It was a mood reflected in much of Manhattan. At my polling place — appropriately enough, the Alfred E. Smith School on the Upper West Side, named for New York’s original “Happy Warrior” — lines were longer than I had seen them on any Election Day save for the Obama-McCain election of 2008. This time the feeling in the lines was entirely different from that day ten years ago, and not just because the balmy sunshine had been replaced by rain. My fellow voters seemed grimly determined, quietly set on delivering a message even though there were no competitive races (or competitive Republicans) on the ballot.

So where are we and where do we go from here?

A tip that Mr. Trump should take from a much better politician than himself, the man who did pull off the impossible, is that there are times to get off the stage. Even when things were going well, Franklin Roosevelt liked to say, periodically, that it was time for him to disappear — to keep a low profile, get out of the public eye and go fishing, even in that much less media-freighted era. No one wants a president in her face all the time, and no TV show is on every night.

It is not advice Mr. Trump will take. Even on election night, he was giving himself full credit in his tweets for what he called a “tremendous success” and retweeting what the writer Ben Stein had said about him, namely that “Mr. Trump has magic about him. He has magic coming out of his ears. He is an astonishing vote-getter and campaigner.”

Well, the magical Mr. Trump has become a permanent low-pressure system hovering over us, dominating our conversation, filling our airwaves, distracting us from exercising our great right to be left alone. But he is constitutionally incapable of giving up the tweet-glow, and so will likely exhaust even his most devoted followers in the end.

Regarding those followers: we have all been told, over and over again, by one expert after another from nearly every possible spot on the political spectrum that none of us must ever, ever talk down to these, our fellow Americans, or criticize their choice of Mr. Trump in any way, lest we further alienate them.

Fine. I will say this then: listen to yourselves. Listen to your experience, to that little voice in your heart or in your head, to what you can recall of what used to be acceptable presidential behavior in this country. It will tell you that this is not a fit man to be president, in any way whatsoever. It will tell you that this is not what you have to settle for, that you yourselves can do better in choosing someone else, no matter how often you have been disappointed in the past.

For Democrats, this campaign had its own heartbreaks: Beto O’Rourke, Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum losing to three of the most obnoxious candidates in the race. The wrenchingly narrow failure to knock the likes of Steve King or Chris Collins out of the House. And of course, Republicans keeping the Senate means not only that Mr. Trump will have something to brag about (when does he not?) but that he can jam through as many appointments — particularly judicial appointments — as he likes, perhaps starting with a replacement for Justice Clarence Thomas at a politically convenient moment like, say, 2020.