The diarist invokes the penultimate chapter of the Return if the King to describe what we have to deal with after Trump:

A great Shadow has departed.”

With these words, Gandalf reveals to Sam the success of his and Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring, the fall of the evil Sauron, and the liberation of Middle Earth. Joyful celebration ensues, Frodo and Sam are lauded as heroes, and they all live happily ever after.

Only, not quite. Instead, the penultimate chapter of The Lord Of The Rings, “The Scouring of the Shire,” sees Frodo and his Hobbit companions return to discover that their beloved homeland has been taken over by a band of ruffians and grifters under the command of a two-bit hoodlum named “Sharkey,” later revealed to be the wizard Saruman. Fittingly, the chapter begins with Frodo and friends encountering a newly constructed wall—in fact, a “great spiked gate.” They surmount it to discover their land befouled, its quaint villages vandalized, and the inhabitants turned against one another. In their own village of Hobbiton, a hideous new mill belches black soot into the sky.

I never cared for this chapter. Many apparently adore it, but to me, it always felt small, petty, and tacked on in the wake of the epic battles that preceded it. Frodo and company have just defeated the massed armies of Sauron—now they have to mop up a bunch of drunken club-wielding delinquents? But in the wake of the Biden-Harris triumph, I finally appreciate Tolkien’s prescience. For although our great battle is won and Donald Trump is defeated, all is far from well in our own Shire. We return to discover our public lands under siege, our infrastructure crumbling, our reputation besmirched, our social safety nets abused and in disrepair, and a pandemic raging unchecked.

This is the beginning of the middle paragraph:

Tolkien understood that the aftermath of evil is not sudden good, but rather a long, hard, unglamorous slog towards normalcy and decency.

It goes on to talk about how to deal with those who remain after Trump, based on the story. What we should give to people is a chance to change, but understand that there will be those that won’t.