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There is no question that Trump's reelection is the most impressive political comeback in recent memory. First, the good news: money did not buy the election. Kamala Harris overspent Trump 2 to 1 and still lost. Whatever the reasons for Trump's victory, money is not one of them. Second, Trump didn't just win in a few states (the infamous "swing states"): he won pretty much throughout the country, because even where he lost he lost by a lot less than expected. From the moment Florida was called for Trump with a huge gap between the two candidates to the moment that California announced its results, Trump did consistently better than expected. In Massachusetts, Trump got 68,000 more votes than in 2020 and Harris lost more than 300,000 to Biden in 2020. In New York, Trump picked up more than 220,000 more votes than he did in 2020 and Harris got almost 850,000 fewer than Biden in 2020. Harris' 11-point win in New York is in fact a Democratic candidate’s worst performance since 1988. It is little consolation for the Democrats that Trump did NOT win the majority of votes: he won less than 50% of the votes (Harris 48.4% and the rest to independent candidates). Trump ran three times and became president twice but never won 50% of the votes. Then let's look at the numbers: 156 million people voted in 2024, two million fewer than in 2020. In 2020 Biden got 81 million votes and Trump 74 million. This time around, Trump got 77 million votes and Harris only 75 million. In addition to the three million people who moved from Biden's camp to Trump's camp, another two million didn't vote. The number of people who didn't vote was particularly shocking in California, a state where people were expected to be highly motivated to vote against Trump: only 16 million people voted in 2024 which is almost two million fewer than in 2020, despite the fact that the number of registered voters increased by half a million. There are many interpretations of the results. One seems to be neglected, although it is the most visible one: Harris is a woman. Any woman running for president in the USA starts with a huge disadvantage. Did you notice she never wore skirts? Always pants. She was trying to dissociate herself from being a woman as much as possible, but, ultimately, she couldn't hide the obvious fact that Trump is a man (and a white man) and she's a woman (and a woman of color). Millions of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, Indians, etc are united in preferring a man over a woman as a boss. Think of it: an extremely unpopular politician like Trump (who never had an approval rating over 50%) won twice, first against Hillary Clinton, a woman, and then against Kamala Harris, a woman. One can find few candidates in the history of presidential elections who were as unpopular as Trump, and, yet, he won whenever he ran against a woman. He lost when he ran against a man, Joe Biden. A woman running for any kind of office starts with a handicap of 2-10% depending on where she is located. There is no place in the USA where being a woman is a plus for a political or executive career. Being a woman is a plus for being a secretary, a flight attendant, a nurse, etc: not for being in charge of a corporation or an institution. Most political analysts think that it is not Trump who won but the Democrats who lost. Analysts point to several issues (inflation, immigration, crime, etc) but fundamentally they point to the "dissonance" between the reality experienced by the middle class and what the Democrats, in particular Biden, were saying. Exit polls show that anger over inflation was the single biggest issue of this election, but Democrats insisted that the economy was in excellent shape. At the beginning, Biden repeated that inflation was just a momentary spike, and then, when it became clear that it wasn't going away, he simply avoided the subject. Alas, no matter how much time you spend in television ads, you can't change the most powerful form of publicity: the price of tomatoes and eggs at the supermarket. Whenever the middle class went to the grocery store, they were reminded of inflation. The "dissonance" between the facts and Biden's attitude was the real issue. The inflation had many causes, almost none due to Biden's policies, but the Democrats were utterly incapable of explaining it. Government spending (the single most powerful cause of inflation) got out of control under Bush II, and Trump was an even bigger spender. Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods are simply a tax on the middle class (it's money paid by the consumer to the US government, hence a tax). When Trump reneged on Obama's deal with Iran, he de facto took 12% of the world's oil reserves off the market, which certainly helped the spike in oil prices even without counting the war in Ukraine. And Trump's war on illegal immigrants caused labor prices to increase. For four years Democrats were incapable to explain to the public that Biden was not the only one responsible for inflation. Incidentally, there was inflation all over the world (except China), and inflation in the USA was lower than in many other developed economies, a simple fact that most US voters never heard. It was not difficult to explain why the economy was not in good shape, but the Democrats pretended that the economy was in very good shape and therefore they didn't have to explain why it was in bad shape for the middle class. As for those who remember the first three Trump years as a good economy, it should not be difficult to explain to them that the Trump economy was largely the Obama economy (the economy started growing under Obama and continued under Trump), but, again, one first had to admit that the economy under Trump was better than the economy under Biden. Tariffs on most imported goods, and especially on imports from China, caused prices to increase; but the Democrats rarely spoke about it because... Biden never repealed Trump's tariffs. Another dissonance was on immigration. It was clearly ridiculous that millions of foreigners were crossing into the USA from Mexico under the eyes of powerless border guards. It was grotesque that there were smartphone apps that guided illegal immigrants step by step to enter the USA. Democrats kept claiming that the president couldn't do anything about it until the day that he actually did something about it and the flow declined overnight to a trickle; so there was something that the president could do. The dissonance was that the middle class perceived a double standard: the illegal immigrants seemed to be treated better than citizens. Images on television showed them with a smartphone, nice clothes, traveling for free in air-conditioned buses, and staying in hotels. For the many families that cannot afford to buy groceries, this sounds like an insult. The middle class saw it as an unfair system that rewarded non-citizens over tax-paying law-abiding citizens. The Democrats were unable to explain why Biden wasn't doing anything to stop the "alien invasion". More importantly, the Democrats were incapable of explaining what causes the problem to start with: most of those migrants come from country that have been destabilized by drugs and guns, drugs that are purchased by US citizens and guns that are sold by US stores; i.e. the chaos is a consequence of something that the USA is doing. The solution is not a wall but to stop buying drugs (that fund the drug cartels) and to stop selling guns (that arm the drug cartels). But, again, you can explain these things only if you start by admitting that there is a big problem. Trump promised a mass deportations of the millions of illegal immigrants. Democrats have been incapable of explaining that the middle class will pay for this: the illegal immigrants mostly take jobs that nobody wants, and, when they compete with citizens, they lower costs. A handyman is obviously much more expensive in a community where there is no cheap labor alternative. The handyman's business is hurt by cheap labor, but the dozens of the handyman's customers are hurt when there is no cheap labor available. Cutting off the supply of cheap labor will result in higher wages for legal residents but this will result in higher prices for the community at large. Second, the economy may suffer from the disappearance of millions of customers: immigrants are not just cheap labor; they are also consumers who buy goods and services, which creates jobs for others in the community. Since no Democrat has been able to articulate these simple concepts about the economic benefits of illegal immigrants of course the working class voted for deporting the illegal immigrants. It is a no-brainer that, if they are illegal, they should be either in jail or back in their home country. The Republicans repeatedly accused Biden of having caused the wars in Ukraine and Palestine with his weakness, and the Democrats were again utterly incapable of saying what is obvious to the whole Middle East: that Hamas was motivated by the transfer of Israel's capital to Jerusalem and by the peace process between Israel and Saudi Arabia, both started by Trump. Hezbollah armed itself during the Trump years when Trump abandoned Syria to Syria's hated dictator Assad and to Trump's buddy Putin. As for Ukraine, the war had already started in 2014, when Putin first invaded eastern Ukraine and seized Crimea, and Russia built up its army and air force under Trump, who never even dreamed of stopping Russia's rearmament. You don't suddenly invade a big country like Ukraine in 2022 unless you have been preparing for several years. But, again, the Democrats were incapable of placing blame on Trump, even though the whole world has witnessed how tolerant Trump was to Putin for the whole four years of his presidency. The Republicans successfully blamed Biden for the disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan, but the Democrats consistently failed to emphasize that it was Trump who signed the surrender in Qatar. Biden merely executed. Biden has been blamed for trying to run a second time, and for waiting too long to pull out. But, if there is something Biden should be blamed for, it is that he was basically Trump Part II. He didn't repeal the tariffs, didn't undo the surrender to the Taliban, didn't move back the US embassy in Israel, didn't restart negotiations with Iran, and so on. Look closely, and Biden's policies were actually fairly similar to Trump's, and that's one reason why the Democrats found it hard to pin responsibilities on Trump. You can't accuse Trump of causing inflations with his tariffs when Biden kept the same tariffs in place; you can't accuse Trump of causing the Taliban triumph in Afghanistan when Biden didn't object to the surrender; and so on. Biden's low-profile imitation of Trump made it difficult for Democrats to explain that those were Trump's ideas and Trump's actions. Kamala Harris was the personification of the Democratic Party's inability to address the issues. Trump had simple answers to complex questions (and you knew that they were silly and incompetent answers, but they were answers), whereas Harris was only capable of "word salads", convoluted speeches that avoided giving a real answer. To the male electorate, this reinforced the conscious or unconscious feeling that a woman is not up to the task of running the country. The one time when I liked Fox News is when the Fox News interviewer lost his patience with Kamala Harris' vague answers. The issue of abortion remained high on the minds of women, but somehow the issue of guns disappeared. Democrats somehow stopped talking of the number-one killer of US citizens: not immigrants, not Taliban, not Hamas, but average US citizens. When a kid tried to assassinate Donald Trump, the Democrats failed to explain it in what is the most obvious way for any foreign observer: a kid was able to obtain that gun legally. The more guns around, the more likely that someone tries to kill a politician, just like someone shot kids at a high school and someone shot on a crowd from a Las Vegas hotel room. Instead the Democrats wasted time, energies and money to defend causes that were important only for tiny minorities and sometimes even upset the silent majority. First and foremost, the wildly exaggerated "transgender" issue. It simply irritated people that, in the middle of rising inflation and an alien invasion, the government was focusing on the issues of "LGBTQ" (which has rapidly become the most hated acronym in the nation). The "Black Lives Matter" movement didn't help either: the middle class (White, Hispanic, Chinese and even Black) already feels that there is too much tolerance for those who break the law. Black Lives Matter was perceived as finding excuses for criminals. What people wanted was protection from crime, not excuses for crime. Many blame the "Black Lives Matter" movement for the increase in violent crime in Black communities. The middle class (White, Black, Yellow, whatever) perceived the Democrats as undermining law enforcement in order to protect criminals. I am not justifying the killings of innocent Black people by the police, but the way Democrats addressed that problem was to create a bigger problem. Their party became associated with the idea to "defund the police", i.e. leaving communities even less protected from criminals. The problem of police brutality, of course, is created by guns. European cops rarely kill innocents because they rarely fear that the criminals will be armed. US cops kill innocents because, having to face armed criminals on a daily basis, they feel that shooting first and asking questions later is a survival strategy. All of these "minority" issues, in the end, are championed by the college-educated class and seem to unfairly neglect the non-college class. These issues helped create a "dissonance" between college-educated people and non-college people. People who didn't go to college (who are about 50% of the electorate) revolted against college-educated people (the other 50%). College-educated people are generally smarter and more knowledgeable but have created a world that largely helps their own category: the stock market, GDP growth and so on are factors that translate into higher income for college-educated people. They mean nothing for the non-educated ones, who generally don't own stocks and even suffer if GDP growth comes through off-sourcing their jobs to other countries. Among the college-educated people there are tycoons, journalists and politicians who prey on those non-educated masses. College-educated people can then spend time and money on discussing LGBTQ and police brutality. Democrats somehow undermined the dignity of labor by emphasizing that people should get a college degree. Democrats again failed to explain why a college degree is important and what are the obstacles to getting one. Social mobility is now higher in "socialist" Europe than in "capitalist" USA. Translation: the child of poor parents is more likely to get rich in Europe than in the USA. The welfare state of "socialist" Europe has worked pretty well while the individualistic meritocracy of the USA keeps failing. There is another divide that is not related to political parties. Since Benjamin Frankling, via Edison and Bell, for three centuries the US nation has been enthusiastic about the idea of progress. The USA had the biggest and best World’s Fairs. Inventors and scientists were national heroes. No more. The trend in the other direction was probably started by leftist, communist-leaning intellectuals, but eventually percolated into ordinary families, and the massive amount of disinformation on the Internet has clearly made a dent into the charisma of any new technology. Many people have become skeptical that technology and innovation will make their life better. Virginia Postrel saw this coming in her book “The Future and Its Enemies” (2011). In a sense this is the old divide between "progressives" and "conservatives", but it is not about lifestyle: it is about the very concept of progress. Is progress good or bad, and for whom? Democrats defended minority issues but inadvertently fueled resentment in a cross-ethnic majority. Their "culture war" and their "woke" attitude ended up mattering a lot among a majority that still likes old values, that still thinks Columbus' discovery of America was a heroic feat, that still thinks that Christmas is the most important day of the year, that still thinks that Whites created a free and wealthy nation, and that still "wants" to think so. In many places the "culture war" may have mattered even more than inflation. For example, polls in swing states showed that most people were optimistic, not pessimistic, about the economy. Non-material factors may have been as important or even more important than material ones. While the middle class was focused on inflation, the liberal newspaper New York Times wasted time to explain why the word "Black" should be capitalized while "white" should not. (I used to capitalize neither, now i capitalize both for fear of being accused of racism if i write "black" instead of "Black"). Democrats felt that people should vote for them to defend democracy and free speech, but the middle class felt that they had to vote "against" them for the same reason: they saw Democrats as "canceling" opinions, censuring speech, destroying careers, decapitating statues, and instituting a dictatorship of politically correct vocabulary. They saw Democrats as empowering a technocratic elite to control society. The middle class is tired of the continuous assault on traditional values and longs for a return to "normal" life. An underrated issue was education. Many parents feel that their children have lost one year or more during the pandemic and have been left behind; that children are not learning enough anyway; that the educational curriculum is biased against White people and against the USA; that public schools are failing to teach math, science and even spelling while they "brainwash" children on LGBTQ and "Black Lives Matter" issues. Small businesses have been complaining for years against the mounting number of regulations. Large corporations can afford to comply, but small businesses often have to shut down. My favorite example is ADA, the "Americans with Disabilities Act", which mandates that businesses must provide a comfortable environment to disabled people. For example, the bathroom toilet must be "at least 60" wide with its flush lever located on the open side.... the center of the toilet must be between 16" to 18" of space from the side wall and the toilet seat must be at least 17" to 19" above the floor." I am just quoting from the law. Countless "mom and pop" restaurants have gone out of business in places where ADA compliance is enforced: they couldn't afford to remodel their restaurant. Even a website has to be ADA compliant, and i'm not sure how to make this website ADA compliant! Democrats thought that it was a big deal when Trump claimed that "Haitians eat dogs and cats". It was a big deal only for the college-educated class. Ditto for the avalanche of Trump lies and exaggerations: only the college-educated class was busy fact-checking Trump. The rest of the country was checking the price of tomatoes and eggs, was fed up with illegal immigrants being treated better than citizens, was annoyed by irrelevant discussions about transgender bathrooms, was desperate to get a decent education for the children, and was even intimidated by the culture war waged on them. The Democrats ignored the issues that truly bothered the majority while pandering to relatively minor issues of minorities. Are transgender people treated so badly in the USA compared with other countries? Are Blacks treated better in China or France? Social media have been disparaged by the mainstream media and by the college-educated population, but in reality social media are the vehicle through which the "silent" majority can vent its frustrations about these "dissonances". While academia and mainstream media were busy catering progressive programs to the intellectual class, the far-right was meeting the working class on social media and turned it against the intellectuals. Democrats counted on young people, but Democrats neglected the fact that young people were not around (as voters) when Trump became president in 2017. The 20-year-old voters of 2024 were 13 in 2017. Young women cared about abortion enough to vote for Kamala Harris, but 56% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump, and in any case Trump did better with young women (40% voted for him) than he did in 2020 (33%). Young men were also more likely to be impressed by Trump's personality. It was a popular mantra among Republicans and even independents that they didn't like Trump's personality but liked his policies. In the past only the neofascists liked his personality. In 2024 a lot more Republicans and independents like his personality. He survived an assassination attempt (and shouted "Fight! Fight!" instead of simply ducking and running), he survived countless trials and accusations, and he survived several attempts to disqualify him from running. Those who tried to paint him as a senile madman who rambles on and on ended up proving something else: he came through as a tough and energetic leader. This image clearly appealed to millions of voters, including many young voters. Democrats also overestimated how much young people truly care for the environment, climate change, racial equity, peace in the world, and so on. Young people grow up on a regime of hip-hop lyrics, first-person shooter videogames, superhero movies; and they get their news from one-minute videos not from the New York Times. It would be easy to conclude that the USA has changed so dramatically that people have no moral compass anymore and they are now willing to vote for a scumbag and traitor. But history shows that scandals have rarely inflicted damage on a candidate the way a bad economy has. Think of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the big scandal of 1998: Clinton's approval rating increased that year to a whopping 73%. Very few people cared about his extramarital affairs, but everybody cared about the booming economy. Trump's own allies were exasperated by how he was conducting his campaign, a campaign of lies, insults and preposterous conspiracy theories. They kept advising him to focus on the issues, not on insulting his opponent. However, 75 million people voted for him, so it looks like he knows the nation better than the seasoned politicians and the pundits. The old politicians and the pundits think that decency and civility are more important, but 75 million people didn't care. The "moral compass" is particularly absent among the many Blacks and Hispanics who moved in the direction of Donald Trump. Trump didn't win votes among Whites, his traditional constituency: he won votes among Blacks and Hispanics (and Chinese, Indians and other immigrants and children of immigrants). Ironically, it turns out that the very immigrants and the very minorities that the Democrats tend to defend are the first ones to care more about the economy than about moral values. It is White people who care most about the Constitution, defending democracies around the world, saving the Earth, minority rights, and so on. Again, the divide is more along "college degree" lines than along race. The mainstream media focused on a narrative that showed Trump as a congenital senile liar but that turned out to be irrelevant in the age in which people don't trust institutions anymore. What truly mattered was the price of the tomatoes, for which the Democrats were blamed. And what truly mattered is that the Republicans offered only one alternative to the inflation-creating Democrats. If you are scared of the 75 million people who voted for Trump, think of a simple fact: a 30-year-old never had a chance to vote for a Republican who is not Trump. It is not their fault that Trump and not Nikki Haley was chosen by the Republicans who voted in the primaries. I think that there are issues that are more important than the price of the tomatoes, but, again, the Democrats failed to explain it. The issues should be climate change, the Palestinian genocide, the proliferation of single-use plastic, the persistence of the oil economy, the guns that kill many more citizens than terrorists (or immigrants), and the nuclear threat of North Korea. It's not only the Left that failed. One also has to acknowledge the brilliant job done by the right-wing media. As obnoxious as the right-wing pundits sound, they were obviously very effective. For example, one day I watched Fox News nonstop when all the "mainstream" channels (domestic and foreign) were showing one of Trump's erratic rambling speeches: Fox News only showed a brief excerpt in which Trump looked perfectly sane. Instead on the same day Fox News had a one-hour panel discussing how evil and dangerous Kamala Harris is, with several innuendos to Biden's declining mental health. The rest of the world saw an insane Trump and scratched their heads why anyone would vote for this madman, but the millions of people who watch Fox News never saw that. Incidentally, these are also the same commentators who in 2003 told them that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, who in 2007 told them that Bush II had created the greatest economy ever, that in 2010 told them that Obamacare would be repudiated by the masses, that in 2020 told them that covid was an hoax, that malaria pills cure covid, and, last but not least, that Joe Biden would cause an economic depression similar to the Great Depression. We have to give credit to the right-wing media that, despite being wrong every single time, they have a stronger impact on the electorate than all the academic experts and the mainstream media who have been right on all those issues. Trump's movement has been viewed as a large protest movement, but it's not clear against whom, because Trump represents very much the military-industrial establishment, Wall Street, the big corporations, the oil lobby, and so on, precisely the "system" that has created the huge wealth gap. He also represents the status quo in the undemocratic institutions that should be changed: the electoral college, the senate, the supreme court. You can't view what the protesters protest again if you don't check the price when you buy tomatoes and eggs. Ultimately, Biden will go down in history as the president who gave a pardon to his criminal son, and Trump will go down in history as the president who came back, fought against a coordinated effort to put him in prison, survived an assassination attempt, and all of this while he was even underfunded; and he still won.
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