You can’t say it was a fluke. If in 2016, Donald Trump’s novelty, combined with his loss of the popular vote, allowed liberals to retain a bit of plausible deniability about what his presidential win meant about America, this time, there is no such comfort. Donald Trump is no longer a mystery or an amusing diversion: no one can claim that they do not understand full extent of his malignant corruption, or the seriousness of his movement’s hostility to pluralist democracy. And he won the popular vote.

Many postmortems of last week’s election have tried to preserve the notion that Trump’s voter’s did not endorse him and his vision – that they know not what they do. This is dishonest, and a bit patronizing toward Trump’s supporters. Trump’s voters, for the most part, know exactly what he is, and what voting for him means. They are not ignorant or mistaken about him. They endorse him and what he is.

A large part of what a majority of Americans voted for last week was the Trump campaign’s virulent misogyny. Trump himself, an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about both committing sexual assault and engineering the reversal of Roe v Wade, speaks of women in vulgar, degrading terms. He picked a running mate who has denigrated childless women as “psychotic” “cat ladies”. His adviser and funder Elon Musk, who seems to have designs on becoming something of a shadow president in Trump’s second term, is a techno-fascist pro-natalist who goes around offering women insemination.

The Trump campaign positioned........

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