Kamala Harris had effectively two arguments in her campaign. The first was defending women’s abortion rights. It didn’t work. Her share of women voters did not increase above Biden’s in 2020. The second was defending the nation against a mad fascist who would dismantle its democratic institutions. That didn’t work either; Trump won the popular vote.

I hope that someone is registering all of the predictions about the disaster which will sweep over America as soon as Donald Trump becomes the 47th President. They will make entertaining reading four years from now, when his term finishes. They range from food poisoning to environmental catastrophe to the end of democracy. Here is a random selection.

• the second Trump presidency is an extinction-level threat to American democracy – Zack Beauchamp, in Vox
• Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. – Tom Nichols, in The Atlantic
• As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. – David Frum, in The Atlantic.
• Americans should now be wary of an incoming Trump administration that is likely to put a top priority on amassing unchecked power and punishing its perceived enemies. – New York Times
• Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism… What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us. – Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times

There’s something wildly inconsistent about these prophecies. After a free and fair election, in which Trump won both a resounding victory in the Electoral College and with the popular vote, how can these elite members of the fourth estate say that democracy is dead? American democracy is alive and well. The problem is that it delivered a result which is not to their satisfaction. Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem comes to mind:

the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Donald Trump is certainly problematic. His loose talk and abrasive rhetoric sound menacing. He has threatened to deport millions of illegal immigrants, to jail his political opponents, and to use the National Guard against “the enemy from within”. His behaviour on January 6 was inexcusable.

A few days before the election, the New York Times pulled together a long list of alarming excerpts from his speeches this year. “These statements are so outrageous and outlandish, so openly in conflict with the norms and values of American democracy that many find them hard to regard as anything but empty bluster,” it declared. “We have two words for American voters: Believe him.”

But more than half of America’s voters are willing to bet that they were empty bluster and not a threat to democracy.