By Julie Strupp and Rachel Sadon

“You know how on the Titanic, the band kept playing as the ship sank?”

Yeah?

“That’s what it is like out here.”

So said our photographer after capturing the relatively early scenes at the White House, when several choral groups came together around 11:30 p.m. for a “flash choir” with the goal of showing the world that “we as a country are better than bigotry.” Instead, the performance, organized by the activist group Avaaz, felt like something more akin to a funeral march.

A few hours, and an unfathomable election result later, some members of the crowd at the White House periodically chanted “fuck Donald Trump.” But a growing number of Trump supporters showed up to revel in victory—almost all of them young, white males. Most wore Make America Great Again hats. One came draped in the American flag as a cape. No matter their political affiliation, everyone expressed surprise at the outcome.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Chris Vaughan, a Trump supporter and freshman at Catholic University studying politics. “It’s about strength, it’s about unity, it’s about bringing America back to what it once was…. They’re saying, let’s run it like a business, let’s see how that works, let’s give it a chance.”

Almost no one believed it possible earlier in the day, as people queued up at their polling places in the District on a perfectly lovely fall day. While a handful of issues were reported in D.C., voters were largely cheerful. The city ended the evening with a considerable showing for D.C. statehood and Clinton, who earned 90 percent of the vote here.

As the night wore on, though, election watch parties shifted from rowdy, crowded conversation to anxious nail-biting and the constant refreshing of election results.

The mood down at the White House grew quiet and tense. Spotlights cast everything in a sharp white light. Most of the several hundred people crunched up against the chain link fence that separates the crowd from the lawn were local university students, Clinton supporters, with a healthy number of American and foreign media scrambling for photo opps and quotes.

A handful of Trump supporters—maybe 20 identifiably so—were eagerly giving interviews and posing for the cameras. “We’re down here to see history,” said Trump supporter Alex Workman. “I support him because I want a return to conservative values that Reagan had. I’m sick of the Bible-thumping conservatism, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion.”

As the votes came in after midnight, the crowd swelled and so did tensions. An older woman waving a cardboard sign reading “Hillary for prison” got into a shouting match with a young woman draped in a rainbow flag. A Trump supporter had his hat taken. Protesters climbed the trees in front of the White House for a better view.

As the rural and suburban parts of the country that catapulted a man with no military or government experience to the most powerful position in the country began to celebrate his imminent victory, the nation’s capital descended into gloom (with the exception of Trump International Hotel).

“Who the fuck were those pollsters talking to?” one man yelled to a ghostly street in Shaw. When CNN called Florida, a spectator watching the returns on a large screen outside Compass Rose remarked in disbelief, “Well, every empire fails eventually.” Throughout Shaw and Logan Circle, crowds got thinner and thinner as the clock stretched into the early morning hours.

“I’m very upset right now,” said Camille Chatilovicz as she walked out of a bar onto a relatively deserted H Street NE around 1:30 a.m. “I’m ashamed to be an American tonight.”

She’d kept quiet about the election up until that point, but the returns did her in. “I lost my shit tonight.” On top of the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, Chatilovicz said, she was most dismayed about the rumor that Trump stiffed a woman who catered his 1993 wedding, in addition to all of the painters, construction and contract workers who have reported not being paid by the real estate mogul.

“I rely on every single paycheck and if I ever worked for him and he didn’t pay my due wages, I’m fucked—and so that’s the most upsetting thing to me,” she said. “And so for him to be the president of my country is horrifying.”

At the White House, dejected Clinton fans huddled together, some hugging one another, others sitting on the ground.

“I just don’t understand how so many people in this country could vote for someone who’s the epitome of racism and bigotry and anyone…oh my god I can’t even put it into words,” said Michelle Amoedo, a freshman at Georgetown University. “It’s hard to explain how I’m feeling.”

“I am bisexual, I am black, and I am a woman and I’m at the lowest rung on the social ladder according to Donald Trump, so anything, so everything that he has said since running for president has been against who I stand for as a person and it breaks my heart,” said Judy Hasty, a freshman at American University studying justice and law. “Everything I believed in yesterday, I don’t believe in it anymore.”

“I’m looking into moving to Japan and teaching English. Like I don’t want to be here for him,” said Gina Melso, who works in D.C. and described herself as “more of a Bernie fan.” “There’s no way he could actually build a wall. There’s no fucking way. So at least that’s good, right?”

About 10 police officers stood by, but they said things had been largely peaceful and that the White House had the biggest crowd in D.C.

“I feel really good. It’s been really hard being in D.C. and flying the Trump flag. You get a lot of angry looks,” said Brent Waddington, a Trump supporter from New Jersey. He was at a concert when the results started rolling in. When he got on the Metro at the U Street-African American Civil War Memorial station and started getting angry looks, he began to realize that something had happened. “It’s gonna be a great four years, hopefully eight.”

Outside of the gay bar Nellies around 1 a.m., there was a brisk trade in bummed cigarettes. “I haven’t smoked a cigarette in years,” one woman said, gratefully accepting it from a stranger and inhaling. “I need one right now.”

Christina Sturdivant contributed reporting. This post has been updated.