Over the last eight years I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing books about Donald Trump, so with his re-election I thought I’d post a few preliminary thoughts and provisional observations that I will no doubt be returning to for modification and expansion as we move forward. That is, if I don’t decide to unplug from the discussion entirely, which is something I’m starting to consider.
Exercising my nearly perfect record of failure when it comes to political prognostication, I thought Kamala Harris was going to win the 2024 election. Both because she performed very well (and much better than expected) and ran what I thought was a solid campaign, but also because I thought there was a lot more Trump fatigue out there. Leading up the election there was a refrain I heard among many of my American friends (and not a few Canadians as well) that they were just “so sick of the guy.” And I’d add that these were by no means just lefties saying this. It was George Will who prophesied that Trump’s demise would be the result of his becoming boring, which he assuredly was, but on election day a majority of Americans signed up for another four years of the Trump Show. I didn’t think there was that much appetite out there for such programming. I thought people were fed up. I was wrong.
I also thought Trump ran a very bad campaign, by the end of which he appeared so tired and sounded so incoherent that more than one observer thought he was actually trying to lose. He seemed cooked to me, and I don’t think that was a false impression. Just since 2020 he has clearly taken a significant step down in his mental functioning and I would put his chances of serving out his entire term to be only 50/50 at best. Despite his usual bluster about being a perfect mental and physical specimen, he is old and not in good health. But I guess as long as doctors can keep him upright he’ll do for the establishment. As the anti-government crusader Grover Norquist once described his ideal president: “We don’t need someone who can think. We need someone with enough digits to hold a pen.”
There have already been many Democratic post mortems. I don’t know how convincing or even useful they are. There are still some hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters out there who see him as representing a populist turn the party should have taken in 2016. I don’t think Sanders could have won in 2016 and I still don’t see him as a viable national candidate, as popular as he is personally and how well some of his policies play. The non-partisan establishment would crush him. That same establishment despises Trump, but they know he can be bought. A point I’ll return to.
The most common explanation for Harris’s failure is that inflation was the deciding factor in the election. Perhaps. But America has experienced higher inflation and it had anyway come down to the point where it was lower than when Biden took office. Not to mention that inflation is largely out of the control of a president. During the campaign Trump not only gave no explanation of what he would try to do about it, one of his few absolute declarations on economic policy – the imposition of staggering tariffs – would be inflationary by definition. If it was the “economy, stupid,” then the U.S. had one that, as even The Economist declared weeks before the election, was “the envy of the world,” and was the strongest it had enjoyed since the 1960s. None of that mattered.
Many people also say that Harris was hurt by not having been chosen in a primary. I don’t see how that would have helped her much at all. Yes, Biden, who was far too old for the job (as is Trump), should have announced he was only going to serve a single term at the outset of his presidency, but that would have put the party in an awkward spot, as Harris wasn’t seen at the time as an attractive candidate and it would have seemed strange to have made her Vice President and then immediately rejected her for the top job.
My own sense, which I share with the outspoken Saunders, is that cultural issues didn’t help the Democrats, and haven’t for a while now. They should probably walk away from identity politics, which many people (especially white, working-class people) have come to see as a scam and that have often accelerated into comic depths of virtue signaling and self-flagellation. What I mean is stuff like Trans rights (from pronouns to athletics), DEI initiatives, or anything that can be made to fit under the label “woke.” In Canada I think Indigenous issues are taking on much the same character. People are sick of hearing about this stuff. I get an earful of people complaining about it nearly every day. What the Democrats need is someone who will declare that “the era of identity politics is over” and that social justice initiatives are dead. This does not mean endorsing or turning a blind eye to racism or sexism or whatever but it does mean the end of the government being active in trying to fix the same. It’s not like pursuing these policies are doing the Democrats any good, as both women and people of colour have moved toward Trump while white people without a college education (not a minority among the American electorate) have solidified as a Republican base.
But in the end, looking at the breakdown of the vote, I mostly agree with those who say there probably wasn’t anything Trump could have done to lose. The media, understood broadly, is entirely right-wing now. And by media “understood broadly” I mean talk radio (iHeartRadio, formerly Clear Channel), social media platforms (X), and podcasters (Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, et al.). Newspapers like the New York Times don’t count anymore, and Fox News still rules cable (drawing nearly double the viewers of either MSNBC or CNN on election night). Yes, everyone lives in their own media bubble now, but the right-wing bubble holds a lot more voters. As Michael Tomasky observes:
Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.
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And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
Fed a diet from such information (not quite news) sources, people felt the country was on the wrong track and voted for change. Voting for change is frequently what happens, but I’m never sure if it’s just optimism (change can only be for the better) or anger at whoever’s in power. Either way, I think in this case it was a mistake.
As so many of the top office holders in his first administration warned, Trump is not fit to be president and poses a grave threat to American democracy. At his age it is also clear he is not going to change, pivot, or become more presidential. He is going to behave like he did in his first term, only worse because he is mentally failing and there will be no guardrails. So we can expect a lot more anger, grievance, and resentment.
What will be the practical results of his election? I imagine most of Project 2025 is a go. Which means turning America into Hungary, or some other one-party state ruled by an oligarchy (the label fascism, which got a lot of play late in the campaign, is an outdated twentieth-century relic). While Trump himself may not be behind Project 2025, or even know much about it, that really doesn’t matter since all reports from his first term made it clear that he has little to no interest in actually governing. As one of the Republicans running against him in the primaries put it, the only reason he wanted to be president was to make money and stay out of jail. I very much believe that to be the case. And so the criminal investigations against him will now be set aside and I think even a conservative estimate would put his expected windfall from grifting in the office will personally net him in the billions of dollars from tycoons and foreign governments looking to curry favour.
I don’t know what the foreign policy consequences will be, but can’t imagine much positive from someone who has made no secret about his admiration and respect for dictators and his general ignorance of international affairs. I’m willing to bet he’s unable to find Taiwan on a map, and he may not need to in another few years. Which may be true for Ukraine as well.
On the domestic front I assume the push to emulate Hungary (or Russia, or China) will continue apace, working in tandem with the global forces Anne Applebaum dubbed Autocracy, Inc. I don’t see where any pushback is going to come from. The main thing I feel confident predicting though is that we are going to see kleptocracy run mad. The looting of the American state is about to begin, on a scale (to borrow a favourite Trumpism) never before seen in the history of the world. Back during his first term Sarah Kendzior characterized the Republican plan for America as being to “strip it for its parts,” and Trump presided over an administration more corrupt and indeed criminal than any the U.S. had ever experienced. Well, expect that to ramp up bigly. The copper wires are going to be ripped from the walls, the plumbing fixtures torn out, and the lead taken from the roofs. Switching metaphors, the cookie jar is going to be wide open and sitting out on the table for at least the next two years. To indulge a more speculative take, one way I could see this imploding is with the combination of a push for total deregulation of the financial sector coupled with the mad schemes of the crypto pushers leading to a crisis perhaps even greater than the 2008 mortgage meltdown. That’s only one of the unhappy shocks we might have in store though.
As Aditya Chakrabortty put it, “Trump will almost certainly plunder from the budgets for social security and Medicaid. Social services will be cut. The tech bros will suckle on government subsidies, while the suits from private equity get to set government policy.” The rich are about to get a lot richer and the poor are going to take a hit. After the election one of the aphorisms of H. L. Mencken soon started making the rounds: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
A lot of this goes back to the kind of thing Thomas Frank wondered about in What’s the Matter With Kansas? By channeling social issues (politics is downstream from culture!), the political right tricks the poor and working class to vote against their economic interests. There’s some truth in that, and I’m saying that from the perspective of someone who tends to vote for parties that want to tax me more, while getting tax cuts delivered to me by people who really can’t afford them. I guess I can’t complain too much, but I’m not thanking anyone either.
It’s all a bit discouraging. I think the United States is a great country full of great people that has been irresponsibly led for a while now by politicians of all parties. Yes, competent political leadership is in short supply everywhere (Canada and the UK are recent grim examples) but even disliking government as much as I do that’s no reason to blow everything up. I’d like to think Trump marks a kind of nadir or lowest point in the American experiment in democracy, but things can always get worse and I think they probably will. One thing I’ve learned following Trump’s career is that there is no bottom.
Alex Good 