It was Donald Trump’s worst nightmare. Tuesday’s Blue Wave Tsunami, one of the nation’s most historic outcomes capping the year of its 250th birthday, will take awhile for its impact to be fully appreciated. But it arrives as a complete and total, without exception, repudiation of everything that Donald Trump has come to represent over the last decade. Everything that Trump has tried to accomplish has blown up in his face. He was a horrible businessman, as evidenced by his record numbers of bankruptcies. He chose the path of the criminal early on, goaded by his erstwhile legal counsel and who knows what else, the infamous Roy Cohn. He was the last evidence of a foul period of national excess, of a reaction formation against the noble achievements of America during the FDR years, the second world war, and the post-war recovery. Remnants of the losers of that war, fascist genocidalists, went underground trying to hang onto their foul dreams while slowly gaining ground in the 1960s and 1970s, finding an opportunity with the promotion of social excess in the 1970s that involved the hedonistic exploitation of women to stem the tide of the feminist revolution. For the young Donald Trump then, it was engagement with a degenerate personal lifestyle that coincided with an approach to business dealings that festered with deceit and corruption.

Trump got hooked on that world and the Soviets helped him with the idea that he might carry their water even into the White House here if they owned him through blackmail and the tawdry subcultures of urban life. A naive America got suckered in as it fell for the Trump approach, itself. Like a teenager who gets hooked on a bad addiction, it became too hard to extricate from and so it played along. But reality was catching up, along with growing cadres of well meaning folk eager to get clean. Emotional encounters drove the thirst for recovery, and at last, this week, the break happened, all at once and everywhere.

So it is another new morning in America. Waking up with the sun shining, birds chirping and the dog needing a walk, here we now are. What now, America? We’re being given yet another chance to fulfil our potential, to build a better world for us all. Shake off the cobwebs, and let’s get to work. Or, maybe after breakfast. We can shape a better world. The most egregious excesses that Trump has wrought among us, such as the behavior of the current defense secretary, need to be taken on first, even as we map out a better future more generally.

  Don’t let the euphoria of the current moment last too long. We have a lot of new possibilities now to engage.