We all knew it had to end like this.

Instead of a gracious transfer of power, we got an empty National Mall, a defeated tyrant, a helicopter on the White House lawn at 8 a.m. and 25,000 national guardsmen to defend the Inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden from terrorists who fly the flag of ex-President Donald J. Trump.

Nothing during the Trump-era told us that he would be gracious in defeat. He made friends with dictators while turning his back on our allies and cheering on white supremacy in Charlottesville and on national TV (during the worst debate in American history). He would lash out, unchecked until days before leaving office, on social media, stoking flames of hate and division while surrounding himself with incompetent cronies to do his bidding. Under his watch, a pandemic ripped through our communities, killed 400,000 and counting of our family members and neighbors. He incited a mob to storm the US Capitol while the statue of Columbia, goddess of Freedom, wept atop the dome of the defiled temple of democracy.

So as President Biden finally takes office, I stand appalled, but not surprised, at the state Trump has left the nation in.

Just over two months ago, I wrote that the 2020 election was a reflection of our national morality. I stand by that, but recent events have shown me that the election was only a ripple in the tidal wave of moral reckoning in America.

The Trump-era was a referendum on our collective apathy. We allowed Trump to rise to power because we took democracy for granted. It is our birthright, but never has someone who wished to take that away from us come so close to actually doing so. If we, as a nation, wish to be the center of the moral universe, whose values and actions guide the free world, it will take more than a new president to make that happen.

With his first words to the nation, President Biden said, “We will not lead by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

It takes all of us to make democracy work.

In “Harlem,” American poet Langston Hughes, great-grandchild of two slaves and two slave owners asks us, “what happens to a dream deferred?”

But what if that was the American Dream? For Black Americans like Hughes and for so many others, that dream has been deferred for a long time. But Trump intended to put the fundamental principles of American freedom, the dream of a democratic society that we all share, on hold. Trump was not the cause, but rather the manifestation of the cancer that has been attacking what it fundamentally means to be American for hundreds of years.

To America, Trump was a weapon of mass destruction. He sowed division and incited violence among us and made us question whether our great American experiment would make it.

But like any weapon of mass destruction, the Trump-era was never going to dry up like a raisin in the sun. No, just as Hughes supposed that a dream would, he exploded. The riot at the Capitol was the final fury of the raging, violent funeral pyre that signified the end of the Trump-era.

Democracy endured this attack, but the enemies of liberty will return. Freedom is our birthright, but we can only keep it if we fight. For all his faults, Trump taught us that.