One word you’ve heard a lot since Donald Trump declared victory in the race for president on Tuesday is “comeback.” In the New York Times, reporter Peter Baker marveled at Trump’s “comeback victory.” CNN marked Trump’s “historic comeback,” Reuters deemed the comeback “stunning,” and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump’s victory “history’s greatest comeback.” And on and on.

Everyone simmer down.

To call Trump’s reascendancy to the presidency a “comeback” imputes some sort of heroism to it, as if he has overcome misfortune to return to glory. Trump is not a basketball player returning to his peak form after tearing all the ligaments in his knee. He is not a businessman whose company, wrecked by the pandemic, surges back to make even bigger profits.

He is not Winston Churchill becoming prime minister after being cast out of Parliament by voters eleven years earlier for supporting Britain’s return to the gold standard. (As Churchill would say of his unpopularity at the time, “I always remember that, if instead of making a political speech, I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.”)

The fall that was the predicate for Trump’s “historic comeback” was entirely Trump’s own doing. He was not unjustly cast from the presidency because of unfair accusations made against his character or behavior. He is all the things his critics accuse him of being: a loathsome, unapologetic man who has lied enough to the American public that a hefty portion of the country believes him.

So if he has “come back” from anything, it is having to very briefly experience the consequences of his own behavior.

Granted, people are allowed some hyperbole in the wake of an emotional election. (See: Ben Shapiro’s declaration that Trump’s win was the “greatest political story in history,” which stretches the meaning of “greatest” beyond recognition.)

But how much credit should Trump get for simply never quitting?

When asked about the most troubling problem of governing, U.K. prime minister Harold Macmillan is said to have replied, “Events, dear boy, events.”

This bolsters a prominent strain within political science that holds that campaigns — despite all the speeches and political advertisements and attacks — don’t really matter. Instead, it is events that determine whom we elect, whether it’s the impact of inflation or illegal immigration or foreign wars. And while we all try to guess who is going to win based on the emotional fireworks we see during a campaign, the pie might already be baked well before the votes are cast.

And so it may have simply been events that swept Trump into office a second time. It wasn’t his powers of oratory or his expert political strategy that made the difference, it was simply that people were sick of paying 15 bucks for a Big Mac meal at McDonald’s. Much as Joe Biden benefited in 2020 by simply not being Donald Trump, Trump benefited in 2024 by simply not being a Democrat.

And that is largely because of the atmosphere Democrats had created in America, in which Ivy League–educated college students can get their loans “forgiven” but low-income parents seeking to get their kids out of failing public schools and into top-notch private schools are left to fend for themselves. An America that demands its citizens accept a mind-bending gender ideology in which both women and men who call themselves women must be treated as biologically the same. An America in which Democrats gaslight us into thinking that citizens opposed to abortion are “extreme” when in fact unlimited abortion up until birth (Kamala Harris’s position) is favored by about 10 percent of the population.

So the American people deserve credit for rejecting the insane asylum that has become modern progressivism, but Trump’s return to the White House is hardly any reason to celebrate. His victory is another blow to traditional conservatism, which will be a completely foreign concept to an entire generation of young Republicans. Conservatives who stand for free markets, low taxes, and strong national security will now be like those people who back into parking spots or who listen to music only on vinyl records. They are a fringe group of weirdos everyone is more comfortable ignoring.

Further, Trump’s “comeback” has come at the expense of the dignity of Republicans at all levels of government, who have turned their backs on the classical liberalism that once animated them. The gutlessness with which they all capitulated to his narcissistic whims will damage public faith in politics for a generation.

And then, of course, there is the message Trump’s election sends to future Americans. He isn’t suddenly a decent human because he won, it’s just that people don’t care that he isn’t one. They see him either as an entertainer or as an outlaw, an immoral man willing to break rules and smash things they hate.

For the next four years, America may be on an anti-woke path, but recall that many of the most egregious examples of progressive social unrest happened during Trump’s first term. The Left is anything but lazy, and the backlash to the next Trump administration could result in a more unstable country as he grows even more erratic.

So even though the worst exigencies of leftism will be purged from the halls of the executive, spare us the celebrations. You do have to give his supporters credit for one thing: While many of us considered his second rise to the presidency unbelievable, they never doubted it.