The night when hope ebbed away

Those of us who stay awake and follow US election results through the night come to learn it takes a toll on your nerves – especially for the last three elections.

In 2016, the consensus was that Donald Trump would lose, almost certainly in a rout, but through polling day the slight doubt nagged at you: what if he doesn’t? As the results trickled in, that doubt grew – but could at first be explained away.

Until eventually, it couldn’t: by 3am, you could still clutch at straws, finding ways Hillary Clinton could still, just, do it, if everything fell right. But on some level, you knew it wouldn’t. It was already over, it just wouldn’t be official for hours yet.

The Biden/Trump contest of 2020 was virtually the opposite experience. We had endured four years of Trump and felt jaded, hard-bitten. We knew he was dangerous, and had every chance of winning. But we also knew how to look at the results – the early votes would look good for him, but the postal votes would be counted later, and would favour Biden.

At 4am in the UK in 2020 we knew that Biden had probably done enough, even though Trump looked to be ahead. We knew how many votes in heavily Democratic areas were to come, and it would almost certainly be enough. The nightmare was ending, unless something went completely awry.

Shortly after 4am in 2024, everything looked much more like 2016 than 2024. It is still, at the time of writing, theoretically possible for Kamala Harris to win. But the hubris of some of her supporters in the last day or two is now a distant prospect. A Harris victory is now looking vanishingly unlikely. Fox News has just called the election for Trump.

He looks set to be president again, and the Republicans will control the Senate as he does. Keir Starmer has already sent congratulations to Trump on his victory.

Is it best to watch the news emerge slowly over the course of a (very) late night? Or would it be better to rip the plaster off quickly and wake up to the new likely reality that Trump will have a second presidency? Is it better to learn that the world will be upended again gradually, or as a sudden shock?

That dread is likely to be a companion for the next four years. For the first few years of Trump’s first term, the UK newsroom I worked in would have someone keeping one eye on the president’s Twitter account. Shortly after noon, that person would wearily shout “he’s awake”, and work would begin on Donald trump’s latest nonsense or outrage.

This time they will likely be worse. The insanity starts at a higher level, the cast of characters is more extreme, and Trump is a man now dead set on revenge, as well as on making his mark on history.

We know we will spend the next four years bombarded by tantrums on a geopolitical scale. We know there will be that constant feeling of paralysis: what can we do about all of this? Maybe it’s better to just disconnect and live in relatively blissful ignorance?

The dread is real – but it’s not just the dread of what’s to come. It’s knowing that the feeling will almost certainly be a constant companion for the next four years, yes, but it’s also that we can’t just rip off the plaster and get on with it. There’s still that last dash of hope to kill off first, and that could take days.