I’m crushed. I’m sure a lot of people who are reading this feel the same way. It’s hard to grasp.
Trump got away with it. All of it.
If you want, you can even set every political, legal, personal, moral, and business-related transgression Trump has ever committed to the side. Over the past few months, Trump has been saying what autocrats say before they hollow out democracy and start committing the most grievous of political sins, the sort of actions that lead nations to declare “Never Again.” Americans should have heard that and rejected Trump out of hand. Now he’s president-elect.
It’s a massive civic failure.
I think this election has disabused me of the notion that the United States is this shining city on a hill or somehow exceptional. It’s not that I ever really believed that. I always knew America had its flaws, and I never bought the idea that America does no wrong or is always on the right side of history or is somehow always in the process of perfecting itself. It’s that I felt modern America—the America forged by my Founding Fathers, FDR and MLK—at least possessed some of that spirit, that if we ever got it wrong, the ideals we had implanted in our national conscience would eventually kick in and soon enough we would course correct and get it right.
I just think now that whenever America has done the right thing, it’s because the better angels of our nature have dragged us kicking and screaming to that. More often than not, when those angels land on our shoulders, we brush them off. We really don’t want to be bothered by them even as we steal their platitudes to ease our minds.
It hurts to admit that even though I’ve read my Plato and Machiavelli and know that politics often boils down to the expression of passion and the raw exercise of power. I know that’s true even in a democracy and even in American democracy. The People are not always right. The People can do wrong.
But what really hurts is seeing that aspirational idea of democracy put up for a vote and rejected at the ballot box. The results of this election really do reveal that most Americans are not committed to democratic values or, maybe more charitably, don’t really understand what a commitment to democratic values entails. I’d go even further and say these Americans view democratic values as an inconvenience and an impediment to their personal or social ambitions. It only makes sense to look at America from the point of view of a cynic.
So I’ve got way more to say about what happened last Tuesday than I can squeeze into one article here, so I’ll spend the next few weeks exploring those thoughts. I’m also still processing the results and don’t want to leap to conclusions. I’ve already seen some reactions from people on both the Right and the Left that don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I guess what I’m saying is beware of hot takes (including my own.)
One thing I would be very cautious of are pundits who place the blame for Trump’s victory on Democrats. Now, introspection is good. Democrats ought to review what went wrong in their strategy and figure out what limits their appeal. There are things within Democrats’ power to change, and if Democrats are able and willing to make those changes, they should do so. The urge to fix those problems is what anyone with a sense of agency and responsibility would feel.
However, blaming Democrats for Trump’s victory lets the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump—the architect of 1/6, a man who said he wanted to be “dictator for a day,” who expressed interest in using the military to arrest his political enemies, whose own chief of staff described him as a fascist, etc., etc., etc.—completely off the hook. It also goes way too easy on Republican officials like Mitch McConnell who knew that Trump wasn’t fit for office yet refused to hold him accountable. To say Democrats drove voters to embrace a fascist candidate for president because Democrats are too woke or let inflation get out of control or weren’t tough enough on immigration misses a much more alarming issue: That over 70 million Americans are fine with putting a fascist—someone whom a now-prominent American politician once called “America’s Hitler”—in the White House. That’s messed up.
And to piggyback off that point, it is high time the American people and every media outlet in the United States—mainstream or not—acknowledge this double standard: That Democrats are almost always held more responsible for their actions than Republicans because Democrats run on the idea that they will govern responsibly while incompetence and dysfunction is considered a normal, inherent, and acceptable feature of the Republican Party. When Democrats err, it is seen as a betrayal of the public’s trust; when Republican’s screw up, it’s no more than what the public expects. (It’s the old “boys will be boys” excuse.) Some may be tempted to think that’s a clever trick the GOP has played, but in a two-party system like ours, it ought to be a given that both parties will act responsibly. If one of the parties doesn’t do that, it ought to be disqualifying.
So I’m not much in the mood right now to hear pundits rail against Democrats for “talking down” to Americans when no politician in American history has ever used more crude or insulting language than Trump; for playing “identity politics” when no politician at least in recent memory has run a campaign more centered on identity politics—specifically as it relates to Whites and men, which are, yes, identities1—than Trump; or for someone like David Axelrod to say Democrats are the party of “smarty pants” when Trump’s buffoonery has become the stuff of legend. It’s not that those critiques of the Democratic Party may or may not have merit. If those are problems, Democrats can recalibrate. But to say that’s what pushed Americans to embrace a fascist when the fascist himself suffered to an even greater degree from similar problems suggests to me we’re missing the bigger issue here. Maybe Democrats didn’t offer up a serving of porridge that was just right, but that does not justify why voters opted instead for a bowlful of poisoned shit.
The most straightforward explanation pundits have offered for Trump’s victory is that many Americans, like citizens in democracies around the world, are unsatisfied with the post-pandemic economy, specifically the bout of inflation that defined it. I suppose that’s Political Science 101: Voters assess the state of the economy and if they don’t like it, they hold the incumbent party accountable. It’s the economy, stupid, right?
However, inflation was a worldwide problem with two very clear origins—the unsettled post-pandemic economy and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—that could not be traced back to Biden’s economic policies. Furthermore, numerous economic metrics indicate the economy is outstanding right now and moving in a positive direction. Finally, if Americans were really concerned about inflation, they certainly wouldn’t cast their vote for Trump and his inflationary agenda.
Now, maybe the average American voter isn’t as tuned-in to that information as I am. Perhaps that’s indicative of a communication failure that Democrats need to address. It could also be a sign Americans are not putting in the effort needed to educate themselves on the issues. (There’s a lot to unpack here; I’ll write about it in a future article.)
But still, prices haven’t come down, even McDonald’s has gotten expensive, and interest rates are high. Americans have felt the squeeze. The name of the political game is kitchen table economics, and I respect that. Government ought to be responsive to the economic needs of the people. The retrospective theory of voting holds that voters base their decision on how they feel things have gone in recent years and either reward or punish the party in power accordingly. Americans today don’t like the state of the economy, so Democrats paid the price for that.
But we let Trump voters off the hook by saying the 2024 election was just a referendum on the Biden economy, that any Democrat would have lost, that any Republican would have won. That’s not how it really works. For example, in 2004, Americans looked at what was happening with the war in Iraq and concluded President George W. Bush needed to go. Then they looked at the alternative, John Kerry, and said (exhibiting, yet again, a profound lack of judgment) nope, we’ll stick with Bush. A candidate from the opposite party is not the default option when dealing with an unpopular incumbent. Elections are a choice. The American people made a choice by picking Trump over Biden, just as the people of North Carolina last week rejected a gubernatorial candidate who posted racist and anti-Semitic comments anonymously on a pornographic website over a decade ago while still backing Trump despite everything he had done.
Furthermore, if inflation has been a pressing public issue since 2022, why didn’t Democrats didn’t get burnt by the issue in 2022 and 2023? Given the electoral power of inflation, if I told you a Democratic governor was running for re-election in 2023 in a state Donald Trump would win in 2024 by 31 points, would you think that Democrat would get re-elected? Yet Democrat Andy Beshear was re-elected governor of Kentucky in 2023. In 2022, Democrats picked up a seat in the Senate and held off challengers in battleground states. Democrats did well in gubernatorial elections that year as well, defending their hold on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If the economy is always top of mind, where was the effect of inflation in 2022 and 2023?
Some will point out that despite the inflationary economy, many of those Democrats in 2022 ran against bad MAGA candidates, which explains why Democrats did so well. But wait a second: If MAGA is toxic enough to override economic concerns at the ballot box, you’ve got to explain to me why Donald Trump, the ultimate MAGA candidate, prevailed in 2024. Some will argue Trump ran on his good economic record as president, but he was also a notoriously rotten president who fomented an insurrection before leaving office and then had a rotten post-presidency.
All of which is to say that to really understand what happened last week, I think we need to look beyond a theory of retrospective voting based on economic performance. We need to account for an inattentive public with loose or vague attachments to democratic values (I’ve written about that before) that also lacks the vigilance needed to stand up for those values. We need to account for Trump’s overtly racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic appeal, which activates vile instincts in the electorate. We need to account for a Republican Party—both in the electorate and in the halls of power—that prioritizes its own power over democratic norms.
I also think we need to account for Trump’s unique appeal and one particular aspect of his persona that I would argue binds much of his coalition together. At the end of the day, Donald Trump is a carnival barker, a hype man, a snake oil salesman, a fraudster. He does not try to hide this from people, either. It’s all transparently a stunt. And his supporters love him for this.
They love him because he lets them in on the scam. They’re made to feel like they’re members of his club. When they attend his rallies, they know they’re not the sucker because they’re surrounded by them. But they also love him because of what that says about his vision of America. Trump’s America is full of easy money—easily made, easily lost, easily remade. It’s an America where you can become rich and successful simply by looking rich and successful. A bonanza is waiting around every corner: In cybercurrency, in social media stock, in NFT trading cards, in Bibles. It’s there for the taking. You just need the balls to go grab it.
Don Trump’s America is a get-rich-quick scheme. Its hallmark is the hustle. For the disparate members of his club—the small-business owner, the evangelical preacher and his congregants in the start-up church, the twenty-five-year-old trying to piece together a living in the gig economy, the podcaster peddling conspiracy theories, the Wall Street broker, the MMA aspirant, the Silicon Valley tech bro—this is the America they want to live in. They’re not particularly invested in America as a democracy; if anything, they consider democracy—with its talk of obligations and norms, power sharing and compromise, deliberation and respect, rule of law and minority rights, human rights and civility, coexistence and fairness—a hindrance. Instead, to them, America is a nation full of marks waiting to be exploited. They wouldn’t mind if Trump got democracy off their back. They figure they’re strong enough and clever enough to survive and thrive without it.
As I wrote earlier, it’s a civic failure. And the only thing more heartbreaking than knowing America bought what Trump is selling is knowing America bought it twice.
Signals and Noise will return soon.
Exit Music: “Reason to Believe” by Bruce Springsteen (1982, Nebraska)
Just want to make three points here: 1.) The fact that Democrats are being held accountable for leaning too hard into identity politics rather than Trump is proof Americans really don’t understand “identity politics.” 2.) Trump’s entire political career stands as evidence for why identity politics are necessary today. 3.) That Kamala Harris’s candidacy was regarded as proof that Democrats embrace identity politics when Harris actually downplayed her identity as a woman of color on the campaign trail is a sign that most Americans’ understanding of identity politics runs no deeper than noticing a person’s (other than White) skin color and (other than male) gender.