For those who have not yet perceived the flashing red lights and screaming emergency sirens in Donald Trump's America, the president's jolting meltdown at the White House lectern last Thursday should have triggered a revelation. "I'd like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election," began the president who has done everything he could conjure up to obliterate "the integrity of our very important 2020 election." Though he was obviously losing the election by Thursday, according to the entirely legal votes of a record-breaking number of Americans, he proclaimed, "If you count the legal votes, I easily win." Those able to summon the intestinal fortitude to watch this display saw the familiar cross between Charlie Chaplin and Benito Mussolini, but this time, he crossed that fine line separating swaggering demagogue from swaggering whack job.

In Lexington, Massachusetts, the next day, angry Trump supporters faced off against jubilant Joe Biden backers steps away from where the American Revolution got underway. The former waved American flags and chanted, "USA! USA!" But you had to wonder what concept of USA squares with declaring votes illegal because they happen to have been cast for one's opponent. The Biden supporters, comprised of people in their teens and 20s, countered with "This is what democracy looks like!" And it is a testament to their families and their teachers that, despite the daily debasement of democracy that we have been subjected to over the past four years, they have not forgotten what democracy is at least supposed to look like.

Indeed, young Americans provided a powerful boost to the broad coalition of citizens who made Joe Biden president-elect, voting in numbers that contradicted conventional wisdom. Credit as well Biden's former rivals for the Democratic nomination for swallowing their disappointment, parking their own ambitions and rallying behind the Biden-Harris ticket, focused like lasers on the existential threat that Trump has posed to the country. On the left, progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others worked overtime to elect Biden first so they could advocate for policy enhancements later, while principled conservatives organized by The Lincoln Project, Bill Kristol and others relentlessly made the case that traditional American values and support for Donald Trump do not mix. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams spearheaded a multiyear voter-registration effort that carried Biden to victory there.

Then there are Black Americans, whose rescue of this country is all the more moving given how badly and how long they have been mistreated by it. They have been ravaged by this pandemic both epidemiologically and economically, and they have experienced a season of police violence so outrageous as to shake the nation. This has included the suffocation of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake, wanton acts of violence by professed officers of the law. In the Year of our Lord 2020, a sneering president and his allies have not only openly denigrated the proposition that Black lives matter but also attacked as terrorists those who insist they matter.

Hemmed in by restrictions aimed at suppressing their votes, Blacks might have waved off this election with a steely "Well, now you know how we feel. If you want America saved from Donald Trump, do it yourselves."

But they didn't. By the millions, Black Americans waited in lines for hours to vote — in the heat; in the rain; in the cold; in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Unbowed by the pandemic, undeterred by injustice, they carried Joe Biden to the White House on their backs and are responsible for escorting Donald Trump out.

Our country has been degraded by the past four years; there is no question about it. But a majority of Americans determined that enough was enough. Thanks to that determination, the America that we love has been given a new lease on life.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.