By the Editorial Board

American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee.

The founders of this country recognized the possibility that voters might someday elect an authoritarian leader and wrote safeguards into the Constitution, including powers granted to two other branches of government designed to be a check on a president who would bend and break laws to serve his own ends. And they enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.

Over the next four years, Americans must be clear-eyed about the threat to the nation and its laws that will come from its 47th president and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong.

It can’t be ignored that millions of Americans voted for a candidate even some of his closest supporters acknowledge to be deeply flawed — convinced that he was more likely to change and fix what they regarded as the nation’s urgent problems: high prices, an infusion of immigrants, a porous southern border and economic policies that have flowed unequally through society. Some cast their votes out of a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo, politics or the state of American institutions more broadly.