victory.
A map of the country showing the votes of those ages 18-25 is almost completely blue. I have two daughters. One is 19 and has experienced her first election; the other, 24, her second. Smart kids. Maybe we should lower the voting age to 16 and cap it at 25.
If I were young, I might revive that saying of my seedtime: “don't trust anyone over 30.” And I keep thinking of that old union phrase: “Don't mourn. Organize.”
Together, we must fight as hard as we can, and as smartly as we can, to prevent the agenda he has espoused from taking full shape.
At the same time, while we might analyze and criticize the man - this reckless and violent bully so careless of others and so intent on finding love wherever he can - we cannot demonize the results of this election or reify divisions that really don't exist in the end.
I am thinking about those folks who voted for Obama in 2012 and voted for Trump in 2016. I am thinking that if Obama had run again, he would have won in a landslide. This country is not as bad as it seems.
I am wondering whether the fact that Clinton lost the election is because she was a woman with bad optics for the national stage, or whether it was just a matter of the fact that the establishment just does not get what is really going on in America.
The Republican right got this election just as wrong as the Democratic left and mainstream press. The elite got it wrong. The establishment did not get it. I didn't get it. I feel more chastened than angry.
No one saw what was coming, and now all of us are in shock - including Trump himself, like the dog that finally caught the car he had been chasing. That's Trump right now.
Trump says he wants to make America great again. I believe him.
God knows what Trump's agenda is. He never had a plan, just rhetoric at a fourth-grade level. A kid playing in a sandbox saying he is going to build the biggest wall, and that it will beautiful.
I want to make America great again, too, and this last election season makes me realize how deeply we must re-imagine the nation in order to do so, and how important it is that we finally come to terms with where we have become as a nation and our own complicity in it.
* * *
Trump's election is just a mirror. Are we able to see ourselves clearly in it?
If we can, then we would see that the liberal elite lives apart in self-enclosed ways from most of the people who voted in this election and most of those who did not. The establishment press got the story wrong from the start because it is out of touch with what is really happening in this country.
The press relied on data and algorithms that turned out to be woefully wrong, encouraging complacency and calling into question the basic methodologies we use to try to understand what the electorate is thinking.
The press never took either Trump or Sanders seriously until long after it was obvious that they both were on to something.
The fact that Trump was given a free ride for almost the entire primary season - he was really good for ratings - is one of the most shameful episodes in American journalism.
The fact that The New York Times played Sanders below the fold throughout nearly all of his campaign - that the phenomenon of disaffection that the Sanders surge represented was never well-recognized - is equally shameful.
Maybe Sanders could have beaten Trump, and maybe not. But the prevailing wisdom that held Sanders to be unelectable was based on the assumption that Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would be the opposing candidate, not Trump.
Sanders would have been a different story. Maybe it would have been a story with the same ending, but at least it would have had some meaning. In the end, the real issues of the campaign were never faced.
America faces a crisis of education, of drug addiction, of incarceration, of economic inequality, of vastly diminished hopes and expectations for most middle-class and working-class people, of continued systemic racism, of endemic sexism and homophobia, of deep social fault-lines around issues of personal liberties. We could have talked about all of these issues this election cycle.
Instead, we talked about pipe-dream plans to build a $25 billion wall against our southern border and email traffic, much of it leaked by a Russian dictatorship in league with Trump.
We talked about sex scandals and bankruptcies, but we never really paid much attention to the fact that Trump makes all his facts up as he goes, the way a loveless 12-year-old child might, and is so deeply betrayed and abandoned in his soul that his ego throws up all sorts of defenses, most of them reckless and cruel.
Everything I have written here is fact-based, but the prevailing narrative of the campaign was never really based on facts, but rather on a sort of reality TV sporting contest, something like a cross between mixed martial arts and professional wrestling.
In the end, we just underwent the longest running political reality show in history, with a twist ending - all magnified by skillful use of the broadcast power of Twitter and the echo chamber that Facebook creates for its followers.
Trump mastered this new reality: the idea of politics reduced to a blood sport with extensive commentary from referees, none of whom ever understood or controlled the match, nor predicted its outcome correctly. We can't blame him or those who voted for him.
In the end, the media and urban aristocracy to which Trump always longed to gain access made him its creature. Now we all must live with him - this sad, lonely boy who always wanted to be loved.
“King of the world, ma!” It is all that he ever wanted, this citizen Kane, the dark embodiment of our American dream: that literally anyone - anyone - can grow up to be president.
Trump is the American id, and we created him. Now he is our mirror. What do we see in it when we look?