While most of us here are grieving for the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, it’s worth noting that slightly more than half of the country—or at least those who bothered to vote—are breathing a sigh of relief. They got their preferred candidate. Or at least their least unpreferred. As much as we fear what this portends for the future, they believe the country has been saved from those trying to undermine it.
Contrary to the prevailing sentiment, they’re overwhelmingly not monsters. Indeed, while we don’t talk about it all that much, at least directly, given the customs of American civil-military relations, I’d guess my students and military faculty colleagues voted for Trump by at least a 2-to-1 margin. And the folks I went to war and to high school with are likely closer to 5-to-1.
This morning, Steven pointed to Carlos Lozada‘s “Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are.” After a long litany of “I remember when . . .” statements, he observes,
There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary. “Normalizing” Trump became an affront to good taste, to norms, to the American experiment.
We can now let go of such illusions. Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad.
After all, what is more normal than a thing that keeps happening?
In recent years, I’ve often wondered if Trump has changed America or revealed it. I decided that it was both — that he changed the country by revealing it. After Election Day 2024, I’m considering an addendum: Trump has changed us by revealing how normal, how truly American, he is.
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Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.
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This time, that choice came with full knowledge of who Trump is, how he behaves in office and what he’ll do to stay there. He hasn’t just shifted the political consensus on a set of policy positions, though by moving both parties on trade and immigration, he certainly has done that. The rationalization of 2016 — that Trump was a protest vote by desperate Americans trying to send a message to the establishment of both parties — is no longer operative. The grotesque rally at Madison Square Garden, that carnival of insults against everyone that the speakers do not want in their America, was not an anomaly but a summation. It was Trumpism’s closing argument, and it landed.
His NYT colleague Lisa Lerer piled on with “America Hires a Strongman.”
Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do.
He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters. He would be a “dictator” — if only on Day 1.
And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes.
This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.
Their colleague Peter Baker joins in with “‘Trump’s America’: Comeback Victory Signals a Different Kind of Country.”
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.
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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.
“This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption,” said Peter H. Wehner, a former strategic adviser to President George W. Bush and vocal critic of Mr. Trump. “Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”
But also adds some nuance:
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.
And while tens of millions of voters still cast ballots against Mr. Trump, he once again tapped into a sense among many others that the country they knew was slipping away, under siege economically, culturally and demographically.
To counter that, those voters ratified the return of a brash 78-year-old champion willing to upend convention and take radical action even if it offends sensibilities or violates old standards. Any misgivings about their chosen leader were shoved to the side.
The last decade or so has made it pretty clear to me that a larger subset of my erstwhile co-partisans, doubtless including some folks I grew up or served with, are more motivated by racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobic bigotry than I’d understood. It’s certainly more than a tiny fringe of Trump’s base of support. But, no, it doesn’t explain the 72 million folks (and counting)—an actual majority of voters—who voted for Trump.
Folks with columns in the Newspaper of Record ought to understand that Americans overwhelmingly don’t follow politial news, much less read the New York Times, on a regular basis. Probably a hundred times more people can tell you the fate of Peanut the Squirrel than what happened at the Madison Square Garden rally.
After nine years of being told Trump is a fascist and a threat to democracy, it’s not surprising that they’ve tuned it out now that the word is coming from inside the tent.
Rather clearly, Trump’s anti-immigrant rants appealed to a large number of people worried about the economy and the culture. But, no, I don’t think anything like a majority actually supports the measures that would be required to rounding up tens of millions of people. They just want the problem solved and believe Trump cares about it more than Harris.
I honestly can’t explain why the Capitol Riots didn’t create a permanent backlash, but it clearly didn’t. If anything, the multiple felony indictments—and the convictions in the New York case—seem to have galvanized the notion that Trump is a victim. I don’t understand it but it’s true.
By all indications, though, Trump has increased his support. He’s won a majority this time. He is, for the first time in a very long time if not ever, approved by more Americans than disapprove of him. Despite rhetoric that’s obviously racist and anti-immigrant, he’s drawn the largest share of Black and Hispanic voters than any Republican in decades.
In 2016, his shocking win was attributed to a combination of sexism, his opponent’s complacency, and a backlash among blue-collar whites. Eight years later, he’s expanded his coalition considerably.
It baffles and frustrates the hell out of me. Then again, I’m precisely the type of highly-educated professional that has left the Republican Party as it has attracted more blue-collar voters of all races who once upon a time were the base of the Democratic Party. Alas, there are a lot more of them than there are of us.
