To the liberal mind, he triumphed by error, by accident, by Hillary Clinton’s own fault — forgetting to campaign properly in Michigan the same way that you might forget to fasten a window and, damn it, you let a burglar in. These are the tantalizing “what-ifs” of history that keep us all living on a knife edge. What if James Comey hadn’t announced that the FBI was looking at some emails related to Hillary Clinton just days before the election?

The answer is that he did, so deal with it. The Democrats’ constant, tortured analysis of what went wrong, howling at the moon in anger or jest, is not only backward-looking but an insult to the voters who made the rational decision to switch to Donald Trump.

They aren’t all racists. They weren’t all duped. They weighed up the candidacies of Trump and Clinton and concluded, on balance, that one represented change and the other continuity.