On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump, a Manhattan real-estate developer who promoted his candidacy with the instrument of bigotry, was elected President of the United States. The state that put him over the top, according to the A.P., was Wisconsin, which the news agency put in his column at 2:30 A.M.—but the direction of the evening was set when Trump won Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. By some measures, it was close: both Trump and Hillary Clinton won more than fifty-five million popular votes. But, given that even a close loss by Trump would have meant that a troubling number of Americans had opted for demagoguery, the result was stunning. Hours before the vote was called, stock-market futures had fallen sharply. There have been many times when people around the world distrusted America, or feared it. The election of 2016 marks the first time in the modern era that the greatest well of those who are fearful and skeptical of American institutions has been found within the American electorate.

Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, said that the campaign would not be making a statement until at least Wednesday morning—it wanted to take a good look at the numbers. That desire seemed unlikely to change the math. Soon after the A.P. call, Clinton had spoken to Trump by phone, and conceded.

And, a few minutes later, Trump came onstage at the Hilton in Manhattan, joining the Vice-President Elect, Mike Pence, and trailed by a long line of Trumps and his Republican helpers (Senator Jeff Sessions, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus). "America will no longer settle for anything less than the best," Trump said to a nation that, at this juncture, had somehow chosen him. After thanking his family, he added, "This was tough. This political stuff, it's nasty, and it's tough." This campaign, at any rate, has had those qualities.

Trump won, disproportionately, with the votes of white men with no college degree. But it is an act of denial to think that he won only with them: there are not enough of them for that. And, despite what Trump himself, with his contempt for our system, has to say about it, the election was not rigged. Trump persuaded the electorate of something. But of what?

Trump spent Election Day in his Tower. When he went with his wife, Melania—she becomes the first foreign-born First Lady since Louisa Adams—to vote, at a school on the Upper East Side, they were heckled by Manhattanites. The night before the polls opened—technically, in the early hours of the morning that they did—Trump made a last-minute trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Until about a week ago, his focus on Michigan hadn’t made sense to political professionals. The idea that he had any path at all did not make sense to many of them—but Michigan, a blue state? In the basest sense, Trump had gone there because he knew that, if he did, there would be a loud, cheering crowd. He sought those crowds out the way water seeks a way through rock. And, with no wisdom about what America means, he found his way to what America wanted, or perhaps what it craved in a mood of distrust. While he was speaking in Grand Rapids—while he was telling the crowd there that Hillary Clinton was “the most corrupt person” ever, ever, to seek the Presidency—Clinton was on her way from Philadelphia, where she had appeared with Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, and Lady Gaga, to Raleigh, North Carolina, for a final rally to get out the vote there; Gaga and Bon Jovi came along. Clinton still lost North Carolina. For some observers, the phalanx around her was a sign of Trump’s pathetic isolation. But Trump, a marketer, above all, of Trump, turned it into proof of his self-sufficiency: he didn’t need Gaga for a crowd.

This is, in a sense, nonsense. Trump did not win this election alone. He won it because he was the candidate of the Republican Party. He could not have won if the leaders of that party had withdrawn their support in a manner that was designed to deal him a defeat, rather than to provide them with an alibi. In the last days, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and a Wisconsin congressman, campaigned for Trump openly, tweeting and speaking of the glories of a “unified Republican government.” He and his fellow-Republicans allowed this to happen. And they also held the House and won the Senate. They get to decide, in the four long years to come, how much damage Donald Trump will do. (They can start mitigating it by confirming Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee; but that may be a forlorn hope.) Both parties need to usefully address the way in which Americans’ apprehensions about growing inequality, trade, foreign wars, and immigration have become intertwined. But the Republican Party has not only ignored that conceptual muddle; it has exploited it. Donald Trump is not alone in that. There was also the quicksilver word of 2016: trust.

And Hillary Clinton lost. There will be a lot of blaming and complaints in the next few weeks about whose fault that was—the media’s, the F.B.I.’s, Vladimir Putin’s, misogyny’s. All of that demands examination. And yet there is a point at which sinking into a conspiratorial funk will only make the damage worse. Our electoral system is the right one; our faith in democracy is not misplaced, Donald Trump notwithstanding, and it gives us the tools to reject his party in two years, and him in four. The greatest danger of Trump (apart, arguably, from his possession of the nuclear codes) may be if he persuades America to forget that. Clinton, as much as she has been wronged over the years, and unfairly dealt with, had a fair shot here. And she had unambiguous institutional support from her party—even from her erstwhile and putative opponents, like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. It would be wrong to deny that she made certain mistakes which crippled her bid, particularly in the period between when she left the State Department and when she announced her candidacy, for example in taking large sums of money from financial institutions for paid speeches—which was legal, but she seemed oblivious to how it looked. These seem like misdemeanors compared with what Trump has been up to, but they did matter to voters, and Clinton ought to have recognized that. Instead, she lived her life as if she were going to be running against Jeb Bush, a candidate as burdened by charges of dynasticism and political profiteering as she was. When she protested that everything she did was done according to “the rules,” what voters appear to have heard was an admission that the entire system was built in a way they didn’t like. For all that, what she had to offer the country was very, very good. This has been a tragic election.

The pathos—the disappointment at waking up on Wednesday morning and not finding a woman President-elect—is undeniable, and heartbreaking. The pain is unimaginable for a Muslim American woman or for a black child whose neighbors have, in a very real sense, if not rejected them then decided that they didn’t really mind if Donald Trump did. This is a moment that demands, above all, neighborliness. One searches the electoral-college map for signs of it.

More on Donald Trump’s victory: David Remnick on an American tragedy, Evan Osnos on Trump’s supporters, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells on who is to blame. John Cassidy on how Trump became President-elect. Adam Gopnik on talking to kids about Trump’s victory.