his weekend there have been spontaneous parties on the streets of American cities after TV networks finally called the election for Joe Biden. From New York to Houston, Louisville to Minneapolis, liberals came out to celebrate a moment they had been expecting for four long years: Donald Trump had finally run out of road. The spell was broken. The penny had dropped. The US has certainly earned a moment of relief and celebration, but Trump’s toxic presence has not yet been eliminated. In the end, the result was not as close as it first appeared in those nervy early hours on Wednesday morning, and yet more than 70 million Americans picked the incumbent – more than Hillary Clinton managed while winning the popular vote in 2016. In the week before election day, there was a widespread hope that the result would repudiate both Trump and Trumpism. Nobody expected his hardcore base to defect, but there was reason to believe that voters who picked Trump over Clinton might reconsider their choice after seeing his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic, his innumerable legal and ethical violations, his flagrant disregard for the rituals of high office. Pundits put the spotlight on this hypothetical contingent of disgusted voters, and forecast a mass decamping triggered by Trump’s putrid character. The Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell last month reported that Trump was finally losing suburban white women, because, “what they saw was somebody who was constantly interrupting and yelling and seemed, you know, to be candid, kind of maniacal”. It didn’t happen. Trump added almost 8 million votes to his 2016 tally. According to exit polls and preliminary analyses of the vote, he looks to have improved his showing among Asians, black Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and even those white women we were constantly told were put off by his sexism and aggression. If voting for Trump was truly a test of America’s moral standards, the country has failed. So what can we say about the voters who stuck with Trump? First of all, this was no reluctant nose-holding: it no longer makes sense to say people voted for Trump “in spite of” his worst qualities, those are clearly a major part of the appeal. It may be comforting to imagine that “populism” involves charismatic politicians who promise the world to the desperate and the gullible. It is bracing to realise instead that in a democracy, Trumpish figures – who scandalise the establishment and gleefully violate its norms – will always emerge when the acceptable range of ideas and policies gets too narrow. At that point, it is only a matter of time before an outside challenge to the settled bipartisan consensus starts to look very attractive, even thrillingly subversive. There will always be an opening in the market for politicians who promise to make politics political again. And so as long as the Democrats shy away from the redistributive action needed to tackle glaring inequalities in a country where the gap between richest and poorest has more than doubled in the past two decades, there will be an opening for the Trumpist right to present itself as the solution to a broken system – the alternative to Biden and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. Trump’s economic policies overwhelmingly benefited the richest Americans, but until the pandemic took its toll, he continued to lead Biden on the issue; according to preliminary exit polls, voters who named the economy as a top priority went overwhelmingly for Trump. This is a triumph of messaging, not policy. But Americans are still hugely dissatisfied with the state of their country, and Biden’s own message of change needs to be louder and sharper – or another Trump will be along shortly. Last year, Biden got in trouble for reassuring a group of wealthy donors that while America’s obscene income inequality needed mending because it “ferments political discord and basic revolution”, they could rest easy because under his watch, “nobody had to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” We can celebrate people of colour and women and even “middle-class Joe” riding the Amtrak train all the way to the highest office in the land, and that is not nothing. But if nothing needs to “fundamentally change”, these are just rhetorical ornaments on the same old slick centre ground. And the next big challenge to that racially diverse centre will find plenty of popular support, even if it still comes from Trump and his disciples, who will not go quietly from the US’s noisy cable networks. In fact, it was only the rotting complacency of mainstream American politics that made Trump smell refreshing. In a world without blatant voter suppression and disenfranchisement, there might be more concern for Trump’s criminality. In a world where campaigns didn’t pit millionaires against billionaires, where it was not a risky proposition to speak honestly of the country’s glaring structural inequalities, voters might not have thought Trump’s crude insults made him “straight talking”. These clues were there all along. Longwell, who highlighted Trump’s declining appeal among suburban women, also reported that her research found these same voters losing trust in both the media and political institutions. “They sort of throw their hands up a lot and say, I just don’t know what to believe,” Longwell told NPR. “There’s just this sort of total collapse of faith in anything.” Into that stagnant bog, Trump came to stir the muck. His incoherence was seen as a kind of unpractised honesty; his ignorance as a mark of accessibility; his vileness as a sign of his fighting spirit. He wasn’t nice, but he was going to shake things up. The shock of 2016 and the trauma of the past four years has intensified a belated anxiety about the crumbling state of American democracy; it has raised an alarm that is decades overdue. Too many voters looked at Trump and did not see a wicked man, they saw a man willing to break the rules of a broken system. For as long as that doesn’t fundamentally change, there is more wickedness in store. • Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist