American presidential elections are a moment when the nation holds up a mirror to look at itself. They are a reflection of values and dreams, of grievances and scores to be settled.

The results say much about a country’s character, future and core beliefs. On Tuesday, America looked into that mirror and more voters saw former president Donald Trump, delivering him a far-reaching victory in the most contested states.

Donald Trump has promised sweeping action in a second administration. But his proposals are more complicated than that sounds and often lack specifics.

He won for many reasons. One of them was that a formidable number of Americans, from different angles, said the state of democracy was a prime concern.

The candidate they chose had campaigned through a lens of darkness, calling the country “garbage” and his opponent “stupid,” a “communist” and “the b-word.”

In Trump’s telling, the economy was in shambles, even when almost every measure said otherwise, and the border was an open sore leeching murderous migrants, when the actual number of crossings had dropped precipitously. All this came wrapped in his signature language of catastrophism.

His win, only the second time in US history that a candidate won the presidency in non-consecutive terms, demonstrated Trump’s keen ear for what stirs emotions, especially the sense of millions of voters of being left out — whether because someone else cheated or got special treatment or otherwise fell to the ravages of the enemy within.

That’s whom Americans decisively chose.

The centuries-old democracy delivered power to the presidential candidate who gave voters fair warning he might take core elements of that democracy apart.

After already having tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power when he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mused that he would be justified if he decided to pursue “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

This, in contrast to the oath of office he took, and will again, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” as best he can.

One rough and decidedly imperfect measure of whether Trump might mean what he says is how many times he says it. His direct threat to try to end or suspend the Constitution was largely a one-off.

He’s promised to track down and deport immigrants in massive numbers, raising the prospect of using military or military-style assets for that as well.

Spurred by his fury and denialism over his 2020 defeat, Trump’s supporters in some state governments have already engineered changes in how votes are cast, counted and affirmed, an effort centered on the false notion that the last election was rigged against him.

On Tuesday, Trump won an election in the time of a Democratic administration. The effort to revise election procedures will now be fought out by states in his time. Yet another pillar of the system is also in his sights — the non-political civil service and its political masters, whom Trump together calls the deep state.

He means the generals who didn’t always heed him last time, but this time shall.

He means the Justice Department people who refused to indulge his desperate effort to cook up votes he didn’t get in 2020. He means the bureaucrats who dragged their heels on parts of his first-term agenda and whom Trump now wants purged.

Trump wants to make it easier to fire federal workers by classifying thousands of them as being outside civil service protections. That could weaken the government’s power to enforce statutes and rules by draining parts of the workforce and permit his administration to staff offices with more malleable employees than last time.

So it remains to be seen whether America will get two special days Trump has promised.

Upon taking office again, he said, he’ll be a “dictator,” but only for a day. And he’s promised to let police stage “one really violent day” to crack down on crime with impunity, a remark his campaign said he didn’t really mean, just as his people said he wasn’t serious about subverting the US Constitution.

The voters also gave Trump’s Republicans clear control of the Senate, and therefore majority say in whether to confirm the loyalists Trump will nominate for top jobs in government. Trump controls his party in ways he didn’t in his first term, when major figures in his administration repeatedly frustrated his most outlier ambitions.