Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden takes over the presidency from Donald Trump. Trump won’t be attending the inauguration, of course. He was never going to. Instead, the congenital loser will have fled the scene of the crime for his bolt-hole in Florida. If he had access to his Twitter account, he would certainly be tweeting victoriously about the size of his crowd compared to Biden’s – reduced, of course, because of the ongoing pandemic. Not that that will matter to a man for whom lying comes as easily as breathing.

Indeed, it’s a time to breathe a sigh of relief. Biden will immediately end Trump’s racist Muslim ban, rejoin the Paris climate agreement, and enact a raft of sensible measures to combat the pandemic. His Cabinet and wider official positions will be staffed with veteran public servants; gone will be the inexperienced political lackeys and family members taking up key roles across the administration.

So as he says: America is back. These are all good things, beneficial to both the American populace and the wider world. The United States will, for the next four years at least, once again be a broadly stabilising influence around the world. It’s easy to criticise when something becomes so familiar that you take it for granted.

The fight is over. Trump is vanquished, and the threat of permanent disbarment from public office – as well as criminal prosecution – hangs over him. But it’s important to remember that Trump is not just Trump.

Trump very much is Trump, of course: a totally unique combination of pathological narcissism, corruption, untruth, and fecklessness. And it’s possible that his reality show businessman shtick put him in the right place at the right time, convincing a nation captivated by reality television and social media that he alone could fix things. But, broadly speaking, Trump himself isn’t relevant. The voters that elected Trump are.

Trump articulated a set of ideologies seldom heard in mainstream Western politics. His was a blend of white nationalism and ugly American exceptionalism. The racism was the point. Hurting other people was the point. Destruction, owning the libs, fighting back – these were not policy positions but a guttural roar of anger. This was not hope and change – this was grievance and revenge. We have been left behind, they said, and now we’re back. After so long under the boot, it was their turn to stamp on the face of liberals and progressives.

Betrayal is a powerful motivator, and so is anger. In the aftermath of the First World War, the ‘stabbed in the back myth’ became popular in Germany – helped, of course, by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. This narrative attributed Germany’s premature surrender to a shadowy mixture of political elites and Jews. And after a failed coup in 1923, the Nazis rose to power just ten years later on a wave of economic malaise and national emasculation. Hitler’s subsequent policy moves, often backed up by referenda, were widely popular. The Nazi Party was not a historical aberration, an oppressive dictatorship held up only by totalitarian military might. The Nazi Party was the people’s party.

It’s this ten-year timeline that I think of most when I look at Biden’s election. Trump’s double-bill incitement of a coup and terrorist attack failed. Sanity prevailed, though only just – the men and women who brought zip-tie handcuffs and chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence’ came within feet of the lawmakers. But the forces behind that attack still lie deep in the heart of America, and they’re not going away just because Trump is. A mixture of Fox News, social media and deeply cynical Republican officials have convinced a significant portion of the population that their election has been stolen. They have been brainwashed – by QAnon, by conservative media bubbles, by Trump himself. Convincing them that they’re wrong is the same as deprogramming a member of a cult.

In 2020, Trump received the second-most votes ever for President. 74 million Americans saw an openly white nationalist, nepotistic, narcissistic, wannabe-fascist compulsive liar and saw a President – or even worse, saw ‘the lesser of two evils’. They saw racist travel bans, children in cages ripped away from their families, the destruction of truth, and so much more – and they looked the other way. Trump was a mere projection in 2016, a what-if surely over-hyped by the pious liberal media. In 2020, he was reality. And his vote share increased.

Not all of those 74 million are die-hard supporters. Not all of them would storm the Capitol building on his command – although a concerningly large number does consider it justified. Many of them will have held their nose as they voted for guns, against abortion, or to pack the courts. The reason doesn’t matter. Their willingness to countenance Trump, to sacrifice democracy and America’s founding ideals, does. Martin Luther King’s conception of justice differs from their own.

If Trump had been seriously interested in anything beyond his own vanity, he would still be the President on Wednesday. With a totally compliant Republican Party holding the levers of power, he could have done and passed anything he wanted. Too late, they tried to rig the election by defunding the postal service and disenfranchising Democratic voters. They failed. The Constitution held – just about.

The world survived Trump – although many Americans didn’t. But don’t beware Trump. Beware what comes next.

The Nazis were not just the Nazis.

We were the Nazis too.