Election Day

The failing @NYTimes has been wrong about me from the very beginning. Said I would lose the primaries, then the general election. FAKE NEWS!

— Donald Trump, Jan. 28, 2017

November 8, 2016: At 10:00 p.m. I made one last circuit of the newsroom. Our CEO, Mark Thompson, stood near the political desk, looking on with his wife and a small group of others connected somehow to The Times. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan remained in doubt, but the reality was sinking in: Donald Trump was on the verge of winning the American presidency. I have been in newsrooms on election night before. I know how it is supposed to be. The only thing that ever mattered was the horse race (think Gore-Bush) or the historic moment (think Obama-McCain). There was no investment in which candidate was winning — he (or she) was destined to disappoint in the long run — and the dominant emotion was a certain not-quite-cynical detachment amid the electric buzz of the vote count and projections and the anticipation of relief that the endless push of the campaign was finally over. Sure, you couldn't ignore the victories or the big-picture moments, and the day-after stories would be celebratory in their way — duly restrained but with a nod to victory itself, not unlike the next-day account of a Super Bowl or Game Seven of the World Series.

Capture the triumph for a night or relish the race too close to call. Leave the dancing and the crying for others, for believers. But this night was like no other election night. There had been an investment, not just journalistic but spiritual. Donald Trump had campaigned not just against Hillary Clinton but also against The New York Times and the mainstream American press. And his astonishing rise to the top of the Republican Party had been built on a near-daily attack on facts — on the very idea that facts mattered. For journalists, who approach truth like a secular religion and who had seen a thousand times before how a single true story could gut the political career of a lying politician, it had been a year of faith-shaking disbelief. A line had not just been crossed but obliterated. The shock was palpable as the numbers came in, laced for some with the fading hope for a different outcome among people who generally wanted nothing more than a story worth telling. And there was still a paper to put out, a reckoning to account for.

It was too much on an already long night. I slipped away. At the elevators, I ran into Sue Craig and a guy who was obviously not from The Times. Sue had broken one of the biggest stories of the campaign: she was the one who went to her mailbox one day in September and found pages from Donald Trump's tax returns in an envelope. She introduced me to her acquaintance. He had once worked for Trump. I didn't ask why he was there. Like me, Sue had decided to get away. "It's too weird here," she said. We all got on the elevator: Sue, who had written a devastating story about Trump; me, whose letter to Trump's lawyer had lit up the internet for a week in October; and one of Trump's guys. We rode in silence, a strange tableau on the strangest night of the year.

Fourteen hours earlier, as I came into the building, The Times security guards had called me over. They wanted to make sure I knew about the plans for the next morning. In the quirky ways that things happen at The Times, I had become the lawyer to see for all the things the security guys encountered — from the intruder who pilfered women's shoes to the anonymous letter weaponized with razor blades. The Times was printing thousands of extra newspapers, and tables were going to be set up outside for all the people who would be showing up to buy The New York Times for posterity's sake. (The headline, I learned later, was going to read "Madam President.") We had been caught flat-footed eight years earlier, when Barack Obama had made history. By the time I arrived for work early on the morning after the 2008 election, the line was already starting to snake down the sidewalk. Soon there were hundreds of Obama supporters who thought — why wouldn't they? — that the place to buy a copy of The New York Times was surely at The New York Times. Lots of things happen at The Times building; selling newspapers is not one of them. Employees were pressed into emergency duty to cart bundles of newspapers from The Times printing plant in Queens, and the long lines outside the building stretched on into the afternoon. But it was Obama's victory in 2012 that was on my mind this morning. I vote in a neighborhood that is predominately black and middle class. In 2012, following a drumbeat of stories about how Republicans hoped to suppress voter turnout, I walked into my polling place at a local school eight minutes after it opened. The line already extended back to the schoolhouse doors. "Did y'all sleep here?," a guy wanted to know as he stepped into the foyer. On this morning in 2016, I had arrived again before dawn. I was the only one in line at my precinct's table.

That all seemed like a strangely distant memory as midnight approached. I had made my escape from the building with Sue and the Trump guy. At home, I sat alone in the glow of the TV screen as the states that mattered fell into place for the Republicans. I turned it off. Donald Trump was about to become the president of the United States.

The next morning, in a light drizzle on a gray November day, the newspaper sales tables were set up outside the building as planned. No one stopped. The vendors sat idly amid the stacks. There was no "Madam President" front page. Instead, the headline read "Trump Triumphs," and the first two paragraphs of the lead story talked about how the vote "threatened convulsions throughout the country" and made an early mention of those who "had watched with alarm" the rise of Trump. Nearly half the country had voted for the man. I had just spent a weekend in October back in rural Illinois, in my hometown, and for a moment I allowed myself to see the coverage through the eyes of the rest of America, where, at least for this one night, his victory represented a certain kind of hope that change was going to come at last.

It wasn't that hard. I wasn't one of those people you saw around the building who were real Timesmen and Timeswomen, people you were certain had been destined for the place from the time they were in junior high. My path, from the small-town Midwest to a law degree at age 37 and, a decade later, to The New York Times, had never been foreordained.

On a Thursday morning in May 2002, I said goodbye to the guard at the New York Daily News building on 33rd Street in Manhattan and made my way 10 blocks north to start my new job as a...