finally it<u+2019>s over, or so it seems. we made it to nov. 8 <u+2014> which itself is a win. but did anyone catch the livery plates on that careening limo? did that wikileak-ing, weiner-crashing, billy bushing, russian-hacking spectacle really just happen, or was it a figment of too many minds subjected to too much pandemonium over too long a campaign? what was all that about, anyway? it<u+2019>s easy to forget <u+2014> and most of us probably have <u+2014> that this presidential campaign began on a wholly different plane of dread. back in 2015, people were actually worried that this go-round would result in another slog between familiar names and tired narratives. it would fall somewhere in the low-energy tradition of romney-obama, perhaps with the added promise (threat?) of a dynastic rehash: another clinton (hillary) squaring off against another bush (jeb!). fasten your seatbelts, or maybe don<u+2019>t bother. sure, there was always a better-than-decent chance 2016 would yield a historic result: hillary clinton becoming the first woman to be president. it<u+2019>s easy to forget now that mrs. clinton might have been the most admired political figure of either party until a few months before she started running again; before bernie sanders, before donald j. trump , before the <u+201c>damn emails.<u+201d> she appeared, at the outset, to have a nuisance-free path to the democratic nomination and entered the race as a clear favorite over the demographically hobbled g.o.p., whose default manifesto entering this election was called an <u+201c>autopsy.<u+201d> even as young voters declared themselves uninspired by mrs. clinton, the <u+201c>historic nature of her candidacy,<u+201d> as her campaign put it so clinically, made for a momentous backdrop to all the disruption that followed. but rest assured, disruption was the star of 2016, and it bore the pink-orange hue of mr. trump. there<u+2019>s zero doubt that a single candidate monopolized the whole disheartening pageant of 2016. he left a sorry trail of chastened experts, shattered rules and little marcos in his wake. the outcome was all the more remarkable when you consider mr. trump had 16 opponents to contend with in the republican primaries and faced a democratic nominee who<u+2019>s been one of the biggest political celebrities in the world for nearly a quarter-century. mr. trump<u+2019>s complete command of the coliseum is the prime reason 2016 will go down as a line-of-demarcation campaign in which every presidential election that came before it will seem quaint, tame and antiquated by comparison. people tend to focus on the trump effect as a pure negative, citing the <u+201c>normalization<u+201d> of his coarsening style and what mitt romney called the <u+201c>trickle-down racism and trickle-down bigotry and trickle-down misogyny<u+201d> that could result from mr. trump<u+2019>s example. but there<u+2019>s no denying that his scrambling of the political marketplace has been overdue, and perhaps healthy. he proved that a candidate could win a republican nomination by a wide margin while defying party-line orthodoxy <u+2014> praising, say, certain aspects of planned parenthood, criticizing the iraq war and freely calling out putative party elders and leaders such as george w. bush, john mccain and paul d. ryan, among others. his free use of social media and, until a few months ago, his hyper-accessibility to the news media diminished a political communications racket that has enriched far too many media buyers, ad makers and parasitic consultants of many stripes over the years. for as many outrages as he perpetrated, mr. trump<u+2019>s offhand and compulsive style was a bracing departure from the usual on-message lobotomies that candidates inflict, and millions of voters rewarded him for it. if campaigns were won on mentions and mindshare, mr. trump would have been bored of winning from the moment he rode the trump tower escalator into our lives 17 months ago and all sense of political normalcy and decency descended with it. the <u+201c>summer of trump<u+201d> last year was supposedly a passing spasm, until it gave way to the fall of trump, the winter of trump, the party of trump and whatnot. can you actually mock someone for being as solipsistic as mr. trump is if, in fact, this whole election really has revolved around him? the sheer exhaustion of this trip he dragged the country on began to assume a life of its own. how would this reality show play out? or would it? <u+201c>can this thing just end, please?<u+201d> matt borges, the republican chairman of ohio, pleaded to the washington post on the morning after mr. trump spent the wee hours suggesting on twitter that people should check out a sex tape featuring a latina beauty queen (one of those bizarre yet somehow ho-hum episodes you seemed to confront with pelting regularity in a trump election). mrs. clinton was boring by comparison, the hyper-familiar and battle-scarred veteran of the same old political battles <u+2014> not an easy sell in 2016. still, for all of her flaws, she executed key candidate requirements with aplomb. political pros rate somewhere between 50 percent and 70 percent of a nominee<u+2019>s performance on high-profile, set-piece events: putting on a good convention, performing well in debates and selecting a do-no-harm running mate, all of which mrs. clinton did better than mr. trump (except possibly for the running-mate selection, which you could call a wash). her campaign also swamped mr. trump in the unsexy areas of field organizing, fund-raising and (by every indication) <u+201c>get out the vote<u+201d> efforts, which put her at a decided advantage once the voting began. the rest of the clinton package proved discordant with an impatient political moment, devastatingly so at times. her cautious speeches, teeth-pulling approach to disclosure and inability to be forthcoming about her private email server elicited more of the same headaches the clintons have been causing for decades. the same usual suspects hovered around her campaign like flies at the quadrennial picnic of democratic entitlement. reading their hacked emails via wikileaks <u+2014> the secret diaries of band, podesta and brazile <u+2014> offered a deflating case study in why so many voters wanted this so-called establishment blown to smithereens. it helped explain how mr. sanders was able to throw such a scare into mrs. clinton during the primaries, and how mr. trump was able to come one winnable election away from the seat of lincoln and f.d.r. both mrs. clinton and mr. trump helped accentuate each other<u+2019>s best and worst arguments. if you were running as a battering-ram outsider like mr. trump, it would be hard to invent a better contrast than the secretary of same; if you were running as a safe and familiar grown-up like mrs. clinton, who better than mr. trump to embody the volatile opposite? whatever these wealthy celebrity new yorkers had in common, their matchup offered a mars-venus disconnect from the get-go. they represented perfect generational and cultural archetypes, even caricatures. if there was ever a cartoon male to represent everything hillary clinton has ever placed herself in opposition to, it was donald trump. she was the tracy flick class president to trump<u+2019>s <u+201c>mad men<u+201d>-vintage assumed privilege and male id; she was the wellesley striver bent on breaking the <u+201c>glass ceiling<u+201d> of the tower the likes of mr. trump slapped their names on in gold; she was <u+201c>it takes a village<u+201d> to the <u+201c>i alone can fix it<u+201d> of an unlikely septuagenarian exemplar of the selfie generation. mr. trump<u+2019>s campaign slogan, <u+201c>make america great again,<u+201d> did not even pretend to be forward looking (just as mrs. clinton<u+2019>s <u+201c>stronger together<u+201d> barely attempted to be catchy, inspiring or memorable). it was as if mr. trump felt he could backdate himself from the social and political strains that the clintons and their baby boomer ilk have been in the middle of for the last 50 years. could a republican party whose leadership seemed committed to diversifying its white male base really nominate someone who called mexicans <u+201c>rapists<u+201d> in his announcement speech, described women as <u+201c>fat<u+201d> and <u+201c>ugly<u+201d> and acquiesced to his own daughter<u+2019>s being described as a <u+201c>piece of ass<u+201d>? but in a way, it was also perfect, right? because of course the first woman to breach the ultimate men<u+2019>s sanctum of the american presidency would first have to defeat someone who actually boasted about the size of his penis on a republican debate stage. <u+201c>you can<u+2019>t make this stuff up,<u+201d> mrs. clinton would say as a refrain at her campaign events in the final months of the campaign, usually referring to something trump-related. it<u+2019>s a phrase that pretty much anyone who<u+2019>s watched this campaign could sign on to, from either side <u+2014> an actual point of unity, something to build on. and it does seem certain that our civic life will be dealing with the fallout from 2016 for a long time. usually elections bring a measure of closure on election day. there are typically expressions of mutual respect and vows of (or at least nods to) a fresh start. you wonder if anyone will even bother this time, whether we<u+2019>re entering a long hangover phase or the dawn of a country whose divisions will keep getting only sharper. is national unity even possible after a campaign in which one candidate threatened to put the loser in jail, and the other consigned half her opponent<u+2019>s supporters to a <u+201c>basket of deplorables<u+201d> (dismissing them as <u+201c>racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic, you name it<u+201d>)? where could the healing possibly begin? at the very least, i<u+2019>ll offer a small proposal, take it or leave it. maybe the purest act of patriotism involves well-meaning citizens redoubling their efforts at being respectful, compassionate and decent in their everyday lives. (on twitter? that might be pushing it.) it<u+2019>s what we can control, after all, our small gift to democracy, beyond all the noise and fallout that our politics inflicted in 2016. we toast to our endurance and maybe our resilience, too. we survived the rough trip to nov. 8, and now we unpack. a version of this article appears in print on november 9, 2016, on page p1 of the new york edition with the headline: waking from a fever dream. order reprints | today's paper | subscribe
a fever dream of an election
mark leibovich