How long has it been for this madness?

The above was a FlipClock.js counter measuring elapsed time from January 20, 2017. It targeted January 20, 2021 as the endpoint. That date has passed. The clock completed its run.

The Duration

This page was a duration clock, not a countdown. Where the president page asked "how long until it ends," this one asked "how long has it been" — a subtle but meaningful framing difference. Duration clocks measure suffering in progress. Countdown timers measure anticipated relief. Both were running simultaneously on this site, targeting the same end date, from different angles.

The duration: January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021. Four years. 1,461 days. The clock measured it in real time and the answer was always accurate to the second.

The Clock Stopped

On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States. The FlipClock hit its target. The madness, as measured by the original page, had lasted exactly four years. The clock was correct.

The transition completed. There was, notably, a period between Election Day 2020 and January 20, 2021 during which the validity of the election results was contested through legal challenges and public statements. The certification of electoral votes on January 7, 2021 was preceded by a breach of the Capitol building on January 6. These are facts of record. The duration clock was running throughout. It did not editorialize. It counted.

The Problem With Clocks That End

Donald Trump ran again in 2024 and won. He was inaugurated for a second term on January 20, 2025. The "how long has it been for this madness" clock, which was designed to measure a specific bounded interval, now has to contend with the fact that the interval is not over — it has resumed, after a four-year interruption, with a new start date.

A faithful reconstruction of the original page's intent would require a new clock: one that either measures the total elapsed time across both terms (skipping the Biden years), or measures elapsed time from January 20, 2025, or acknowledges that "the madness" is now a discontinuous time series and the original measurement instrument was not designed for this. Systems that measure ongoing phenomena often have this problem. The metric that made sense for one operational period stops making sense when the operational parameters change.

The clock ran. The clock stopped. The question it was asking is not finished yet.