In the final weeks of the campaign it was hard not to interpret the images of Donald Trump’s turgid, endless rallies as proof of collective exhaustion on the part of his party. The interpretation was wrong, and still it was tempting: the tight smiles on the faces of Kristi Noem and various Republican officials as they watched the former President sway to “Time to Say Goodbye” and other hand-picked favorites for over half an hour, the all-too-knowing laughter of Trump’s audiences as he played the hits—the “weave,” Hannibal Lecter—the upper rows of arenas empty or emptying as the hours dragged on. The magnetism of this strange and sui generis performer was never fully absent in these speeches, but it did feel like the light had dimmed.
Hadn’t it been dimming for years? Last weekend the Atlantic ran a juicy piece about the chaos and despair inside the Trump campaign. It should have reminded me more than it did at the time of the hundreds of similar articles published during his first term and during the 2024 campaign. He’s really cracking up this time, he’s lashing out at everyone in his orbit, he’s lost the thread. And then his defeat in 2020, his exile and prosecution after January 6, his increasing incoherence and paranoia, flagged even by his former staff. (“Once Top Advisers to Trump, They Now Call Him ‘Liar,’ ‘Fascist,’ and ‘Unfit’” went the title of the Times’s collection of interviews with the likes of John Kelly, James Mattis, and Mike Pence.) The pattern is so clear in retrospect: these cycles of marginalization and humiliation would have defeated anyone else, but Trump—through some combination of unprecedented luck and intuitive political genius—kept reemerging, impossible to count out no matter how outré the misdeed. Yesterday was a triumph greater than 2016. It wasn’t a fluke. Trump is America’s choice.
Until the election’s final months, Biden and his campaign officials, perpetrators of one of the great acts of political malpractice in US history, had given Trump an opening to be a less engaging version of himself and still dominate, by virtue of being not-Biden. No one, I think, is more responsible for this week’s result than Joe Biden. As in 2016, senior Democrats’ refusal to reckon with their candidate’s profound unpopularity doomed their election chances. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Biden did eventually confront the inevitable. But by then the damage had been done.
Still, in July it seemed possible that replacing Biden would be enough to bring Trump down to earth. The consoling assumption back then was that Trump’s success in the polls was operating somewhat by default and that Trump on his own terms, rather than as non-Biden, held limited appeal: he was a fading grotesque, a sociopath becoming ever more sociopathic, a bigot without equal in contemporary American life. This assumption was, of course, wrong. Trump couldn’t be brought down to earth. His affirmative support was as strong as most of the polls said it was, and for many of his voters he was in no sense the “least bad option.” He was and remains, for tens of millions, the very best option—the charismatic and TV-made CEO, the man whose role in the Covid crisis has been memory-holed, the leader whose transgressions are worth the price of admission if not actively part of the pitch.
I don’t want to brush past the reality that for many Trump supporters, the vengeful fantasies, the violent misogyny, the lifelong racism, the primal loathing of immigrants, and the delight in saying the unsayable are nothing but upside. The cruelty is the draw. But it’s also clearly the case that voters were wildly dissatisfied with Biden’s presidency and with years of acute inflation felt disproportionately by the working and middle classes—the very groups who, in key states, swung to Trump in 2024. “Since the GWB administration,” Annie Lowrey tweeted last night, “it’s been clear that headline economy statistics have become less and less of a clear guide in terms of telling you what average families are feeling.” Over and over during the last two years, commentators pointed to the strength of the Biden economy—rebounding GDP growth, rising employment—and criticized voters who felt otherwise as victims of a “vibecession.” The Fed was on the case! Why all the whining? There are many explanations for Trump’s victory, most of them surely interrelated, but an unavoidable one is that this election was a referendum on an unpopular incumbent administration that failed to address the soaring cost of everyday life. Groceries are expensive, housing is expensive (nearly half of America’s renters spend upwards of a third of their household income on rent), my dentist is so expensive that I’m putting off important dental work until who knows when, the music classes I’d like to enroll my daughter in feel too expensive to even bother researching, and on and on. As self-interested and even solipsistic as this feeling may be, I suspect it was on a lot of minds last night—just as it has been all over the world in recent years. (“Virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world has lost,” David Dayen wrote earlier today in the American Prospect.)
Harris had been dealt a very weak hand, both by inflation and—most consequentially—by the life-sucking anti-charisma of her boss. Yet there were also unforced errors. I’m sure that in the coming days we’ll have plenty to read—maybe in this magazine—about the ways the Harris campaign fucked up. (It was grimly funny to see Joy Reid announce last night that Harris had run a “perfect” campaign, a few months after saying, following the Biden-Trump debate, that she would vote for Biden even if he was “in a coma.”) Front of mind, of course, is the repeated refusal to engage with activists—even friendly ones—on the question of the genocide in Gaza, a moral disaster and a major electoral liability, if not a decisive one. And what did the reunion tour with Liz Cheney and her evil father’s spectral presence accomplish, other than alienating everyone but a sliver of self-congratulatory consultants and pundits eager to flaunt their bipartisan commitments in the most obscene way possible?
Last night, as the results started to emerge, memories of 2016 naturally started flooding back. One particular batch of results from Loudon County, Virginia—possibly released erroneously, I didn’t bother to check—seemed to augur the worst. But after that first brush with dread, the all-consuming horror of 2016 never returned, not last night, or this morning as I walked my daughter to school in the seventy-degree November heat. The shape of the night was so similar, the outcome so similarly foreordained in retrospect. I wonder if the past eight years have been so disillusioning, so hardening, that the intensity of that earlier shock is simply no longer available.
This is the emotional-political paradox I’ve been thinking about today: on one hand, the feeling of soberness and cold clarity. On the other, the reality that in every respect, what happened last night is far worse than what happened in 2016. This time it isn’t an aberration. Trump is now the ultimate Republican insider. The Republicans control the Senate and almost certainly the House, and nowhere has the US’s still-unfolding right-wing coup paid more dividends than on the Supreme Court. The people in Trump’s orbit are meaningfully more sadistic than the people who were there last time—and those who have stuck around are more empowered. Will abortion be outlawed altogether? Will Obamacare be repealed, for real this time? Can trans people expect any safety at all? Will Bobby Kennedy stop adding fluoride to the water? Will federal funding dry up for basically everything that’s not defense and cops? What will happen to public education and public transit? How much damagewill Trump’s NLRB do to organized labor, and how quickly? How many people will be ensnared by all kinds of crypto schemes and what will the next crash look like? What will happen to the regulatory state more generally? Will I get deported? This is all to say nothing of climate change, and so much else I’m probably forgetting out of some residual sense of self-protective ignorance.
Some of Trump’s voters—namely the rich and the superrich—will get exactly what they wanted out of the deal. Most will not. Even if he doesn’t get his way on inflation-exploding tariffs (one of this election’s many ironies is the extent of pocketbook voting for a candidate whose most important surrogate has promised “temporary hardship”), Trump will make life worse in so many ways. He will leave this country more unequal and more immiserated. Maybe one iron law of American politics is that Presidents are always rewarded (and punished) for the wrong things.
Earlier this year I caught a screening of Milestones, Robert Kramer’s sprawling, semi-fictional 1975 account of a few lost souls unmoored in post-’68, post-hippie, post-hope America. What stood out to me about the film, more than its epic length and its shivering beauty, was the sense of characters adrift in the frame, alone not just in their respective shots but in their lives, dispersed across the landscape years after the revolution didn’t happen. They have been jailed, abused, and defeated, and until the film’s miraculous conclusion they fail to find their way back together. Today’s left never had its climactic moment of triumph to linger on. Our riots were co-opted, our one viable presidential candidate was marginalized by the Democrats, and our encampments were repressed and punished—also by the Democrats. For all the left’s successes (including the passage last night of a number of ballot initiatives on abortion and the minimum wage, even in states that opted for Trump over Harris—proof that our ideas aren’t the problem), I worry that we now find ourselves as adrift as Kramer’s characters, facing just as much backlash but even fewer organizational victories.
If this election result offers more brutal clarity than the painful, needling contingency of 2016, there is much we still don’t know about what happened, and about what the next few months and years hold. Is this a new, definitive realignment, or is Trump unique? How will the Democrats respond to the decisive failure of its much-vaunted suburban coalition, and how will we respond when they inevitably respond in the worst way possible? How will we take care of one another? What are we up against? If nothing else, I hope that these are questions we can answer together.
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