The first examined Trump’s comeback, the most astonishing in America’s political history, from indictments, impeachments, and siege by Washington’s bien pensants and deep-state malefactors. The second editorial besought the Democratic Party to learn from its defeat and repudiate the policies and methods of its ugly and violent extremes to become a plausible party of government again.  

But it seemed wise to prepare a third commentary for the contingency that the result would hinge on Pennsylvania and might not be known until America had endured several days or possibly weeks of debilitating litigation. What needed to be said immediately in the absence of a clear result?

That question, however, soon became moot. As soon as polls closed, every piece of data coming in, first a trickle, then a steady stream, and finally a spate, contained incontestably good news for Trump. Although the election was not called until the small hours of Wednesday morning, the result was clear long before midnight on Tuesday. Trump was heading inexorably for a smashing victory, which obviated the need to lament legal shenanigans or America’s inability to produce a result in good time the way other serious countries do.

The fact that Trump won so decisively, especially with a big margin in the popular vote, is massively important. This is not because a presidency determined only by the Electoral College is less legitimate — it isn’t. In 2016, Trump won 30 of the 50 states just as he appears to have done now, and he was just as much a proper president then as he will be after taking the oath of office on Jan. 20 next year.

But winning the popular vote, which he did by 5 million votes, hugely buttresses his claim not just to the White House but also to the support of people of goodwill across the political spectrum. The popular vote is an irrefutable argument for acceptance of his policy agenda and his leadership. That doesn’t mean it should not be properly debated, but it does mean it should not be obstructed as somehow foist improperly on the nation.

No Democrat or anyone even further to the left can carp plausibly that he didn’t win “the American people.” For the next four years, Trump will be able and no doubt keen, whenever his detractors quibble, to retort, “I won. Voters chose me. This is democracy.” It will not be possible to gainsay him.

It is time for all those who claimed piously and purblindly to be the guardians of democracy to consider their own positions. Their best option is to support the president whom the people have chosen. There are, to borrow one of Trump’s most controversial and misrepresented phrases, “many good people” among them. They are not all media mountebanks like MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who greeted the results by saying voters, in this case in Florida, were right-wing extremists and fascists. One hopes, which is not the same thing as expecting, that many other Trump critics, however, will now accept his presidency with greater humility than they have shown up till now.

Accusations that Trump supporters were fascists, racists, and garbage made many of them naturally reluctant again to proclaim their allegiance. The accusations were not confined to the leftist fringe but were echoed and widely implied by such leaders as former President Barack Obama at his most demagogic.

But ordinary Americans who voted for Trump knew the accusation was false. They kept their opinions to themselves, and pollsters thus once again largely failed to predict the wave that was about to overwhelm them. Those Trump voters who do not wear their politics as a badge of virtue, as so many on the Left do, simply want their country properly run, and they voted accordingly.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The result was a shattering blow to the anti-democratic leftist mobs against whose expected violence Washington storefronts were boarded up for several days before Election Day. The weight of the blow Trump delivered below their ribs on Tuesday knocked the wind out of them and dumped them on their backsides. They were so demoralized that their mayhem reflex was temporarily anesthetized.

But they will be back by Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. We cannot expect their long-term acquiescence in Trump’s victory. Once they have picked themselves up and brushed off the dust of defeat, they will start to smash other people’s property and claim they represent the forces of popular democracy. But there is now a president-elect whose mandate includes a call for order.