Last summer, as I drove along the backroads of Indiana, through the vast flatlands punctuated by cornfields, grain silos and the occasional farmhouse, I noticed something peculiar. The ubiquitous Trump flags and lawn signs were disappearing.

I had made this journey countless times during my years living in the Midwest. In previous summers, Trump signs were as much a part of the landscape as the corn itself. Some were enormous, mounted on barns or planted defiantly along highways. Others were modest declarations of allegiance on neatly manicured lawns.

But something had changed. The signs weren’t simply fading. They were vanishing.

I wondered whether their disappearance signaled a political awakening, quiet disillusionment or merely exhaustion with the endless spectacle of Donald Trump. Perhaps people had simply grown tired of advertising their loyalties. I couldn’t tell. But I suspected something was stirring beneath the surface.

On Tuesday, November 3 we got our first answer. I should have been ecstatic. Instead, I found myself somewhere between relief and suspicion.

Was this a repudiation of Trumpism, or had Americans simply grown weary of the carnival? Had they rejected the cruelty, the xenophobia, the casual contempt for democratic institutions? Or were they merely dissatisfied with the price of groceries, the economy and the chaos of a presidency that seems to manufacture a new crisis every morning?

The distinction matters enormously.

A war that never ended

On June 16, 2015, I remember how my jaw dropped as though I had been struck by a Mike Tyson left hook. Donald Trump, holding the hand of his wife, Melania, glided down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan. It was a theatrical entrance befitting a reality television star. Then came the words that would change American politics.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he declared. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

I had witnessed plenty of ugliness in American politics, but this was different. Here was a man seeking the presidency casually dehumanizing millions of people. Surely, I thought, Americans would reject someone so crass, so cruel, so contemptuous of others. Surely his candidacy would backfire spectacularly.

A few months before the elections, speaking to university students in Karachi, Pakistan, I confidently predicted that Trump would lose. My reasoning wasn’t based on polling. It was personal.

I had married into an Indiana family. I knew Republicans in the Midwest and South, decent, churchgoing people who worked hard, cared for their neighbors and believed in treating others with respect. My wife’s relatives and friends were among them. I couldn’t imagine them supporting someone whose behavior so thoroughly violated the values they professed.

But many did.

Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots but won the Electoral College. He transformed that narrow victory into a sweeping mandate, turning American politics upside down.

More troubling than his victory was what it revealed about the country I had embraced as my own.

Forty years earlier, as a sophomore at Florida A&M University, I was enjoying an afternoon with friends at a park near where the FAMU and Florida State campuses overlapped.

I’ve written before about how a white student near me waxed nostalgic about the Civil War. “The South should have won,” he said wistfully, as though mourning a missed opportunity rather than a moral catastrophe. “We beat you last time,” I shouted back, “and we’ll do it again.”

But that exchange has stayed with me. What seemed like an isolated encounter with an unreconstructed Southerner was a glimpse into something deeper: a war that had never truly ended.

When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, I became convinced that America was entering the final battle of its unfinished Civil War. The guns fell silent in 1865, but the struggle over who belongs in this country, who holds power and whose humanity matters never truly ended.

This isn’t simply a war between North and South, or even Republicans and Democrats. It is a struggle within white America itself. On one side are those willing to build a country where power is shared and history confronted. On the other are those clinging to a fantasy in which they remain the rightful heirs to the republic.

Trump didn’t create this conflict. He exploited it brilliantly.

He recognized that economic insecurity and the fear of losing status could be transformed into a potent political weapon. Immigrants became invaders. Black Americans became undeserving beneficiaries of government largesse. LGBTQ people became threats to traditional values.

The message was unmistakable: America was being taken away from its rightful owners.

For generations, whiteness had functioned as an invisible currency, conferring advantages often taken for granted. As America grew more diverse, some interpreted equality as a loss of their own standing. Trump gave those fears a voice and built a political movement around them.

The mask comes off

There is something almost perversely useful about Trump’s decade of political dominance.

He stripped away the politesse that had long concealed America’s racial contradictions. His bigotry, contempt for democratic norms and willingness to demonize entire communities exposed wounds that many Americans preferred to believe had healed.

Remember the declarations of a post-racial America after Barack Obama’s election? That comforting fiction didn’t survive Trump.

But governing through grievance had consequences. Economic hardship persisted. Families struggled with housing, healthcare and the rising cost of living. Immigrants were vilified, yet the promised prosperity remained elusive.

Scapegoating could win elections. It couldn’t pay the rent.

Then came November 3, 2026.

Voters delivered a stunning rebuke to Trump and the Republican Party, handing Democrats control of both chambers of Congress, flipping Senate seats in states Trump had carried and electing Democratic governors in traditionally Republican territory.

The magnitude of the victory was remarkable. But what struck me most was its geography.

This wasn’t simply another Democratic triumph in familiar liberal strongholds. The repudiation extended into regions where Trumpism had once seemed invincible.

I thought about the people I knew in Indiana. I thought about the diminishing Trump signs I had noticed while traveling through the Midwest. And I wondered whether something fundamental was shifting beneath the surface.

For the first time in a decade, I began to believe that the final battle might be approaching a turning point.

Not because racism had disappeared, or because Americans had suddenly become immune to demagoguery. But because enough voters appeared unwilling to continue accepting cruelty and division as substitutes for competent government.

Perhaps people were finally recoiling from what they saw.

Winning isn’t the same as governing

Across the world, from Brazil to Serbia, citizens are turning against political leaders with extraordinary intensity. Yet their anger conceals a troubling paradox: they are often united in what they reject but deeply divided over what should replace it.

Anger can remove a government. It cannot build a better one.

Democrats now face precisely that challenge.

Their victory is not necessarily an endorsement of a single ideology. Progressives, moderates, independents and disillusioned Republicans helped produce this outcome for different reasons.

Democrats would make a historic mistake if they interpreted the results as permission to return to business as usual. They must address the economic insecurity that made Trump’s promises attractive, restore faith in public institutions and demonstrate that government can improve people’s lives.

They must also pursue accountability. The corruption, abuses of power and cruelty inflicted on vulnerable communities cannot simply be swept aside in the name of national healing.

Reconciliation without accountability is an invitation to repeat the past.

Europe’s choice

Europe should pay close attention to America’s painful reckoning.

Across the continent, from France and Germany to Italy and the Netherlands, political movements are exploiting the same anxieties that fueled Trump’s rise: fear of immigrants, nostalgia for an imagined past and the conviction that national identity belongs exclusively to those who can trace their ancestry back generations.

The language may differ, but the message is familiar. Someone is coming to take your country away. It is a seductive lie.

Nobody is replacing anybody. Generations come and go, as they always have. Nations are not museums preserving the identities of their founders in perpetuity. They are living societies, constantly reshaped by the people who inhabit them.

A Black boy born in Ghana who grows up in Rome can be every bit as Italian as someone whose ancestors have lived in Sicily for centuries. He may speak Italian with a Roman accent, cheer for the national football team and understand the country’s customs as intimately as anyone else.

His skin color does not diminish his claim to belonging.

Acculturation is not instantaneous. It takes a generation, sometimes two, for newcomers and their descendants to weave themselves fully into the social fabric. The children of immigrants inhabit two worlds; their grandchildren often know only one.

The process can be uncomfortable, even contentious, but difference is not a threat to national identity. It is one of the ways national identity renews itself.

My advice to Europe is simple: don’t follow America down the road of xenophobia and manufactured grievance. Follow instead the more difficult path we have struggled to forge through our contradictions, toward a multicultural democracy in which belonging is defined by shared citizenship rather than bloodlines.

America’s journey has been rocky, often brutally so. But over time, what once seemed foreign becomes familiar, and what one generation resisted, the next embraces without a second thought.

The road doesn’t smooth itself. It takes political courage, economic opportunity, strong institutions and a willingness to recognize one another as equals.

Europe can learn from our mistakes without repeating them.

Rebuilding the House

America is a house on fire, I wrote last year, its foundations weakened by slavery, exclusion and generations of unresolved injustice.

The midterms suggest that enough Americans may finally be reaching for the water.

As a Haitian immigrant, a Black boy with a French accent who later married a white woman from Indiana and raised biracial children, I have lived many of this country’s contradictions.

Our family’s very existence has sometimes challenged other people’s assumptions about what America should look like.

I have never expected a perfect country. But I have always believed in the possibility of a better one.

America has spent generations learning, often painfully, that a nation cannot preserve its identity by excluding those who are helping to shape its future. We have not completed that journey, and perhaps we never will. But the road becomes less treacherous with every generation willing to travel it together.

We have shown what happens when fear becomes a political movement and grievance becomes a governing philosophy. The question is whether Europe will heed the warning—or wait until its own house is on fire.