Mark Halperin

There'll be fights at kids' birthday parties.

I think there'll be protests that will turn violent.

I hope they're not, but I think there will be some.

But I think it will be more, it'll be less anger and more a failure to understand how it could happen.

You know, like the death of a child or your spouse announcing that, you know, your wife announcing she's a lesbian and she's leaving you for your best friend.

Like something that's so traumatic

that it is impossible for even the most mentally healthy person to truly process and incorporate into their daily life.

I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's what's going to happen for tens of millions of people because they think that their fellow citizens supporting Trump is a sign of fundamental evil at the heart of their fellow citizens and of the nation.

So how right was I?

How right was I in October of 24?

In some quarters, I'm giving credit for being very right.

I don't think I was totally right, but I was a lot right.

I was a lot right.

And the reason I was a lot right was because just like in 2016, I talked to a lot of voters in 2024.

about how they saw this election, how they saw the prospect of Donald Trump winning again.

And I talked to people who were gonna vote for Donald Trump, who saw this as a huge corrective, not just of the Biden policies on immigration and the economy.

but of the failure to have a fair election in their view in some cases in 2020, but also because Donald Trump had been, in their view, shackled as president by various things, including the people he hired.

And they wanted Trump unshackled, and they have gotten Donald Trump unshackled.

In one short year, we've seen an extraordinary amount of change.

foreign and domestic, but particularly on the domestic front, what he's done with Congress, what he's done with business, what he's done with universities, the media, the use of his office, tearing down the East Wing, changing the name of the Kennedy Center, all these things that he didn't do like this in the first term have reinforced in the minds of so many people I talk to just how upsetting this is and how