We got hit bad on Tuesday night, but we’re Democrats. We get up. We stand up. We move forward.

I want you to remember that we did it before. Donald Trump was elected president, but the world didn’t stop turning on its axis. The sun came up the next morning – it’s up here in Northeast Pennsylvania despite the state’s failure last night – and it will come up tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Don’t forget how resilient this country is. We have survived worse than Donald fucking Trump and JD smirking Vance. In the days to come, it will be up to pundits and prognosticators and pollsters to explain the numbers and how it happened, but in the short term, we discovered last night that there are more angry people out there than we thought.

Here's the deal. This isn’t the time to mirror their anger. Now is the time to stand together and show them who are. We are Americans and we are a good people. What raised its ugly head in this election – hate and racism and xenophobia and every other ism you can think of – has been there all along. Trump gave it a focus, and he benefitted from it in an election.

But elections and even presidents do not define who we are. We do that with the way we live our lives, with our attitudes about each other, with our empathy and our drive to do better and be better.

I’m going to leave you on this bleak day with a happy thought. We are the ones people turn to when they want to feel better about themselves. We are the artists and the musicians and the playwrights and the actors and the screenwriters and the poets who have made a difference in the life of this nation and will continue to do so in the future. We are Patti Smith. We are Joan Didion. We are Bob Dylan. We are Bo Diddley. We are Georgia O’Keefe. We are Jerry Garcia. We are Jackson Pollock. We are Maya Angelou. We are Edward Albee. We are Muddy Waters. We are James Baldwin. We are Roz Chast. We are Margaret Atwood. We are Allen Ginsberg. We are Stephen Sondheim. We are Jules Feiffer. We are Taylor Swift.

We are all of them and we are even more.

The politics and the people we oppose do not produce this greatness. They produce Donald Trump. If you are looking for a reason that we will recover from this, it is right there.

They have hate. We have love and each other. We will resist. We will persist. We will prevail.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott.