Despite 34 felony convictions, two impeachments and an attempted overthrow of the 2020 election,

Donald Trump wins a second term as president of the United States.

This is America Dissected.

I'm your host, Dr. Abdul El Sayyad.

Friends, I know I don't usually drop in your feeds on Fridays, but this is no ordinary

time.

Or perhaps it's more ordinary now than we care to admit, because for the second time

in three election cycles, Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.

I can't help but recall the emotions of 2016, like the cosmic record had skipped and that

some kind of cruel mistake had been made. We strained to understand it. But if 2016 was

difficult to understand, 2024 breaks the mind. Over the course of four years, we watched as the

drama of our national politics morphed into Trump's preferred medium, reality television,

his governing coming by tweet. For those of us with the privilege to live a few layers removed

from the raw machinery of government power, we experienced those four years as an abstraction,

which was anxiety-provoking enough. But too many others, poorer, blacker or browner, felt the

fundamental contours of their lives reworked around his caprices. His American carnage was visceral. It literally

tore bodies. He tried 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, weakening its protections and

undermining it where he could. And the lasting legacy of his judicial appointments has been the

gutting of a half-century's precedent protecting the right to an abortion, leaving millions

of women without access to essential

health care, taking the lives of several. Nowhere were his failures, both as a man and as a leader,

more clear than during his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. At every turn, he undermined his

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