Shattering as it was, the most difficult moment in the 2024 presidential odyssey for me was not when the networks finally called the election for him, heralding that his Second Coming was now at hand.

Nor was it in the series of unfortunate events that began with the star-crossed presidential debate of June 27, when, shortly after Joe Biden opened his mouth, made sounds, said incomprehensible things, and then fell apart, removing any hopes that he could again hold the center, I—along with the rest of the panicked non-MAGA electorate, and perhaps for the first time seriously—stared deeply into the authoritarian abyss. The abyss, having just swallowed the incumbent President whole, mercilessly gazed right back.

Some would insist that the most difficult moment was when he declared that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”; or when he openly called for the termination of the Constitution to reinstate him to power; or when he promised more than once to be a “day one” dictator if he reclaimed the presidency; or when he threatened to prosecute and imprison his political opponents, whom he branded the “enemy within”; or when he repeatedly slandered his new competition, Kamala Harris—the sitting Black vice president, Democratic nominee, and potential first female President—as being “dumb as a rock,” an “extremely low IQ person” who was “slow” and “mentally unfit,” while falsely questioning her racial and ethnic identity and employment history for good measure.

Ghastly as that menagerie of difficult moments was, none of them were the worst.

Shocking as they were to watch unfold, neither was it those terrifying moments when the rough beast instinctively and courageously stood up and slouched his way toward safety after a would-be assassin’s bullets fired at him and mercifully missed, but only after he first struck an instantly iconic fist-raised pose against an impossibly blue Pennsylvania sky with a perfectly situated American flag flying overhead, as his freshly spilled blood trickled from his ear, across his cheeks, and pooled around his defiant scowl—an image that thereafter helped propel him to his largest lead in the public opinion polls, leaving me and his legions of detractors fretting that he might have just sealed his victory in a moment of uncharacteristic gallantry.

But that was not it either. The most difficult moment in this harrowing campaign and election came in the early morning hours of November 6. That’s when the task fell to me, as it surely did to millions of other pro-democracy parents around the world, to rouse my peacefully sleeping children and deliver the news of his decisive victory. Hours earlier they had surrendered to slumber—worried, but nonetheless confident that they would rise to see the first woman elected President and, more importantly, the survival of our democracy safely intact by the dawn’s early light.

My 12-year-old son and ten-year-old daughter had taken a pointed interest in this campaign, as they had in the equally perilous 2020 contest, but this time with even greater comprehension and, yes, apprehension that something more dire might happen if “that bad man” won.

He had won, I confided to them in a soft, somber bedside whisper. Saying that was the easy part.

“But why did he win, Daddy…and what happens now?” Hearing that was the hard part.

Thinking about how to respond to that question—that was the most difficult moment.

I regret to tell you that I did what parents are often told never to do to their children, but what the forty-fifth and now forty-seventh President of the United States, Donald Trump, does reflexively, like breathing, without compunction and without a second’s thought, to the American people and the world.

I lied to them.

I told them with pretend conviction that everything was going to be okay and that they shouldn’t worry anymore about any of this, that Trump would only be in charge for four more years and that we wouldn’t really have to take refuge in another country, as their Cuban exile grandparents and great-grandparents had done six decades before them; that the republic would surely continue, and that democracy’s champions would rally back and win the next presidential election in 2028.

But I don’t necessarily believe that. The truth is that the hard answer to their question fills me with a foreboding bordering on dread. Because what I genuinely think happens now is precisely what John Kelly, Liz Cheney, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Mark Milley, and an army of historians, academics, experts on authoritarianism, and even members of his own family warned us would happen if a “fascist to the core” like Donald Trump was elected President again: the loss of our democracy.

In functioning democracies, when political parties, candidates, and causes lose a campaign, they know what to do: reflect, recharge, reorganize, and refocus on a clear, simple goal—winning the next election. But can we now objectively count on free, fair, and impartial elections in the United States as the remedy going forward with this regime about to take over the government?

Over-the-top alarmism? Trump’s own actions argue otherwise. His final telling effort as President in 2021 was to incite an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government after previously failing to persuade officials in certain battleground states to “find” him the votes. Rather than retreating to even a fig-leaf, performative normalcy, in his third campaign he doubled down on his illiberal actions and rhetoric, promising pardons to all those who participated in the January 6 insurrection, dismissing again as rigged and fraudulent the outcome of the coming election, and cryptically telling an audience of supporters that they wouldn’t “have to vote anymore” if he won. Why would an unleashed Trump 2.0 be different?

Don’t get me wrong. I am sure we will have elections in the United States, and certainly in 2026 and 2028. But by that line of logic, I am also certain there will be “elections” in authoritarian Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela over the same period.

For those who insist our institutions will hold the line, I am reminded of the comments made in 2019 by fellow Gen Xer and Democratic presidential contender Beto O’Rourke in the middle of Trump’s chaotic first term: “Our institutions have failed us…. They have been impotent in the face of the gravest threat that we have ever known.” O’Rourke’s words took on an even more disturbing resonance after President Biden took the reins of American power and the institutional guardrails still proved just as impotent as his Administration failed to hold Trump accountable to the rule of law.

The final rampart—the break-glass, emergency option that we were told was the last, but best, most visceral and powerful firewall of defense against fascism—is We the People of the United States.

However, the conundrum there is that they have just spoken, well over 150 million strong, and in our constitutional republic, their verdict to legitimize their chosen leader with an Electoral College majority—regardless of whether that leader is a wannabe fascist—must be respected.

But what if I told you that in doing so, our fellow citizens might have unwittingly—or even consciously—found the cheat code that could bring about American democracy’s demise? The paradox of our system from the beginning, which stymied the genius of even the most formidable of Founding Father intellects, is that the only way to bring about the rupture of democracy is through the very exercise of democracy: elevating to our highest office through legitimate means a person committed to its destruction.

So, what do we do now, if that is, in fact, what we the American people just did?

For the first time in my half-century as a citizen of this exceptional nation, and quarter-century as an engaged political strategist and public opinion researcher, I don’t quite know. No one does. There is no sure-fire playbook we can use to disentangle ourselves from this moment. And therein lies the horror. Of course, we fight, we preserve, we protect, we defend and never surrender; but we may no longer have the guarantees enshrined in the democratic contract now that they will soon rest in the clutches of the founders’ worst nightmare—a likely tyrant, democratically elected. Benjamin Franklin once advised that we’d been gifted a republic, but only if we could keep it. Left unsaid by Franklin and his Constitutional Convention colleagues was the eternal warning that if we broke that sacred intergenerational covenant and lost our republic, we might not ever again get it back—a devastating truth I still can’t bear to share with my children.