After one of the strangest elections in decades, it was New York that told me Trump’s time had passed

Reporting on this US election was always going to be different. Not in our lifetimes have we ever seen anything like Donald Trump – and not in a generation have we seen anything like the Covid-19 pandemic. With offices still locked down, those of us in New York City stayed connected online when otherwise we might have sat together in a newsroom with regular deliveries of pizza and coffee throughout the night, waiting for developments. As it turned out, it was lucky we didn’t waste all our pizza and coffee budget on one marathon 5pm-to-5am stint last Tuesday, because we wouldn’t get a definitive projection until Saturday lunchtime – and we’re still waiting even now for Trump-backing Republicans to formally accept the result.

So it was that New York reporters and editors like me, who had expected a long couple days followed by some time off, soldiered on and on into the night through all of last week. At one point, results in Pennsylvania and Georgia got so close that we each went to bed at midnight and set alarms at different points throughout the night, texting each other at 4am and 6am to say: “Nothing yet.” When it got to Saturday morning, I was getting a distinct “Al Gore vs George W Bush” feel about the whole thing, and had resigned myself to the idea that we wouldn’t know who had come out on top until at least December. “Mark my words, it’ll be Christmas Day,” I muttered darkly to E, who mutely supplied me with another jumbo pack of sour gummy bears to get me through the next few hours.

Then, all of a sudden, a ballot dump from Pennsylvania came in and everything changed. We realised that the numbers were such that Biden had won the election. Sitting at my laptop in my Brooklyn apartment, I entered a temporary period of denial. “Are we sure??” I asked the news editor twice. But then the confirmation came from just outside my window: people began clapping, cheering and shouting. Someone in the building opposite leaned out their window and clanged a spoon on a colander. “Happy democracy day!” a woman shouted up at me. All the cars on the street started honking their horns.

After making sure that we’d taken care of giving the immediate news to Independent readers, I grabbed a sweatshirt and a face mask and ran out onto the street to join the gathering celebrations. It was like the scene from a movie. An impromptu brass band had set itself up on the corner, with one man using the back of an abandoned wardrobe as a drum. Someone stood on the roof above me flying an impossibly large American flag. Buses went past full of celebrating people; others stood up through their sunroofs and waved to passersby. Whole families gathered at the Barclays Centre: children in Spiderman outfits, old guys in inflatable Halloween costumes, young women in workout clothes who had detoured from the park. The atmosphere was jubilant. People were jumping up and down, doing thumbs-up signs to each other, and saying, “We did it! We did it!” The entirety of Brooklyn seemed united in joy about the end of the era of Donald Trump.

Bizarrely, as I stood in the melee, I realised I was boiling. It was 23 degrees: hot and sunny. In the middle of November, the summer had returned for a brief few days of celebration.

That evening, E and I walked down to the park with our deck chairs and watched the sunset in our shorts and T-shirts in a socially distanced crowd. Every few minutes, people broke into a sort of Mexican wave of clapping and cheering. Champagne bottles were everywhere. Street vendors were selling “Biden/Harris” badges and hats. Fireworks exploded every few minutes, and children ran around with sparklers. Fresh out of six days of uncertainty, I finally sat back and took a breath. Trump may still be kicking and screaming on his way out the door, but New York told me everything I needed to know: his time had passed, and the nation was relieved.