Did the American people just vote, in a free and fair election, to terminate their experiment in Republican government? They’ve had a good run—248 years—but they have elected Donald Trump and he’s made it clear the kind of government he wants to run. And it’s no republic.

He is a great admirer of dictators and has threatened to use the Justice Department to pursue his enemies and the military to quell dissent. The voters could hardly be in any doubt what they are getting—an autocrat.

And he will be in a position to make much mischief. The Republican Party will control Congress, the Senate and probably the House, and he is its master. He will command the Justice Department and the military. The only thing standing in his way will be the Constitution. He has suggested he would “terminate” the Constitution when it doesn’t suit him, and in any case who interprets the Constitution? The largely Trump-appointed Supreme Court, of course, and it isn’t shy about giving more power to the president.

That Americans should elect a man with too many grievous faults to count may be shocking, but that they choose an authoritarian path is not so surprising. As I have posted, many Americans are aggrieved about the social and economic changes in their country since WWII and Trump is a master of grievance. A recent poll conducted by The New York Times/Siena College showed nearly half of voters were skeptical that the American experiment in self-governance was working.

Trump has masterfully exploited Americans’ lack of trust in their political system. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, says “Trump has been conditioning Americans throughout this campaign to see American democracy as a failed experiment. … He has used his campaign to prepare Americans for autocracy.”

His supporters, whether billionaires or the working class, recognize that he is “flawed” but believe he will nonetheless be of use to them, the very same idea that motivated German conservatives to persuade President von Hindenburg to make Adolph Hitler chancellor, thus setting Germany on the road to the greatest disaster in its history. American democracy is made of sterner stuff than Germany’s was, so perhaps Trump voters’ folly hasn’t set the U.S. on a similar course.

In any case, the country is now Donald Trump’s. According to Peter H. Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, “This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” He has, as another pundit put it, changed the country by revealing it.

Benjamin Franklin once famously told the American people that the nation was “a republic, if you can keep it.” I wonder if old Ben could have conceived they might no longer want it.