As someone who is not a student of American politics, I tend to relate American political developments to experiences and places that I am more familiar with. From this perspective, I’ll try to make four simple points. For a foreigner, particularly an Eastern European, who carries a significant political history in their personal biography, one of the most striking things that began to unfold in the United States—long before these most recent elections—was the intense conversation about the “last elections.” Specifically, the question of whether these could be the “last elections” in the sense of the political system being in peril. This debate became especially prominent around 2020, when the idea was first articulated.