As hard as it is for liberal Chicagoans to understand, the American people voted to endorse Trump’s vision for America. This was no fluke electoral college victory against an unpopular opponent, as in 2016. This was a victory in which Trump won the popular vote. That was reflected in big cities, including Chicago, where Trump won 22 percent of the vote, a big improvement on his 15 percent in 2020. He even won the conservative 41st Ward on the Far Northwest Side, the first time a Republican candidate has won that ward since George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Trump won this year for the same reason he lost four years ago: he was the candidate of change, at a time when two out of three voters said the country was “on the wrong track.” Kamala Harris represented an administration with a 40 percent approval rating, an impossible number for her to overcome. Anti-incumbency seems to have become a feature of American politics. This is the third consecutive election in which the party in power has lost the White House — the first time that has happened since the 1840s. In a CBS News poll, 27 percent of voters said the most important quality in a candidate was “Can Bring Needed Change.” That was second only to “Has The Ability to Lead” at 30 percent. 

This was also the second time Trump has defeated a woman in his races for the White House. While he never called Harris a “nasty woman,” his label for Hillary Clinton, he ran a hyper-masculine campaign that made it clear he believes the presidency is a man’s job. He shook his fist after an assassination attempt, and vowed to protect women “whether they like it or not.” Is America ready for a woman president? Maybe. Can a woman beat Donald Trump in an election? It hasn’t happened yet. Joe Biden stepped down in favor of Harris after a June debate led his supporters to conclude he was too old to serve another term as president, but he couldn’t have done any worse than his replacement, who lost all seven swing states, including six states Biden carried in 2020. Women voted for Harris, 54 percent to 44 percent, but Trump did just as well among men. Latino men gave Biden 57 percent of their vote in 2020. This time, 54 percent voted for Trump.

In her three-month long campaign, Harris was never able to break through Trump’s stranglehold on the nation’s attention to present a clear and forceful vision of herself or what she wanted for America. Trump knows how to dominate the news, usually by saying something outrageous. Even when a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at his Madison Square Garden rally, that dominated an entire day’s news cycle. Harris tried to turn the remark against Trump, but was anybody paying attention?

What will a second Trump term mean for Chicago? Well, we should once again get used to being a rhetorical punching bag for a president who demeans big cities (even though he’s from New York, the biggest city of all). Trump compared Chicago to a Middle Eastern war zone, carped that its crime rate was “an embarrassment to the nation,” and called the police superintendent “a disgrace” for protecting undocumented immigrants. As former mayor Lori Lightfoot told this magazine in September, Trump refused to collaborate with the city on legislation to stop gun trafficking and would not fund large infrastructure improvements.

During the campaign, Trump promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants, even using the military to root them out of American cities. That would certainly affect Chicago, which has become a destination for tens of thousands of South American refugees. 

“When it comes to a new Trump administration, there’s a lot of fear in the city of him building on what happened the last time he was in office,” says Luis Gutiérrez, CEO of the Little Village immigrant support group Latinos Progresando, which has been holding legal-rights seminars and by identifying churches and schools to serve as sanctuaries for immigrants in the event of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in anticipation of a second Trump term. “He’s learned a lot. In a second term he’s going to be more determined to do the things he was talking about in his first term. We have to brace ourselves.”

All of Chicago will have to brace itself for another Trump term. He’s made it clear, over and over again, that he doesn’t like our city, and this time, he has a real mandate.