This week’s cover

To understand how we came up with this week’s cover you need to travel back to that far-off land where Donald Trump had not yet won the presidency and the election was still balanced on a knife-edge. We did not know who would win. We did not even know if we’d know who would win. The only thing we were certain of was that, if we waited until we had the information, our deadline might not give us enough time to come up with a decent design.

So we put together a few contingency covers. First were the uncertain, throw-up-our-hands covers. We needed those because on election night it’s dangerous to presume anything. Every editor is haunted by the infamous headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune on November 3rd 1948: “Dewey Defeats Truman”.

Amid the uncertainty, we had put back the print deadline for our cover in America to Thursday morning London time. But we still needed to cater for the possibility that we would have no earthly idea who had won.

In one design a nation was taking refuge behind the sofa as a horror show unfolded; even the marmalade cat was alarmed. In the other we ditched the sofa and the voters to leave a wide-eyed kitten which, frankly, was a bit mystifying. Was it a reference to the pet-eating immigrants in Springfield, Ohio? To cat-ladies? We never got as far as finding out.

We also needed a pair of “no result” covers showing both candidates at slightly differing sizes, to hint at which one was nosing ahead of the other. As we went into Tuesday evening, the numbers said that we could just as well be preparing for President Harris as for President Trump.

In one of those self-serving revisions of the past, pundits on both sides are already behaving as if it was obvious all along that Mr Trump would triumph. The corollary is that the belief that Ms Harris could win was born out of hubris or bias. Our need to prepare for the possibility of a Harris win was a reminder of where the polls actually stood. On the eve of the vote they were within the margin of error.

The one we prepared for a Harris victory would tug hardest at Democrats’ heartstrings. There is already speculation that their candidate could run again in 2028. However, although it is surely only a matter of time before a woman sits behind the Resolute desk, the chances that she will be Ms Harris must be very slim.

After months of agonising, it was just 02:36 London time—21:36 Eastern Time—when Dan Rosenheck, the head of our data team, sent a message over our election WhatsApp group to say that Mr Trump was on track to win. Three minutes later, he added that Ms Harris may even lose the popular vote. We needed to see if his prognostication was borne out, obviously, but it was time to focus on our Trump-wins covers.

There is something about the moment that always confounds your expectations. As the scale of Mr Trump’s achievement began to emerge, it became obvious that these designs did not begin to capture the mood. One, of Mr Trump clutching a flag, was too satirical and the other, showing him wearing a “Trump 2.0” cap, low-energy.

As our editorial was later to declare, Mr Trump’s triumphant return to the White House makes him the most consequential American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Trump era is a return to an old idea of America. Before the fight against fascism convinced FDR that it was in his country’s interest to help bring order and prosperity to the world, the country was hostile towards immigration, scornful of trade and sceptical of foreign entanglements. That is the world Mr Trump will bring back.

A design showing a fist-clenching Mr Trump, surrounded by 60s-style vibrations captured the profound change brought about by his re-election. In 2016 some people comforted themselves with the thought that Mr Trump’s presidency was an aberration. By choosing to overlook his attempts to stop the transfer of power to Mr Biden in 2020, voters have shown how wrong that conclusion was. Instead they have not only embraced Mr Trump’s promise to sort out the economy and immigration. They have also endorsed his unbounded exploitation of partisanship as the basis of his politics, including the slander of his opponents as corrupt and treacherous. This has spread a cynicism and despair about the merits of government that may serve the 47th president, but will not serve America’s democracy. This was a powerful image, but it led away from our leader’s central theme—that the world created by benign internationalists who occupied the White House for 70 years has been shattered.

A cover with stacked photographs of Mr Trump said that his approach to politics and to America’s place in the world was here to stay. But it, too, lacked the acclamation we had just witnessed. So for our final cover we put a bust of Mr Trump above an adoring crowd. It is almost as if he were an emperor.