“This bloodbath of an election,” a friend emailed me. “Like watching someone get murdered,” another said over the phone. And this in an email from a veteran of the Vietnam war: “The third Vietnam Draft Dodger is now commander in chief”.

Welcome to the full flowering of the Era of Trump, which began with that now mytho-epic glide down the escalator at Trump Tower, where Trump commenced his candidacy with these historic words:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

If ever a monument is erected to the Trump presidency, then surely these words – shades of Gettysburg! – will be carved into the marble walls, along with “blood coming out of her wherever”, “fifty bucks a steak” and “I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. In true demagogic fashion, Trump bypassed the head and spoke directly to the gut, to the biles and bubbling acids of raw emotion. He said things that many civil, temperate Americans hardly dared to admit we carried in ourselves – were hardly aware of just how deeply we resented our own niceness, how angry our interior lives with all this stuff bottled up, years and years of internalized micro-aggression from a culture that kept insisting on diversity, inclusiveness, tolerance. Many discovered just what a drag political correctness was all these years, and to be free of it, freed from this code that was jamming us up? That was relief akin to a lung-puncturing primal scream. From the start Trump’s rallies had the air of the tent revival, that same hot thrum of militant exorcism and ecstasy.

“Let’s not fool ourselves,” a friend wrote “I can’t stand anything but cold honesty right now. This is not a Repub winning the election, which would be bad enough. This is white supremacy winning.”

Calm down, we’re tempted to say. It’s really not that bad. Stances are taken, things get said in the heat of a campaign, and we could take heart in the newly gracious, conciliatory Trump on display for several days after the election. Then came the news that Steve Bannon, the erstwhile chairman of the Trump campaign who bears a striking resemblance to Otis, the town drunk on the old Andy Griffith Show, was named “senior counselor and chief strategist” for the incoming Trump administration. The mainstream press still feels compelled to explain the term “alt-right”, but we know already, we know, we know, WE KNOW: white “nationalism”, AKA honky “purity” (don’t dig too deeply into the family DNA!), along with thick, glistening lardings of apocalyptic racism, and a style sense that falls somewhere between “Springtime for Hitler” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”. Prior to his gig on the Trump campaign, Bannon spent four years as chairman of Breitbart News, which he proudly declared to be “the platform for the alt-right”. As Breitbart chairman, Bannon presided over such headlines as “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield”, “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and, two weeks after a white nationalist murdered nine members of a Bible study group at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, “Hoist It High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.”

“Find myself not sleeping at night,” a friend wrote. “The first president endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan,” noted another. Then there was Obama being Obama on the day after the election: “We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.” A man’s character is his fate, as Heraclitus said, and what a strange, twisted fate indeed that Barack Obama – cerebral, disciplined, cool, ever seeking to reconcile and accommodate (as an African American pastor in Charleston commented, once his presidency is over, Obama will no longer have to be the least threatening black man in America) – has had to deal with an opposition that very much regarded him as not on the team. There was the birther movement, for starters. The “closet Muslim” conspiracy theories. The terrorist fist-bump. Founder of Isis. Teenage crack dealer hanging out on the corner. “All this damage he’s done to America is deliberate,” said Marco Rubio during one of the Republican debates, which is a laugh. If Obama wanted to trash the US, all he had to do on taking office in 2009 was sit on his hands and let the hot mess of the Bush economy continue its meltdown to oblivion.

But the issue is bigger than any particular president. After his post-election “all on one team” remark, Obama continued:

The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.

This goes to the heart of the matter. The American system of constitutional government is founded on deliberate fragmentation of power, the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” that we all learned in high school civics. For government to be effective – for government to meet the needs of the people – the US constitutional order requires a healthy measure of good faith cooperation among the players. This good faith began to fray in the early 1990s as GOP leaders in Congress, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay chief among them, declared war on all efforts – even from those in their own party – to govern from a stance of bipartisan cooperation. Democrats, in Gingrich’s world of moral absolutes, were “the enemy of normal Americans”. Gingrich and his allies were fighting no less than a “civil war” with liberals, and as he declared in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, “This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.”

And so began the constitutional hardball and scorched-earth tactics that have characterized the past quarter-century of American politics. You may recall the Gingrich-orchestrated government shutdowns of 1995 and 1995-96 over budget disputes, and the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about a blowjob. In more recent times, there was the famous dinner at a Washington fine-dining steakhouse on the evening of 20 January 2009 – the day of Obama’s inauguration – at which GOP congressional leaders (along with Gingrich, by then a highly paid K Street lobbyist) vowed to sabotage Obama’s presidency by opposing every item on the new president’s economic agenda – at a time when 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing – including those items previously supported or even proposed by the GOP. (“We’re all rooting for him,” Obama said of Trump when they met recently in the Oval Office. “Because if he succeeds, America succeeds.”) Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell later summed up the GOP stance when he publicly stated, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

The single most important thing. Burying Obama was the goal, and if bringing him down required shredding the constitutional order, then to hell with the past 220 years of constitutional order. The filibuster, once reserved for only the most major policy disputes, became McConnell’s go-to weapon, routinely deployed even for small-bore matters. By withholding funding or refusing to consider appointments to government posts, the Senate effectively nullified laws that had been duly enacted in accordance with the constitution. At a time when the federal courts had a record number of vacancies, scores of judicial seats went unfilled; the current eight-months-and-counting vacancy on the supreme court is merely the most high-profile example. Government shutdowns and debt-ceiling crises – once unthinkable – became so endemic that for the first time in its more than 150-year history, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of the US, citing the “recent” phenomenon of “political brinkmanship”. Even then, GOP lawmakers have matter-of-factly continued to use the threat of government default as a bargaining chip, a nuclear option that, if carried out, would have catastrophic effects on the world economy.

Had the founding fathers wanted gridlock, they wouldn’t have replaced the articles of confederation with the constitution. But gridlock’s been great for the Republican party, which has mastered a crude but so far effective trick: campaign as the anti-government party, on a platform decrying government as dysfunctional and ineffective, then once you’re in power pull out all the stops to make sure government is dysfunctional and ineffective. Maybe this is why Congress has lower approval ratings than cockroaches, head lice and zombies, and why Mitch McConnell has the perpetually serene look of a man who sleeps well at night. Those low approval ratings mean his side is winning. That all this has happened at the expense of the constitutional order, and of the spirit of comity and good faith so necessary for the functioning of that order, seems not to trouble McConnell or his colleagues in the least.

To call these people “conservative” is a joke. They seek to conserve precious little. Much more accurate to call them the wrecking crew.

* * *

“On this grimmest of mornings.” And, “the faces on the subway today, I will never forget”. The people want change. Can you blame us? We’ve been sucking wind for 35 years while the 1% rides higher and higher, a trend that began with the “Reagan revolution”, a sea change in American politics which the Democratic establishment accepted all too readily. “It is the poorest people in the world who will pay for this, over and over.” Trickle-down economics, free trade, government-is-the-problem, kick labor to the curb: the whole supply-side package became the default center of political debate, and the increasingly corporate Dems offered less and less to working- and middle-class people as the years went by. “Woke up at 3am thinking, I’ve failed my kids.” That the Clinton campaign wrote off the white working-class vote was not only a political failure, it was a moral failure as well, not to mention emblematic of the past several decades of Democratic leadership. “Tell her to go hang out with George W Bush in hubris hell.” Trump’s campaign spoke to our economic fear and anger with a rawness that Clinton’s didn’t even try to match. In hindsight, it’s no surprise that she lost the Wisconsin and Michigan primaries – and very nearly the nomination – to Bernie Sanders, a candidate who tapped into the same populist angst that would give Trump no fewer than 290 electoral college votes. Though one wonders whether all those good working folks who voted for Trump realized they were endorsing a huge tax cut for the 1%, and a candidate whose election left K Street as giddy as a girl asked to the prom by the handsomest boy in school.

“I wish I thought things would seem even slightly less terrifying in a day or month.”

“Try some escapist literature. I find detailed accounts of the first world war and disastrous Arctic expeditions very readable at times like this.”

This system we have, this “free market” system that grinds huge numbers of people into crumbs, it seems so vast and monolithic most of the time, an unstoppable machine steered by distant, mysterious forces. Trump seemed to offer a rare chance to throw a wrench into the works, and many took it. That there’s a much bleaker side to his victory – racist, misogynist, xenophobic – owes much to certain feelings and impulses that have been steadily nurtured over the years by the Republican party. If you have doubts about that, read up on the history of the GOP’s notorious “Southern Strategy”. Old demons we thought we’d pushed to the fringes, it turns out they’ve been right here among us all along, biding their time, waiting for their hour to come around again. That’s the heartache. And for many, more than heartache: it’s a clear and present danger.

“For a minute, tribal identity looked not to be everything. Fond little daydream –nothing optimistic comes to mind, stunned beloveds.”

* * *

Trump’s policy agenda, always a moving target on the campaign trail, is looking even more slippery in the days since the election. The “Wall”, that sturdiest beam in the Trump platform, might be downgraded to a mere “fence” in certain areas. Signature features of the formerly horrible Obamacare are actually good, and should remain. And that massive deportation force? Maybe not so massive after all. This sort of backstroking belies what’s been obvious all along: Trump has never had much in the way of policy goals besides serving the greater good of Trump.

Ego will be the guiding principle of the Trump presidency. In this respect he’s much more like a monarch than the duly elected public servant of a representative democracy, and, as monarchs do, he will keep his heirs close to the center of power, Ivanka, Don Jr, Eric, and that budding Cardinal Richelieu of a son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Top security clearances and advisory roles are contemplated for the kids, who at the same time will be running the for-profit entities of the sprawling Trump Organization. It’s hard to imagine a more ethically fraught, legally explosive situation for the children, managing a vast consortium of transnational businesses while being privy to the country’s most sensitive secrets, along with easy access to the most powerful man in the world. How will it all play out? Badly. Look to Shakespeare for a taste of the awful potential here, to the tragedies and history plays, those coils of ego and empire and wealth (and sex and sex and sex!) that often end with bodies all over the place. The best thing Trump could do for his children would be to put his assets in a genuine blind trust, and send the kids away – far, far away from Washington – to do their own thing. Limit visits to holidays and weekends, bounce the grandkids on his knee, not breathe a word about business or affairs of state.

But that’s not how monarchies roll. That Trump would put his children in such a legally tenuous position gives us a clear idea – as if we needed it from a man who used to rely on the infamous bottom-feeder Roy Cohn for legal counsel – of his appreciation for the rule of law. Here again we can expect the monarchical model. L’état, c’est moi. People rarely grow in humility once they reach the White House. To the extent Trump attempts to game, spin and mutilate the rule of law, his most immediate potential check will be a Congress that’s firmly in Republican hands, led by the same wrecking crew that’s already shown such faint regard for the constitutional order, with a fire-breathing rank-and-file – think “Freedom Caucus” – egging them on to new lows.

The institutions, structures and traditions of American governance are about to be tested as they haven’t been in generations. You say you want change? Here it comes. Brace for impact.