Trump Has Humiliated His Foes
Donald Trump didn't steal the 2024 election. He has won it — clearly and comprehensively.
Democrats warned that Trump and his supporters are prepared to hijack democracy. Now they must ruefully acknowledge another reality: The Trump movement, no matter how much this appalls opponents, is a powerful expression of democracy.
Vice President Kamala Harris may have been an imperfect candidate — the postmortems are vigorously underway on Wednesday morning — but she delivered the essential Democratic argument perfectly well: The Trump Era was something to be scraped off the national shoe.
Instead, there will be another helping placed on the national plate. His adversaries don't have to pretend it tastes good. But, for now, they need to eat it.
It is not Harris alone who must reckon with the reality that Trump responded to the national mood more credibly for a larger share of Americans than she did. (For now, he is on track to win the popular vote as well as a solid Electoral College victory.) Trump is anathema to a solid majority of college graduates, including to large numbers of conservatives and traditional Republicans. These voters send their children to campuses where Trump revulsion is an of faith. The news media broadly concluded that the gravity of Trump's threat to American norms — including the fact that he is a convicted felon — meant doing away with weasel words like "misled" and instead flatly called him a liar and a would-be despot.
Tuesday night gave an answer to how much the politics of denunciation would dilute Trump's support. And it posed a new question to his opponents: Now what?
The distinction is important. Conventional politicians can see their careers wilt in a moment before controversies and setbacks. Movement leaders — rare figures in American history — draw their energy from deep wellsprings of cultural identity, grievance and aspiration. Like a hurricane over tropical waters, they actually grow stronger from controversies and setbacks.
Let's illustrate the difference in typologies right here. Trump lost the 2020 election and was impeached for interfering with the peaceful transfer of power, and all along never lost his grip on the Republican Party. Harris is now awaiting only the right moment to publicly acknowledge that she has lost the 2024 election. At the moment it looks likely she will not win any of the seven main swing states. How many of the Democrats who embraced her 48 hours ago will be ready to back her if she decides to run again in 2028? Almost certainly she is a one-and-done proposition.
That Trump represents a movement — rather than a flukish convergence of circumstances — is what politicians as astute as former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell missed about him.
"He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger," McConnell said of Trump in the hours after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. The quote, from the book "This Will Not Pass" by my colleagues Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, made plain that McConnell thought Trump was done — and that establishment Republicans like himself did not need to anything more to facilitate the process. "The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us."
Well, no.
McConnell will hear no taunting from me. A month after the 2020 election but a month before the riot, I wrote a column entitled, "Relax, A Trump Comeback in 2024 Is Not Going To Happen." After January 6, a political operative I respect who had been skeptical of the column when it published called me with a word of praise: "Well, that was one of the smarter columns you will ever write." Actually, it will count as one of the dumbest.
But I did have a theory of the case for my view. It was that Trump represented a particular American type of politician — from George Wallace to Joe McCarthy or, more benignly, Ross Perot. These figures tap authentic currents of grievance against elites and politics as usual. They typically have moments when they streak like a comet across the sky, causing conventional politicians to cower and tremble. Then these populist renegades rapidly fade away because they don't really resonate with the deeper dimensions of American character.
In this view, the enthusiasm for such figures is the equivalent of a trip to Las Vegas. People get wild for a weekend, and even do things that might cause them shame in other circumstances. Then they return home to their ordinary lives.
What this election shows is that, unlike what McConnell and I once believed, Trump profoundly does resonate with deeper dimensions of American character.
What is now a central part of this character is what I have called the Contempt Paradox: People are drawn to Trump and the contempt he expresses toward his opponents, especially liberal politicians and the news media, precisely because of the contempt he draws in return. This is the through line of his politics.
The implications are stark. For a significant portion of his supporters, he didn't win in 2016 in spite of his notorious remark to Access Hollywood about grabbing women by their private parts, or in 2024 in spite of his election denialism. He won in some measure of these things — and the indignation they inspired.
Now, however, there is a new challenge for Trump. Much of his political energy comes from victimhood — the perception that he is valiantly fighting back against entrenched forces. How does that work now, in light of the reality that he has unambiguously bested those forces? A movement politician has made himself the first politician to return to the White House after losing it since the 1892 election of Grover Cleveland, who was distinctly not a movement politician or a cult of personality.
We are in for a new chapter of Trump's career, and a new chapter in the American presidency.
