This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC’s special coverage Wednesday.

Across the country, people continue to understand what happened on Tuesday. It’s fair to say that many Americans, myself included, feel this was a bad outcome for the country. But I think it’s very important to be as lucid as possible about not only what happened, but what happened. Why it happened.

Donald Trump won a majority of votes in the Electoral College and, for the first time in his three presidential campaigns, he looks set to win the national popular vote. But if you look at why he won, I think it’s clear that it’s a rejection of the status quo in a time when many voters feel alienated from their leaders and crushed by high prices.

This is what they feel in the Western world, where The outgoing parties of left, right and center suffered the same electoral fate after Covid. This was an election defined by the rejection of a status quo that did not please large majorities.

Trump and the Republicans have every interest in interpreting this result as a mandate for their worst governing impulses – all a la Stephen Miller. Project 2025 dark fantasies of the destruction of the “administrative state”.

But these ideas were never popular. Trump tried to distance oneself of them when they questioned terribly. This is therefore not the source of this victory.

You can see it all across America in Tuesday’s results. You can see it in what happened during the vote. In North Carolina, voters chose Trump by a slight margin. At the same time, they elected Democrats as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and school superintendent. And they may have flipped enough legislative seats to remove the large Republican majority and the veto.

You can see this in referendums across the country. In seven states, including the Trump states of Arizona, Missouri and Montana, voters approved measures enshrining the right to abortion. Voters in deep red Missouri And Alaska also approved the increase in the minimum wage and joined Nebraska by making paid sick leave mandatory for workers.

Just to add to all that, New Jersey elected its first U.S. senator of Asian descent. Maryland elected its first black woman U.S. senator. So did it Delaware, meaning two black female senators will serve together for the first time in American history. Delaware also gave Congress its first openly trans member.

This is not a nation that has embraced the far-right agenda of Trump and his Republican Party en bloc. But we know they will interpret this election as a mandate for full MAGAism.

And we know they have a plana destructive plan for the US Constitution, American democracy and, most importantly, for so many of our fellow Americans, immigrant families, trans people, women and working class voters, who will attack the chin because of tariffs and the gutting of labor laws. .

We also know that Trump aspires to be authoritarian. He doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. He attempted to overthrow the constitutional order through violence. He celebrated it and talked about it resort to political violence several times during his campaign.

Because of all of this, we know that they are going to try to do things to overthrow and change the constitutional order. But most importantly, for those of us committed to stopping them, is to remember that their success is in no way predestined.

Yes, they will try and many people will try to stop them, but the outcome is still undetermined.

I don’t say this out of any slight hope. I’ve been covering Trump since 2015. I covered his first term. He’s tried to do a lot of bad things and hasn’t succeeded because he’s completely distracted and fickle, because he’s a vortex of chaos, and because he can’t be stopped from doing bad things. . stupid, self-destructive things.

None of this changed because he won the election. Are Republicans better prepared this time? Are they more loyal? Is justice more in their favor? Yes.

But again, that doesn’t mean the outcome is predetermined. The reason I say this is because the opinion of the masses is not a fixed thing. It is a real force that changes, circulates and reacts to events.

Even Trump backed down when he found himself on the wrong side. He has tried to move away from his most extreme anti-abortion stance because he understands that it is unpopular and that there has been mobilization against it.

One of the most monstrous things he did in his first term, as documented in my colleague Jacob Soboroff’s incredible documentary and book, “Separated,” was to separate migrant children from their families. As the press reported on it and the courts examined it, it became clear that it was cruel and illegal.

While it was a federal judge who initially blocked it, what put an end to the separation of children was only a total rejection on the part of the democratic regime. Thanks to organization, mobilization and protests, The Americans rightly understood that this was monstrous and rejected it loud and clear.

At the end, Trump signed an executive order to end this practice and even attempted to take credit for getting rid of the abhorrent policy he had implemented. They had to abandon him because he was very unpopular.

This is just one example and in his second term there will likely be things he won’t give up. But in the face of this, it’s really important not to assume in advance that these things don’t matter. They do it.

Public opinion always matters. Politics didn’t disappear in America because 3 out of 100 people changed their presidential vote. Politics depends on the organizing, mobilizing, and persuasive work of our fellow Americans.

None of these tools have disappeared. In fact, all of them are even more important this time around. We have to pick them up and we can’t let anyone take them out of our hands.