Donald Trump and his MAGA movement steamrolled Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Although the final vote totals will be fairly close, Trump won all seven key battleground states, and swept the "blue wall" across the Midwest. He increased his support significantly among Democratic base voters, most notably Latino men, and performed better than expected among Black men. Despite the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, women did not rise up unanimously to stop Trump. According to exit polls, he won a majority of white women, just as he did in 2020.

In the most basic sense, the 2024 election can be understood as a referendum on the direction of America and the future of pluralistic multiracial democracy. Its results were not uplifting. Today’s Democratic Party, the mainstream news media and other defenders of political “normalcy” have few answers for the cultural force and energy of Trump's brand of right-wing populism. In too many ways, they appear locked in an echo chamber, largely talking to each other and convincing themselves that all intelligent and rational people agree with them.

One significant element of this failure is a reluctance to understand or recognize that today’s Republican Party is more of a front organization than a traditional political party. This is from Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism":

The world at large ... usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions. The fellow-traveler organizations surround the totalitarian movements with a mist of normality and respectability that fools the membership about the true character of the outside world as much as it does the outside world about the true character of the movement. The front organization functions both ways: as the facade of the totalitarian movement to the nontotalitarian world, and as the facade of this world to the inner hierarchy of the movement.

Ultimately, Trump's 2024 victory reflects exactly that kind of failure of imagination and comprehension. America and the world are changing rapidly; the Democrats, the media and the mainstream political class cannot keep up. In an attempt to make sense of Trump’s victory, our collective emotions in this time of trouble and dread, what this election reveals about American values and character, and what comes next when Trump takes power in January, I recently spoke with a range of experts.

Katherine Stewart is the author of "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism."

I have written three books about the movement that brought Donald Trump to power. My forthcoming book, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy," is a dissection of that movement. For those of us immersed in this research, the election results may be disappointing and alarming, but it’s not like we didn’t see it coming. Many people have not been paying attention to the movement that brought Trump to power, and may not be aware of the misinformation bubble that it has funded.

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One issue with the mainstream media is that they don’t often go to the places where this movement is happening. One of those places is the local church and their larger networks. Prior to the election, we got a lot of stories about the Democratic Party's ground operations, which often involve strangers knocking on doors. The Christian nationalist turnout machine is much more robust, and it brings huge numbers of extremely reliable voters to the Republican side. Getting messages about who to vote for from your pastor or faith leader, who you trust, is much more effective than getting that message from a stranger. A lot of Americans voted for Trump simply because their pastor told them that Republicans are “people with ethics” and Democrats want to destroy families.

But we shouldn’t simply focus on media failures. The fact that a convicted criminal and credibly accused rapist, who has attempted to overthrow an election, was elected again represents an epic........

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