President-elect Donald Trump should never have appeared on a ballot this year. We shouldn’t even be talking about the horror of a second Trump term. His actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection were disqualifying. The U.S. Constitution had remedies for his actions. If impeached and convicted, he would have been disqualified from running for president again.  

In the U.S. House of Representatives, just 10 of 211 Republicans voted to impeach Trump. In the Senate, seven out of 50. This was the moment in which Trump should have been expelled from our political atmosphere. But a month after he incited an insurrection at the workplace of his future jurors in an impeachment trial, those very Republicans let him off the hook.  

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man whose vote many Senate Republicans were planning to follow, recognized the horror of that day and believed Trump was responsible. However, in a profile of cowardice, he voted to acquit Trump. And enough senators took his cue and voted to acquit him.   

That was one of the days that the 2024 presidential election was decided — when the moral carcasses in the Republican party couldn’t summon the strength to protect their own democracy.  

Another day was March 11, 2021. On that day, Merrick Garland took office as U.S. attorney general. He was tasked with investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his hoarding of classified documents after leaving office. Trump did not stand trial in those cases before election day.  

Garland was so focused on appearing non-political that he allowed Trump and his allies to run out the clock on the judicial system. And while Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial and guilty of falsifying business records to conceal improper use of campaign funds, those trials took place in New York. The U.S. Department of Justice did not live up to its name.  

And so the buck was passed to the voters. This is where alternative information ecosystems play a role. Voters of all races and ages labeled the economy a key concern, and two-thirds felt the economy was “not so good” or “poor.”  

Trump won those voters 70% to 28%. Inflation absolutely spiked during 2021 and 2022. And inflation was a global problem, with America damaged far less than most. But Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, where it has since fallen back down to 2.4%. This was accomplished without a recession, a miracle in economics.  

The Biden-Harris administration brought inflation back down, had record job growth and low unemployment. Voters punished Harris because they believed the economy was bad. Voters are fickle and have short memories. The founders knew this. Impeachment was a mechanism to prevent threats to democracy, like Trump, from keeping power.   

In the House of Representatives, 201 cowards failed us. In the Senate, 43 cowards failed us. And at last count, 72,340,834 of our fellow Americans failed us by rewarding the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War with the most powerful office in the world.