New Jersey tonight rejected Donald Trump’s idiotic, ignorant and hateful effort to drag the country back to 1859 and earlier. The Martin Van Buren bubble that he lives in on the golf courses he owns makes him afraid of the real world, this place where the rest of us live and fight.

A physical coward who wimped out of Vietnam, Trump’s terrified. Just like the emperor in Gladiator, he’s been terrified his whole life.

But we’re not.

New Jersey’s vote for Mikie Sherrill reasserted America’s faith in a key virtue required by anyone trying to fulfill America’s destiny: courage.

Trump is so afraid that he attacks the weak to make himself feel strong. He empowers a secret squad of masked men with guns to come into our cities and towns to separate families, and strip men from their wives and children. He’s so scared that he financed a movement to try to prove that President Barack Obama doesn’t hail from America. He’s so scared in the jets he rides in while prowling the planet, that he pulls the plug on the Gateway Tunnel, which impacts thousands of jobs of real men – real men on the ground. He shuts down the government and impairs families – women – from receiving critical aid programs and benefits. He does this while bulldozing the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom for himself and his billionaire donors, those other cocooned golf cart jockeying few who require stepped up security because they can’t live with the consequences of their own actions.

Trump is afraid because the country’s history is unfamiliar to him.

America’s tough.

Men on horseback and in wagons – not golf carts - built it.

The rest of us have experienced the intergenerational reality of America’s wars and struggles, the pains of trying to shift power and opportunity to a greater number. We remember the elders who went through the Depression, and family members who sat in the backs of the buses in the South, the pangs of hunger and joblessness, the economic chains of segregation. We, who lost family members in wars, beloved men who died, also felt the warmth and strength of those men who came home. “Stay spread out,” an uncle, after 36 months in Nam, tells his nephew on a camping trip in the mountains, “stay spread out, so we don’t get sprayed by machinegun fire.”

Trump’s people occupy a bubble, from one generation to the next. They know nothing of this country. That’s why he feels more comfortable in the company of people who give him a Burger King crown to wear. Could you imagine Abe Lincoln standing there like an awe-struck goon in the presence of a crown? Abe probably would have grabbed an axe and chopped it to pieces. He was too busy uniting the country to its creed, and to the mystical currents of the mighty Mississippi, to bother with monarchical trinkets.

So, if you got lulled into the con game of this television personality too self-involved to have spent a moment of his life understanding the country, who never sacrificed, who never fought, or toughed it out alone on a city street, or in the wilderness, who self-corrects to a pre-Civil War, pre-Revolutionary War, supercilious British Tory mindset, who at his core doesn’t believe in our country, learn something – learn something for a change, for God’s sake - from a hardnosed place that refuses the yoke of tyranny.

A place called New Jersey.