For The Washington Post

ONE-TIME USE ONLY illustration for OP-DVD-WILL

Kash Patel

Trump Debt

The Washington Post

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-BACON-AGAINSTDOOMSCROLLING

New Member Orientation events for the 118th Congress in Washington

FILE PHOTO: Ceremony for the 70th cohort of military combat officers, near Mitzpe Ramon

FILE PHOTO: President-elect Donald Trump delivers remarks in Allentown, Pennsylvania

HOGP

Immigration Separated Families

US President Biden hosts President-elect Trump at the White House, Washington Dc, USA - 13 Nov 2024

For The Washington Post 

For the Washington Post

FTWP

Donald Trump Watches SpaceX Launch Its Sixth Test Flight Of Starship Spacecraft

Staff

House Representatives-Elect Pose For Group Photo In Front Of U.S. Capitol

Iraq US

The struggle of becoming a multimodal transportation city

FILES-US-VOTE-IMMIGRATION-TRUMP

Contributor

Trump Campaign

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Whether leaderboard ad sticky behavior is disabled

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show expanded byline information on articles

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Show the Balance of Power component on the new Election subnav component

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Enable new Elections subnav on Site pages

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

If true, will use a spoofed user agent to scrape and summarize content from paywalled sources

flip back to old full page reload when new updates come in

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Commentary on the latest in news and culture

See more on this topic in your recommendations

Opinions on the news

Make sense of the news — fast. Sent weekdays.

Today’s Opinions newsletter

Opinions alerts

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> won. But why? On the latest episode of “Impromptu,” Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank and James Hohmann grapple with this election result as an “X-ray into our national soul.”

Use the audio player or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/impromptu/" target=_blank>The Post’s “Impromptu” podcast feed</a> to listen to the entire conversation.

Dana Milbank: There will be lots of recriminations about all the mistakes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/kamala-harris/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Kamala Harris</a> made in this and that. But I think that’s besides the point. This is larger than any of that.

We don’t live in the country that we had hoped we were living in. That Americans had their eyes wide open about what Donald Trump was planning to do, with mass deportations, firing tens of thousands of civil servants just right on down the line …

Ruth Marcus: Rounding us up, or shooting us.

Dana Milbank: Right. Rounding up journalists and political opponents. And they said, “All right, we’re good with that.” So, that’s sort of the big picture.

It is possible that if the Democratic nominee were a White guy, things would have turned out differently. But that, too — that’s not about Harris; that’s about the United States of America right now. There will be a lot of questions about where Democrats go from here. But it’s really a question about where the country goes from here.

James Hohmann: I agree with all of that. I do think that there is this realignment that Trump has accelerated, and Democrats have to figure out how to connect with working-class Whites, Latinos and African Americans. And I do think that there were headwinds. The fundamentals really were against Democrats. It’s just hard when 70 percent of the country thinks we’re on the wrong track and fewer than 40 percent of Americans approve of the incumbent president. It’s hard to overcome that.

But even the final 10 days of the campaign with the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/29/biden-trump-supporters-garbage-puerto-rico-comic/8ac7360a-965e-11ef-939a-5dd38bf140e0_story.html" target=_blank>Puerto Rico “garbage”</a> back-and-forth — I understand why it is really offensive. I understand why Democrats capitalized on it: There are a lot of Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania. But, clearly, those voters didn’t feel like the Puerto Rican joke affected their lives. They do care about inflation and immigration. And I do think Democrats have to figure out how to reach these people. You can’t win national elections just with college-educated White people.

I think there’s going to be a robust 2028 debate. And I think also one of the problems is Democrats don’t sufficiently tolerate dissent. And it’s one of the reasons we got stuck in the Biden mess, because you were bullied for saying, “Are you sure Joe Biden is up for running for another term?” And I feel like the “not brooking dissent” in the Democratic establishment is one of the reasons that we ended up in this mess.

Ruth Marcus: Well, I am grappling with this and horrified by this because I think, for me, this is the “this is us” election. Are we really the country that Trump describes? Are we as ugly and vicious to our neighbors? Are we as uncaring about the world? Are we just as selfish as Trump describes us?

The results would suggest, alas, yes. The notion that Trump didn’t just win because of the antiquated artifact of the stupid electoral college, but actually won the popular vote, is a very, very scary thought. And I agree: Democrats will have recriminations because they’re really good at that. But I think this is more about our national zeitgeist and a kind of X-ray of our national soul than it is about whether Harris could adequately distance herself from Biden on “The View.” And that is really what scares me most.

Listen to the full conversation here:

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for commentary, 2007

Yale College

Harvard Law School

Ruth Marcus is an associate editor and columnist for The Post.

Ruth Marcus

White House Correspondent Association's Beckman Award

National Press Club's Gingras Prize

Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (Doubleday, 2010)

Homo Politicus (Doubleday, 2008)

Smashmouth (Basic Books, 2001)

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (Doubleday, 2022)

Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theories and Dunces who Burned Down the House" (Little, Brown, 2024)

Yale University, BA cum laude in political science

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His latest book, "Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theories and Dunces who Burned Down the House" (Little, Brown) is out September 24. 

Dana Milbank

Hohmann contributed to the Jan. 6 coverage that earned the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. He was part of the team that won a Webby for live video coverage of the insurrection and received the award in 2017 for best email newsletter. 

Stanford University, B.A. in History

James Hohmann is a Washington Post editorial writer and columnist specializing in domestic policy and politics. He is also chief commentator for The Post’s video team, offering analysis during all live coverage. And he is a Stanford University lecturer, teaching courses on campaigns and Congress.

James Hohmann

washpost

The mourning after Election Day

the-washington-post

Jabin Botsford

US-VOTE-TRUMP-POLITICS

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Letters to the editor

Submit a guest opinion

Submit a letter

Opinions

prism://prism.query/site,/opinions/columns?limit=20

Opinion Columns

Opinion Columnists

prism://prism.query/site,/opinions?limit=20

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for answers to the election’s biggest questions

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.

Opinion Impromptu after the election: ‘It’s still sinking in’