5 Trump Is Back

Donald Trump’s recent comeback victory signals a significant transformation in American politics, revealing deep populist discontent and a shift in voter demographics that challenges previous assumptions about the Democratic coalition. Kamala Harris's campaign failed to resonate with uncommitted voters, highlighting her lack of a substantive message beyond opposition to Trump, while Trump capitalized on his established brand and resilience despite his controversies. The election results suggest a polarized nation, with Trump potentially reshaping the political landscape for years to come.

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5 Trump Is Back

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‘Trump’s America’: Comeback Victory Signals a Different Kind of Country

In the end, Donald J. Trump is not the historical aberration some thought he was, but instead a
transformational force reshaping the modern United States in his own image.
By Peter Baker / The New York Times / Nov. 6, 2024 (Abbreviated)
In her closing rally on the Ellipse last week, Kamala Harris scorned Donald J. Trump as an outlier who did not
represent America. “That is not who we are,” she declared.
In fact, it turns out, that may be exactly who we are. At least most of us.
The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of
history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and
swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties.
No longer can the political establishment write off Mr. Trump as a temporary break from the long march of
progress, a fluke who somehow sneaked into the White House in a quirky, one-off Electoral College win eight
years ago. With his comeback victory to reclaim the presidency, Mr. Trump has now established himself as a
transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.
Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and
more profound than many in both parties had recognized. Mr. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign
capitalized on resistance to electing the first woman president.
To Mr. Trump’s allies, the election vindicates his argument that Washington has grown out of touch, that
America is a country weary of overseas wars, excessive immigration and “woke” political correctness.
“The Trump presidency speaks to the depth of the marginalization felt by those who believe they have been in
the cultural wilderness for too long and their faith in the one person who has given voice to their frustration
and his ability to center them in American life,” said Melody C. Barnes, the executive director of the Karsh
Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia and a former adviser to President Barack Obama.
Rather than be turned off by Mr. Trump’s flagrant, anger-based appeals along lines of race, gender, religion,
national origin and especially transgender identity, many Americans found them bracing. Rather than be
offended by his brazen lies and wild conspiracy theories, many found him authentic. Rather than dismiss him as
a felon found by various courts to be a fraudster, cheater, sexual abuser and defamer, many embraced his
assertion that he has been the victim of persecution.
The fact that Mr. Trump was able to bounce back from so many legal and political defeats over the past four
years, any one of which would have been enough to wreck the career of any other politician, was a testament
to his remarkable resilience and defiance. He is unbowed and, this time at least, undefeated.
It also owed in part to failures of President Biden and Ms. Harris, his vice president. Mr. Trump’s victory was a
repudiation of an administration that passed sweeping pandemic relief, social spending and climate change
programs but was hobbled by sky-high inflation and illegal immigration, both of which were brought under
control too late.
Once she took the torch from Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris initially emphasized a positive, joy-filled mission to the
future, consolidating excited Democrats behind her, but it was not enough to win over uncommitted voters.
At that point, she switched back to Mr. Biden’s approach of warning about the dangers of Mr. Trump and the
incipient fascism she said he represented. That was not enough either.
Ms. Harris did preach unity in her closing days, but her “we are all in this together” message of harmony fell
short against Mr. Trump’s “fight, fight, fight” message of belligerence. As much as anything, the election
reinforced how polarized the country has become, split down the middle. It is a tribal era, an us-versus-them
moment, when each side is so divorced from the other that they find it hard to even comprehend each other.
Mr. Trump’s political resurrection also highlighted an often underestimated aspect of the 248-year-old
American democratic experiment.
For all of its commitment to constitutionalism, the United States has seen moments before when the
public hungered for a strongman and exhibited a willingness to empower such a figure with outsized authority.
That has often come during times of war or national peril, but Mr. Trump frames the current struggle for
America as a war of sorts.
“Trump has been conditioning Americans throughout this campaign to see American democracy as a failed
experiment,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” By praising
dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China, she said, “he has used his
campaign to prepare Americans for autocracy.”
The defining struggle going forward will be the war that Mr. Trump says he will now wage against a system that
he deems corrupt. If he follows his campaign promises, he will seek to consolidate more power in the
presidency, bring the “deep state” to heel and go after “treasonous” political opponents in both parties and the
media.
As he does that, he will have legitimacy and experience that he did not have the last time around. He learned
from his first term, not so much about policy, but about how to pull the levers of power. And this time, he will
have more latitude, a more aligned set of advisers and possibly both houses of Congress as well as a party that
even more than eight years ago answers solely to him.
The Trump era, it turns out, was not a four-year interregnum. Assuming he finishes his new term, it now looks
to be a 12-year era that puts him at the center of the political stage as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald
Reagan were.
It is Mr. Trump’s America after all.

Welcome back to Trumpland: Complacent Democrats

assured him victory
Tom McTague / UnHerd / November 6, 2024 (Abbreviated)
Many of us have spent the past few months watching the great American drama play out on our screens,
wondering what it was that we were missing in this supposedly transformative figure of Kamala Harris,
destined to prosecute Donald Trump out of history — even potentially with a “blowout” victory for the ages.
Harris was deeply impressive, we were told. She spoke to the soccer moms of America. The suburbs were
rallying behind her. Her choice of Tim Walz was inspired. She was brat. The Republicans were weird. Biden was
a giant who had saved American democracy. Abortion was the issue which would crush Trump. And yet, here
we are. Donald Trump will be president again — only this time with a new electoral coalition behind him that
has the potential to transform American politics not just for a term, but for a generation.
And while there certainly seems to have been very little to the story of Kamala Harris, the climax of the Trump
show does tell us something about what the world is becoming.
This is not 2016, it is something more seismic. That first Trump election was but a tremor it seems, the
disaffected white working class merely the first group to break from the old order before the stampede to
come. This time, Latinos, African Americans and the young appear to have followed suit, with as many as one in
three minority voters backing Trump. For so long we have been told that demography is destiny and that the
Democratic Party was en route to an unbeatable rainbow coalition, as if the policies they were offering did not
matter. That narrative should now be put out of its misery, Canadian style.
Harris was a poor candidate with almost no discernable message, parachuted in to save an unpopular
administration on the unbelievable basis that she did not offer continuity but, apparently, change. It was a
fundamentally bogus offer.
It seems remarkable to say it, but Trump was the substantive candidate in this election offering a critique of the
incumbent’s record. What was the Harris message of this election? What was the substance of her trade,
immigration or foreign policy? What was it that she offered other than the fact she was not Donald Trump? She
was an actor, a cypher. By the end, her offer amounted to a single issue: abortion. It wasn’t enough.
For much of the past decade, Trump stalked his former party with messages about the border, trade and
“woke”. The Democrats knew the threat and nominated Joe Biden as a holding figure in 2020 who would see
off Trump before passing on the baton to the next generation. And then, it turned out, there was not a new
Biden able to assemble the old Democratic coalition. Now an entirely new one needs to be assembled.
Trump is currently on course not just to win the electoral college but the popular vote itself, a scenario deemed
implausible only yesterday. It looks like he will sweep all the battleground states and more besides. Though this
is no Reagan landslide, Trump is making inroads far beyond his 2016 base. He is winning in the New York
suburbs and among conservative immigrants.
Ultimately, Joe Biden was right that his vice president was a weaker candidate than he had been and Obama
was before him. Harris was weaker than Hillary Clinton, too. The Democratic Party’s presidential nominees are
getting progressively worse. Some Democratic analysts were arguing overnight that Harrris had been denied
the time to introduce herself to the American public. But this only reveals the depth of their denial. Biden was
no longer fit for the presidency and would surely have lost by an even greater margin, yes. But Harris was only
as plausible as she was because she was parachuted in at the last moment. It is surely the case that the
emptiness of the drama she offered could only be sustained for the mini-series we got.
Trump on the other hand seems to have improved as a candidate. He has honed his message without
abandoning its essential themes. He was no longer promising to ban all Muslims arriving in the US or promising
to get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Yet everyone knew that voting Trump meant tighter immigration
restrictions, protectionism, anti-wokery and opposition to foreign entanglements: a potent combination in any
democracy. It may not be true, but that was the message.
This is important because America means something in the world beyond its borders — and not just because of
its power. It acts as a great distorting mirror, offering an image of humanity that can appear grotesque in its
violence and inequality and churning, revolutionary individualism. But like any good caricature, it captures
something about humanity in its endless, anarchic strife. Trump horrifies many outside the United States, but
all the more so because they see something in him that they recognise. He is a portent. Harris is little more
than her caricature on SNL.
For years, it has been the European Left which has been taking its politics from America, adopting the manners
and assumptions of the imperial hegemon, seeking its respect. Now, surely, it will be the Right which is
empowered, much as happened in the Eighties. The European Union is already following Trump’s
protectionism and immigration instincts. With Giorgia Meloni in power in Italy and Kemi Badenoch stalking Keir
Starmer in Britain, expect a coalescing of Western conservatism.
What now for the homeless centrists? What of the podcast kings for the liberal left-behinds who were
predicting a Harris sweep — or even for the polling chiefs running 80,000 simulations showing Harris marginally
winning in some implausibly precise number? My prediction: they will remain and they will continue to herd.
For the next four years, though, the great American drama is back with a dark new series. A new story is
unfolding. We are back in Trump’s world and we don’t yet know what he is going to do with it.