Hi and welcome to Anicus Plus. This is our members-only sibling of Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am Dahlia Lithwick. I cover those things for Slate, and I do so luckily alongside the one and only Mark Joseph Stern.

And we are coming to you on this Wednesday evening post-election because, well, you know why.

And we are sharing this member's only podcast with you, including with our non-slate Plus subscribers,

because it really feels as though we might all just need a minute to be together.

Slate Plus members, thank you as ever for making our work in this particular episode possible.

Mark, over to you.

You know, I wanted to start because at the end of our last Slate Plus episode, I made a tentative,

but still somewhat confident prediction that Donald Trump would lose. And I feel like I owe

listeners an apology for the false hope that I may have instilled in them. I obviously did not

read the mood of the country correctly and should have been far more pessimistic about Americans' ability to make a rational and compassionate choice for presidents.

And so I think I have a feeling that's widely shared at this moment on this day of bewilderment

and profound distress that is markedly different from how I felt in 2016. In 2016, it truly

registered as a fluke. He lost the popular vote. Big time, Trump really should not have won that election he just

randomly happened to squeak by in a handful of Midwestern states and take perfect advantage of

the electoral college bias it felt like well this isn't who we are this is something that we can

fight this is something we can stand against because Trumpism and Trump don't

represent the country. And, you know, from where I sit right now, I really feel like Trumpism

does represent the country. I feel like Trump represents the United States and quite possibly a

majority of voters. It's not yet clear, but it seems he'll win both the popular

vote and the electoral college, which is almost unthinkable as of 24 hours ago. And I think,

you know, what we talk about on this show, the issue of democracy, of leaders who respect

...