Donald Trump Has Left the Building
After four seemingly endless years in power, the end of the Trump era is upon us
There was no adoring throng of supporters wishing him well from the White House lawn. There were no final goodbye tweets. There was no friendly welcome to the Bidens, no participation in the pageantry of the peaceful democratic transition of power. A president who never called his successor to concede, who fought for months to overturn the election he lost with a toxic mix of inflammatory lies and rallies that culminated in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, has finally left the White House, and Washington, D.C.
We will not have seen the last of Donald Trump, but for now, he’s gone — preceded in his morning departure from the White House on Marine One by staffers carrying boxes, and by a slew of late-night pardons, including of politically-connected politicians and former aide Steve Bannon.
It has been a long four years. The longest. The wheels of democracy turn slowly—at times in this sped-up digital era, at seemingly glacial speed—but they have in fact inexorably turned against Trump from the moment he took office, from the largest-in-American-history protests that greeted his inauguration, to the 2018 midterms that cost his party the House, to his 2020 election loss and the fact that he has now…
