Donald Trump will go down in history as a truly historic president. That is not a moral judgment. It is simply an acknowledgment of the scale of his achievement in completely remaking American politics.
Like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, Trump has not merely won re-election. He has also brought about fundamental shifts in policy, ideology and the political landscape. Unfortunately, he has also brought about a profound change in political norms, by embracing conspiracy theories and refusing to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election.
The accusation that Trump is a threat to democracy turned out not to be the clinching argument that the Democrats imagined. That could be because Americans simply did not buy the argument. But there is also evidence that there is an appetite for strongman leadership in the US.