On election night 2016 I left my office on W. 26th Street in Manhattan early and headed to the Javits Center. America was about to elect its first woman President, and I wanted to call my Mom from the official Clinton victory party. After standing in line for nearly two hours I realized that I wasn’t going to get into the building, so I took the subway uptown back to my apartment. As I watched the stunned, tear-streaked faces in the Javits Center on television over the next few hours, I thanked god that I was not trapped in that vast funeral parlor.

My oldest son had decided that summer to try to become an FBI agent. He had done all the interviews, taken the exams, solicited letters of recommendation, and completed his physical. At about 1 a.m., just when I had decided that I couldn’t possibly watch the election horror show for another second, I got a text from him: “The FBI offered me a job today.”

I called him and asked him what he was going to do. “I can’t take that job,” he said. “That would be like joining Trump’s Gestapo.” I told him to sleep on it—that maybe the FBI would need men like him more than ever over the next few years. He turned them down a few days later, and I was never so proud of him. I often think of him when I consider what Trump has done to the FBI in the interim.

These past two years leading up to tomorrow’s voting have seemed like an eternity. But we haven’t sat idly by. We started demonstrating—the worldwide Women’s March, which took place on Trump’s first day in office, was the largest political protest in history. We began organizing and launched 1,500 resistance groups based on the Indivisible model all across the country. Thousands of us, mostly women, decided to run for office. We began registering people to vote. We put such constant pressure on Republicans in Congress that forty of them were convinced to retire without a fight. We won some key interim elections, including a Senate seat from Alabama (!), thanks primarily to the votes of women. We waited patiently for Robert Mueller to gather his evidence and issue his findings and his indictments while we chafed at his silence and feared for his professional life. We didn’t resort to violence.

The Trumpists, on the other hand, have moved even more quickly than we feared they would. Immigrants from specific countries—countries that had done us no harm—were banned from America. Trump called racist murderers in Charlottesville “good people.” The FBI and the Justice Department were politicized. Immigrant families were ripped apart and concentration camps were built—and quickly filled—on the southern border. Trump stood before the world and said that the word of the two-bit dictator of Russia was more credible than all the U.S. intelligence agencies. One trillion dollars was added to the deficit overnight to give the ultra-rich a massive tax reduction. Congressional districts were gerrymandered in favor of the GOP and hundreds of conservative judges were appointed to the bench—there is no mystery about how the Republicans plan on continuing their tyranny of the minority. Republican-led state governments began planning months ago to suppress voting by minorities and young people tomorrow. The GOP came within one vote of repealing the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. Foreign allies were abandoned and insulted while our government cozied up to murderers and tyrants. A man accused of sexual assault was given a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court after a phony investigation. Trump’s closing arguments this month have been the most odious, reprehensible statements ever made by a President—pure, full-throated, hysterical, and impossibly crude stream of fear, naked racism and blatant lies. If the Democrats win, he shrieks at his rallies, “lock your windows and lock your doors.” Troops have been sent to the border to defend our country from brown women and children. “Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight,” says the President of the United States of America.

Tomorrow we may get more than a glimpse of our country’s future. Will Trump go down in as the greatest progressive organizer since FDR, or will the shadow of his Yankee Doodle brand of fascism be the introduction to a deeper darkness?

It is the struggle of our generation, and the ballots that will be counted tomorrow represent the first, and the most important, test of the resistance. Most likely we will suffer some heartbreaking losses and some truly inspirational triumphs. But I believe that, despite the trauma of 2016 and thanks to the efforts of millions of Americans, Trumpism—for Trump is just the mouthpiece of a vast national madness—will be less powerful on Wednesday than it is tonight.

That will be real progress and cause for celebration, but it won’t be the end of it. Far from it, because Trumpism does not respect voting, the electoral process, the will of the people, or the resolve of its opponents. When asked today how he felt about the prospect of losing the House of Representatives, Trump was blunt:

 “I don’t care. They can do whatever they want and I can do whatever I want.”

 That’s not going to work.