Jack Klugman was a basset-faced stage and screen actor known mostly, by people of a certain age, for his role as the slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison in the early 1970s TV adaptation of the Neil Simon play, The Odd Couple. Klugman, who died in 2012, played opposite Tony Randall’s fastidious Felix Unger in the hit show, which ran for five years and more than 100 episodes. They could crank out TV shows in those days.

(Among people of a certain age, there’s a vigorous debate as to whether the Klugman-Randall odd couple was as good as Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, who starred as the New York roommates in the 1968 movie. I will not admit to being of that age. But Matthau was pretty, pretty good as Oscar in the movie; this scene is an absolute beaut.)

Klugman, a prolific actor in his long career, followed up his stint as Oscar almost immediately with a lesser-known but longer run as the title character in Quincy, M.E., a series about a Los Angeles County medical examiner. Those people of that age will remember the show. Klugman played a forensic pathologist, a mostly unheard-of profession back then which has become kind of TV staple since. Think any Dick Wolf-inspired series, or Jordan Cavanaugh (Jill Hennessy) in the early 2000s series Crossing Jordan, or “Ducky” Mallard (David McCallum) in the long-running series NCIS. Forensic pathologists, who study clues to determine a cause of death, are still popular, 50 years after Quincy.

Like Klugman, I played a sportswriter for many years. So, following his lead, allow me to graduate from that to do a little forensic sleuthing of my own. A postmortem of sorts.

And you thought this was going to be about old TV shows. Ha ha ha ha ha …

*****

It is customary, after a day like last Tuesday, to examine the dearly departed in an effort to come up with reasons for just what went wrong. But I am reminded of my dear ol’ mother, who often said, as I picked around the edges of cold gravy meat, to “Just shut up and eat it.” Or, as I whined about it, she’d say, “I don’t want to hear it.”

So I won’t spend too much time mulling over the whys and hows and what-went-wrongs of Election Day 2024, wherein Donald Trump Conquers the World. I imagine there’s lots of mulling going on out there by professional mullers. Remember, though, that they’re the ones who told us that this election was a coin flip, too close to call, could go either way, all that. Now they’re busy spewing explanations on why it wasn’t any of that?

(I love the analysts who covered their collective butts by declaring that, yeah, the election was gonna be close but it could be a blowout either way, too. They allowed, these professional pundits, that the election could be close, or it could not be close. Could be Trump or Kamala Harris in a squeaker. Could be either in a landslide. Could be a tie.)

(Could be these people should look for new jobs predicting the weather.)

Truthfully, too … I don’t know why what happened last Tuesday happened. I have no idea. Don’t even want to venture a guess. All I know is that it did, and that many people (though, clearly, fewer than half the population that everybody figured was for Harris) are all bummed about Trump back in the Oval Office, and many are downright scared. That, it should be noted, is to the delight of many more on the winning side.

Now, Trump is busy naming his nominees for cabinet posts in his second administration. (Loyalists only. If you kiss the ring, you can be Secretary of State! Defense Secretary! Attorney General! Head of Health and Human Services! No experience needed!) He’s already talking with foreign leaders. He met with Joe Biden on Wednesday in the Oval Office, a traditional photo-op as the country transitions from one president to the next. It was, it should again be noted, a courtesy that Trump refused to offer when Biden won in 2020.

The certification of Trump’s win will come in early January. It’s safe to say no one will storm the Capitol that day. Then: Trump’s inauguration, on January 20.

After that, the forecast for the nation (step on up, prognosticators) is probably best described as cloudy. Trump’s second and final (?) term figures to be chaotic, even with both houses of Congress under his thumb, because chaos is what Trump does. Will it be a disaster? The death of Democracy? Migrant detention camps and economic earthquakes? Trade wars and a hit squad from the Department of Justice unleashed on Trump’s domestic enemies? Civil unrest? A foreign policy that pulls us away from the rest of the world? Oil fields in Yellowstone? No more vaccines or fluoride in the water? The death of electric cars?

Or is all that the simple rending of Democratic garments?

It’s probably best to concentrate on what we do know …

*****

First, I know, for a fact, that I was wrong about the American people.

I assumed, in my mid-liberal fantasy, that enough of us would see through an immoral man and his lies — nobody can, with any smidgen of honesty, call Trump moral — to keep him from the White House again. I assumed that enough of us would see that our economy, under Biden, is in real, actual, by-the-numbers better shape post-pandemic than any economy in the world, and is a heck of a lot better — again, just look at GDP and employment and all sorts of other numbers other than the price of butter — than when he wrested control of it from Trump in 2020. I assumed that they would see the gains in manufacturing, and a rise in wages, and real infrastructure work being done. I figured they’d see movement in the right direction in climate change legislation, and in strengthening unions, and in acknowledging (and trying to address) gun violence. I thought they’d see Harris’ plans to raise taxes only on those who make more than $400,000 a year — a tiny percentage of the population — and, like all the surveys say, agree with other voters to tax the rich.

But they didn’t see that, any of it. In almost record numbers, they didn’t see.

Instead, they bought into the idea that violent immigrants are overrunning the nation, stealing our tax dollars and defiling our wives and daughters, and that inflation is rampant, and that Harris wanted to tax everybody into smithereens. They believe that we can go back to the 1950s when milk was cheap and there was no crime and everybody was happier. They believe that Democrats want to let trans kids born as boys beat up girls in sports and they want taxpayers’ money for gender-affirming care for prisoners, and that diversity, equity, and inclusion are all bad things, and that all that “wokeness” is what’s wrong with America. Whether any of that is true or not (and, to be fair, even in the most literal reading of those issues, almost none of it is) is almost beside the point. Trump and the Republicans sold it. Most Americans — wow, that’s so hard to fathom I have to underline it; most Americans — bought it. End of story.

Why didn’t we see that coming? Why was Trump able to sell his vision of America, while the Democrats couldn’t push theirs?

Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Nobody wants to hear it. Just shut up and eat it.

Secondly, if there’s one thing I know, for certain once again, it’s that nobody knows the future. (“Even the weatherman gets caught in the rain sometimes“) If Trump’s first term is a guide, he’ll do some whacky things, the Democrats and the left- and center-left media will try to check him, and he’ll eviscerate them. He will do what he wants, as he is wont to do, less constrained this term by the courts or anyone else. Those around him now won’t be there to contain him, as was the case in his first term, but will enable him. If his first term is an indication, it won’t be pretty.

But, as is said in finance quarters, past performance is no indication of future results. That, though, is what has Democrats truly worried. It could be worse. Much worse.

Yeah. Cloudy. With a chance of storms. Maybe severe.

*****

On the Monday and Tuesday of election week, I sat in my home office cold-calling voters on behalf of the Democratic Party of Georgia. That was my paltry contribution to trying to get Harris elected. Dial, listen to a hangup, dial, get a voicemail message, dial, hear someone pick up, go through my spiel, listen to another hangup … and, once in a while, dial, talk to a real person, see if they’d voted and, if they hadn’t, make a last-ditch pitch for Harris.

Over five or six hours — I needed a break in there somewhere; a guy can take only so much rejection — I maybe half-convinced a handful of people to vote for Harris. I talked to a few that said they already had. No one cursed me out. (These were call lists from the Democrats, after all, who rightfully concluded that trying to change Republican minds was useless.)

I feel like I should have done more.

Since the election, I’ve done my wallowing while trying to avoid all those postmortems and doom-and-gloom forecasts. I’m sidestepping both the preening on the right and the self-flagellation on the left. I deleted my Twitter account. I scroll quickly down The New York Times front page to get to the Spelling Bee. I avoid CNN. I can’t even watch Jon Stewart.

It hasn’t yet been two weeks, so none of that has been especially difficult to do. It’s actually been liberating.

Soon enough, though, I won’t be able to avoid the news and all the saber-rattling and fist-clenching that comes with it. None of us will. We’ll be inundated. The right will try to prove Americans made the right choice. The left will try to prove the opposite. We’ll be back at each other’s throats once again.

That’s another truism from Election Day 2024: Little, really, was settled. All we have are one side’s concepts of a plan. A Project 2025 outline. Suggestions, from both sides, of what will happen if this, or if that. Worst of all, perhaps — and this would have been true no matter what the outcome last Tuesday, though it’s undoubtedly more true with Trump, the Great Divider, winning — the election did nothing to bring us any closer together. We are not united. Not. Even. Close.

All Election Day did — and to be sure, this was plenty enough for one side, at least for now — was to show that more people, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, bought that Trump was a better choice for this shaken, ruptured nation.

Well, the reckoning comes soon enough.

Maybe the sun will shine. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be better off in four years.

My professional advice, though, as a sportswriter turned forensic pathologist turned weatherman, is to bring an umbrella. A sturdy one.