Trump Won and There’s Nothing Left to Do About It
Well, today was the day he had been fantasizing about for four years. At 2:24 a.m. on November 6, Donald Trump strutted on stage in a Florida ballroom. He was surrounded by all his advisors, party leaders, family, and friends.
The Associated Press had yet to call the race, but it was quite clear by then that the voters had swept him back into power. He was staring out at a sea of supporters with red MAGA hats, and Trump baskets in his triumph. “We managed to achieve the most incredible political thing. America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
It’s safe to say that the way in which Trump, 78 years old, managed to win re-election will definitely go down in history books. In fact, it already highlights some of the most important (not in a good way) choices America has ever made.
As for Trump’s top aides, the thesis of the entire campaign can be easily summed up in a simple slogan: “Maximize the men and hold the women.” that also meant emphasizing the economy and immigration, which Trump focused on relentlessly.
It also means diverting attention away from the chaos of his first term, the abortion bans he rushed into, and his assault on American democracy four years ago. It also meant a campaign that rode the resentment of disenchanted voters and capitalized on the cultural fractures and tribal politics that Trump long exploited.
On top of everything, the outcome can be credited to a singular figure whose return to the White House traced a political arc unlike any other in 250 years of American history. Trump left office in 2021 a pariah after he incited a mob of supporters to ransack the U.S. Capitol at the end of an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat.
Three years later, he engineered an unprecedented political comeback. He also effortlessly dispatched his GOP rivals, forced President Joe Biden out of the race, and vanquished Vice President Kamala Harris in a dominant victory that surpassed virtually everyone’s expectations. Moreover, he shrugged off a 34-count felony conviction and an array of other criminal indictments.
The scale of this success is without question. He carried North Carolina, flipped Georgia back to his column, and broke through the Blue Wall. His campaign outperformed its goal of turning out men and holding women.
Exit polls also showed Trump won huge numbers of Latino men in key battleground states, improving his numbers with that group in Pennsylvania from 27% to 42%. Nationally, Trump’s support among Latino men leaped from 36% to 54%.
Trump also increased his share of voters without a college degree and earned more ground with Black voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He held steady nationally with white women, shocking the Democrats who had expected a post-Dobbs uprising.
He had his share of big breaks. When he decided to launch this campaign on the heels of a third straight rebuke in national elections, Republican leaders tried to ignore him. His primary opponents were way too timid to take him out, or they were severely threatened.
A combination of “friendly” judges and legal postponements pushed his most damning criminal trials to after the election. Until July, Trump’s general-election opponent was basically an unpopular incumbent viewed by many people as too old to continue. Biden didn’t wait too long to confirm those suspicions when he bumbled through their first and only debate. The Democrats’ hasty replacement of the first-term president with Harris did nothing but deprive them of a better-tested candidate who might have potentially rallied broader support.
Voters took Trump’s own advanced age and more and more incoherent trail rhetoric in stride. Much of the country read Trump’s legal woes as part of a larger corrupt conspiracy meant to deny him and their power. He obviously benefited from global restrictiveness in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has ousted incumbent leaders around the world.
And as we stated before, the consequences could be historic. Trump dominated American politics for nine years now. After four years of his tumultuous residency punctuated by an insurrection, the country chose to reinstall him.
Trump also campaigned on an authoritarian agenda that only upended America’s democratic norms, and he’s already preparing to deliver on it. He plans to focus on mass detention and deportations of migrants, take revenge against political enemies via the justice system, and deploy the military against his own civilians. It is yet to be established exactly how far he chooses to go with the power the public handed him. All in all, it will shape the fate of the country.
Naturally, to the MAGA faithful, Trump’s victory is thrilling. It’s a dream coming true. For the less fervent supporters who still helped him get where he wanted, his rhetoric is largely bluster in service of reforming a government out of touch with America’s economic and social needs.
To the rest of the country and a huge part of the world, a second Trump term is nothing less but a blow to democracy. That split screen will easily animate the American discourse for the next four years.
The nation is now more polarized than ever since the Civil War. But soon, there might be something that binds us all together. As soon as January 20 is here, we will all be living in Trump’s America. Again. This account of how Trump did it, based on over 20 interviews over the last eight months, is nothing less but a free trial into what our future will look like.
Trump’s most controversial moves will definitely face significant legal and political fights. He promised on the campaign trail to pick an attorney general who would investigate and prosecute his political rivals and critics.
Trump will be emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling that took place last summer, which granted U.S. presidents potential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.
And between Trump’s psychological disposition, the vows he made to seek full revenge on his adversaries, and the removal of guardrails that hindered him in the first term, scholars of authoritarianism can see the sign of a nation that’s currently on the brink of crisis.
Ultimately, the election is just as much a judgment on the American people as it is on the man they elected to return to office. His comeback didn’t really happen all so randomly. He slowly built a social and political movement that gave him quite a coercive power over the Republican Party.
He systematically managed to demolish many of the nation’s long-standing norms, ushering in an impressive cohort of lackeys who would enable his most autocratic impulses.
He will soon enter his second term fully committed to creating a governing environment with few restraints on his power. He didn’t hide his intentions. It is, in fact, what the American people voted for.
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