Opinion: Voters reelect Trump, a totem of the worst in all of us

I never want to hear the words “America is better than this” again. I never want to be told about America’s better angels.
I want honesty. I want an admission of exactly who we are as a country, and let’s be damn clear about that definition: We are a country that just elected – that just willfully chose – one of the most cruel, unscrupulous and transparently self-serving political figures in modern history to be president. Again.
We just elected a convicted felon who has normalized bullying, spread hate like an industrial sprinkler and shown us over and over and over again he sees laws as irrelevant and self-enrichment as sacrosanct. Faced with a billowing ocean of red flags – from indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 election to the coddling of dictators who rule enemy nations – a majority of Americans cast their vote for the man who is a totem of the worst in all of us.
So spare me the wails of “This isn’t who we are!” I’ve got bad news for the sane and decent among us: This is exactly who we are.
We’re a country that supports the mass deportation of immigrants, a promise Donald Trump made and will undoubtedly keep. When families are pulled apart, cities and towns are raided by federal law enforcement and the people who once worked in communities and made homes there – some for decades – are penned in detention camps, it is the voting public that approved such a thing.
If legal citizens get swept up in the chaos, so be it. It was the voters’ choice.
Opinion:Heavy Trump vote shows America has already lost
When an unhinged and unqualified billionaire like Elon Musk is put in charge of slashing the federal government to bits, that will be what America chose.
When the Department of Education is abolished and our education system falls into the hands of right-wing ideologues and religious zealots, that’s the outcome of the choice U.S. voters made.
When Trump’s tariffs hit and drive up prices across the board for consumers, it won’t be the fault of the myriad economists who told us what would happen. It will be the thing a majority of Americans chose. It will be the economic pot they chose to be boiled in, even though the Biden-Harris administration has the economy rocking.
As The New York Times reported Oct. 30: “Consumers are spending. Inflation is cooling. And the U.S. economy looks as strong as ever.”
When Trump does away with his own legal cases – trashing the rule of law his party once claimed to stand for – that will be what the people wanted. When he turns the U.S. Department of Justice on his so-called enemies, when he goes after Democrats and others with malicious intent and calls in the military to stifle any form of dissent, keep your mouth shut about that being un-American. It’s now 100% American, because it’s exactly what people in this country willfully chose.
I don’t want to hear a damn word – ever – about anyone not realizing just how bad things could get. I don’t want to hear about how grocery prices were too high so you figured voting for Trump couldn’t hurt. I don’t want to hear how you didn’t like either candidate so you sat the 2024 election out.
The stakes of this election could not have been more clear and could not have been broadcast any louder. Vice President Kamala Harris ran as smart a campaign as I’ve seen. She reached across the aisle and offered a big tent for people to seek shelter. She was qualified – as a former prosecutor, a former U.S. senator and a vice president – in ways Trump could never imagine.
But America chose the guy who cavalierly said he’d be a dictator for a day. Voters chose the guy who denounces our allies and cozies up to our enemies. Voters chose the guy who is an adjudicated rapist, a role model to none, an often-incoherent and always hate-fueled loon who has turned Americans against each other in ways I never thought possible.
Voters chose Trump. He won. Cruelty won. Bullying won.
And that’s who America is right now. We are Trump, and we will own every bit of the shameful and painful and embarrassing things he does. We are not “better than this.” We lost the right to make that claim the moment the presidential race was called.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk