Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was an extreme failure for the United States as both a nation and a country. He has open contempt for democracy and the Constitution. He is publicly promising and threatening (and putting in place the means) to rule as the country’s first elected dictator on “day one.” Trump, like other such autocrats and authoritarians, means what he says both literally and figuratively. 

A country consists of a defined territory and borders, founding documents, laws and institutions. The United States failed to protect its democracy by putting an autocrat and his larger authoritarian populist movement and cadre of kleptocratic allies in control of its governing institutions — including Congress. This is a great failure of the United States as a country. 

A nation consists of shared values and ideas, myths, narratives, stories and a sense of shared community and identity (and perhaps even destiny) that tie together a people. One of the tenets of America as a nation is a belief in American Exceptionalism. Be it a “shining city on a hill” or “the world’s greatest democracy,” Trump's return to power further undermines America's self-image of greatness. The United States has now been brought down to the level of being common, and just another of many examples across the centuries, of how a failing and sick democracy succumbs to demagogues, strongmen and authoritarians and their false promises of renewed greatness and easy solutions to complex problems.

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com