Midway through the 2016 presidential campaign, when it became clear Donald Trump would claim the Republican nomination, a rueful joke circulated among disbelievers: “Can we just admit that we may have taken this ‘Anybody can grow up to be president’ thing a bit too far?”

The disbelievers have gone from laughter to shock. On Tuesday, Americans put the future of their nation in the hands of Donald Trump, an untested leader with deep character flaws and no experience in governance or national security. Voters delivered a humiliating rebuke to America’s political establishment and to the hangers-on – the pollsters, the pundits, the media elites, the celebrities who surrounded Hillary Clinton on stages even as Trump stood alone.

Humbled Democratic leaders and others who had predicted Clinton would win 300 electoral votes or many more instead watched, agape, as Trump picked off states that Barack Obama had won handily. This wasn’t a landslide, but it buried Democrats under plenty of rubble. All that talk of taking back the U.S. Senate and just maybe the House? The assumption that a Democratic president would reshape the U.S. Supreme Court? All gone. Let the Democrats form their circular firing squad for the volleys of blame that now commence.

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