On Monday, Donald Trump was officially certified by Congress as the winner of the 2024 Electoral College vote. Vice President Kamala Harris, who Trump defeated in the election, fulfilled her responsibilities by overseeing the vote count and ceremony. Trump will take power on January 20. His inauguration coincides with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Day. Trump is America’s first White president. Dr. King is one of America’s great freedom warriors for multiracial democracy and human rights. He was martyred for his struggle to force America to live up to its professed ideals and unrealized potential. The coincidence of these two events is one more example of how this version of reality feels fundamentally broken.

Trump’s official victory as the 47th president of the United States also took place on the fourth “anniversary” of his attempt to remain in office despite being defeated in the 2020 election. On Jan. 6, four years ago, in one of the most infamous moments in American history, many thousands of Donald Trump’s MAGA followers, at his encouragement, participated in a violent assault on the Capitol. They came dangerously close to succeeding. Then-Vice President Mike Pence (and other high-ranking government officials including Nancy Pelosi) were minutes if not seconds away from being tracked down by the MAGA mob. The quick thinking by an African American Capitol Police officer named Eugene Goodman likely saved Pence’s life — and American democracy.

"I think of what filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch said when he left Berlin for the U.S. in the run-up to fascism in Germany: 'Nothing good is going to happen here for a long time.'"

Trump has repeatedly said that he will pardon many members of the Jan. 6 MAGA attack force because they are "victims," "political prisoners," and "patriots" if not civic saints and heroes. Trump has described the Jan. 6 attack by his MAGA followers on the Capitol as "a day of love."

The centrists, institutionalists and other such mainstream voices who continue to naively believe in a version of an eternally democratic and decent America that does not exist and where autocrats and demagogues are anathema to the country’s political traditions and culture were (self- and incorrectly) convinced that the events of Jan. 6, 2020, would be the end of Donald Trump’s political power and the MAGA movement. Instead, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement would endure and grow in power and influence. There is a deep appetite for authoritarianism in America (and other parts of the world).

In all, Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, the certification of the Electoral College votes on Monday, and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, have caused a type of cognitive dissonance and frustration among pro-democracy Americans and other members of the “reality-based community” that none of this should be happening but all of it has and continues to. On this, Heather Cox Richardson writes in her newsletter Letters from an American how, “Democracy stood in the sense that its norms were honored today as they were not four years ago, which is no small thing. But it is a blow indeed that the man who shattered those norms by trying to overturn the will of the American voters and seize the government will soon be leading it again.”

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The emotional core of this dissonance and disbelief at Trump and MAGA return to power is a profound state of mourning for the nation and its future.

In an attempt to make better sense of our collective emotions (and tumult and upset) in these weeks before Trump’s return to power, reflect on the previous year and the election, and what may come next, I recently spoke to a range of experts.

Steven Beschloss is a journalist and author of several books, including "The Gunman and His Mother." His website is America, America.

The failure of American voters, including many Democrats, to embrace Kamala Harris is a tragedy that the country will only begin to comprehend in the months ahead. Whether she was rejected because of her gender or race, her ideas or the price of eggs, the failure of a strong majority of Americans to grasp or care about the danger........

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