Which way, Trump voter? We react to election 2024
Cry me a river
Charly Triballeau/I'm done with liberal tears. I don't care.
Do you enjoy finding out your ex-girlfriend got dumped after you've been married for five years? No. You couldn't care less. I knew they'd be crying, and I care as much about their belief system today as I did before Trump won.
The only thing remotely interesting about their meltdowns is how they've gone from, "Muh ... RACIST" to "Muh ... UNEDUCATED!" I actually prefer the latter allegation because it's more true.
I don't "wish them nothing but the best." I don't wish them anything. They blew it a long time ago, and we've moved on.
For the next four years, we will be building a wall, deporting illegal aliens, privatizing everything, trashing CRT, dismantling affirmative action, de-wokeifying education, embracing meritocracy, and basically allowing America to reach its full potential without Marxist bureaucracy in the way.
The crybabies can join us or move to Europe or go on a sex strike, we don't care. Bye-bye! Home to Mommy.
— Gavin McInnes , host of "Get Off My Lawn"
Time to build
Print Collector/A national mandate has been delivered by the American people to Donald Trump and all who would serve at his pleasure: a mandate to secure our borders, revive our economy, and bring peace to our empire — to change the trajectory of our nation.
The American revival has begun. This is our century. We will not surrender to despair and malaise, nor consign ourselves and our civilization to decline and collapse.
Beyond this political victory, achieving this grander civilizational goal will require sober thinking and serious work. Politics and civic duty will be required, as will enterprise and economics, entertainment and the arts, technology and exploration.
The American people and their engines of war and peace — private and public, secular and religious, urban and rural — must set their minds and hands to the work needed for this revival of their civilization. America has been drowning in mere inches of water. All we must do is stand up.
— Andrew Beck , co-founder, Beck & Stone
Sun's out, guns out
Steven D. Starr/That disorienting feeling you are feeling is not vertigo.
It's the Overton window, which just made the most dramatic shift to the right in decades.
The win is so massive. Their loss is so total.
The worst people in America are vanquished. Evil dynasties fell. All Trump's enemies are in exile, humiliated. GOD IS GOOD.
On November 5, 2024, America fought and won a second war against European governance. We rejected unelected bureaucracy. We rejected state-enforced decline, crushing and inhuman rule by faceless overlords, socialism, communism, European-style feudalist wars over territory, and globalist rot.
Next summer is going to be the biggest and best White Boy Summer we've ever had. You have six months to work on your tan.
— Peachy Keenan , cultural commentator and author of "Domestic Extremist"
Fear factor
David Dee DelgadoA decade as pariahs. Reverse McCarthyism.
Think of how many of us in blue cities put up with the petty harassment, the constant, low-grade fear they'd come after our livelihoods or our families. And come they did.
A Tuesday evening in November put an end to all that. Suddenly, we're citizens again. MAGA hats in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. Has any other piece of clothing so enraged a regime?
For ten years our friends, families, and employers pretended that voting for an extremely popular, mainstream politician and his frankly milquetoast policy proposals was not wrong, not misguided, but deeply, historically evil.
I can't think of anything less American than that. Trump will inevitably disappoint, as does every president once faced with the task of actually governing. It remains to be seen whether he will make good on his promises.
But we must remember him for what he was — a hammer that punched through the door of an absolutely rotten elite that simply had to go. And, ultimately, a leader who freed us from an era of fear.
—Isaac Simpson, founder and director, WILL
Dictatorship at the door, democracy on the floor
Sonia Moskovitz/She would nod while delivering her response to a question like a teacher trying to get buy-in from a truculent fourth grader.
There was a fair amount of "Nnkay?" — eventually fodder for impersonators on TikTok.
But even very simple, general, softball questions got engulfed in "Americans have hopes, and dreams, and aspirations" — as if, yep, those three things were not the exact same thing.
What was clear to the world was that this woman had not done the homework. If you look at video of her in Europe right as the invasion of Ukraine happened, a reporter asks her a fairly specific and detailed but not at all hostile question, and she makes a comical deer-in-the-headlights face and points at a diplomat from Iceland, as if to say, "He knows the answer!"
In brief, the reason the coconut lost was not "misogynoir," not gender war, not "a battle for the future of our multiracial democracy."
It was because she appeared incapable of the gig and the orange man seemed capable. You might not like his solutions, but he knows what he wants to do and how he's going to do it.
Legacy media was shocked and appalled that large percentages of "Latinx" people wanted to make money and wanted things to run properly. For this disloyalty, you had the likes of Joy Reid and Al Sharpton saying that the "Latinx" were more racist (read: anti-black) than whites were. So much for thick-and-thin loyalty!
People want (yes, go for it, Mussolini meme-makers!) the trains to run on time. They want crime to be punished and for the border to be enforced.
It cannot be overemphasized what an existential shock to the system it is that Trump suggested that the United States of America is not just some block of real estate that anyone on earth can hang out in but rather an exclusive club — kind of like Roy Cohn's favorite hangout, Studio 54 — where to gain admittance you have to show some value.
What a concept! It makes even the Ella Emhoffs of the world worry that someday they might not be on the list. This to me is an admirable form of discipline for the hoi polloi.
The second-biggest takeaway from this election is that the entire legacy media sang the same note together.
It's brat summer, wear Charli XCX putrid green, it's coconut-tree meme time, it's the summer of vibes, she didn't do so badly against Trump, Walz didn't do so badly against Vance, her "60 Minutes" bobbles didn't matter, she's gonna win it in a landslide, it's gonna be a squeaker but she's gonna make it after all, she's gonna save democracy ...
... and no real Americans out there in the real world bought it.
Puerto Ricans went up for Trump after the garbage gag. No one will trust the mainstream media in the same way ever again.
The biggest takeaway: We have a golden age coming at us. Not just in terms of laws passed but where the culture is going. It feels weird to have hope on a large scale!
— Matthew Wilder , writer and director of the forthcoming film "Morning Has Broken," with Ava McAvoy and Fred Melamed
Uncle Donald
Davidoff Studios/I don't think it's very feminine to have political thoughts — it's kind of a dirty topic that's best left to the men. But I used to be very involved before I married my husband. I would mostly help my dad, John Lamb, with his campaigns.
It's hard to have feelings about Trump, in the way that it's hard to know what to think about your eccentric uncle. When I spent six months in Germany in 2019 as an au pair, the children I looked after asked me, "How can you stand to have him for your president?"
I felt a righteous indignation to defend his honor — as if he were my uncle. A little unsavory, perhaps, but still family.
I also felt pride — not the brazen sense of superiority Americans stereotypically display in Europe, but a simple, sincere gratitude for my country. I decided then to like Trump, to the point that I became more active on Twitter so I could see his tweets.
I liked that he didn't seem calculating, that he just said things as he saw them. Sometimes even I was offended by what he said, but I could respect his authenticity. When he didn't make it the second time around, I regretted that I hadn't liked him a little more. America felt less fun those next four years.
This election, I ignored the news as much as I could, although my husband and I did watch both debates. I remember thinking how Trump seemed changed — more poised. I had a feeling he might actually be able to win this time, especially when Kamala took over the race. Nobody wants a prosecutor for a president.
Is a Trump presidency truly God's will? It's still too early to know, in my opinion. Part of me wonders if there might be more assassination attempts, or if the left has accepted this victory to lull us into complacency. I really don't know — all I'm certain of is that these next four years show promise to be interesting and fun.
— Keturah Hickman , writer and lace tatter
Go fast and go forward
Heritage Images/We are on the good timeline now.
The triumph of Trumpism is complete. He has put away the old GOP and defeated both the Clinton and Obama factions of the Democratic party. Trump has built a coalition of core Americans and Silicon Valley power brokers that is unique to modern history. Young people, tired and put off by the constant moral hectoring of the left, have also come on board. It is now cool to support Trump. It is high-status to support Trump.
In this new environment, anything is possible.
American dynamism has been tamped down for decades by bureaucratic dead weight and the enervating spirit of the longhouse. No more. The conditions are ripe for unprecedented growth and innovation. We are going to the stars, literally. And a wide-scale cultural renewal is imminent.
People want beauty, they want optimism, they want adventure, and they want heroism. We are going to deliver them the symbols and narratives that instantiate this latent yearning. We must not lose sight of this opportunity. We must not get bogged down in petty squabbles and factional disputes. We must go fast and go forward.
— Jonathan Keeperman , founder, Passage Publishing
Exit the Twilight Zone
CBS Photo Archive/There have been times over the past four years when I have felt like I'm living in the Twilight Zone.
We have been gaslit over and over by the Biden administration and the media regarding the strength of the economy and all of their accomplishments.
I would hear this while pulling my hair out to keep my restaurant going amid skyrocketing costs and frequent supply shortages — as our family's savings evaporated.
I would hear this while my wife and I did everything we could to support our four children, while also having to protect them from relentless ideological nonsense. And while being called bigots for wanting our daughter to play in sports with just biological women.
All of this against a backdrop of lies suggesting this is simply what "democracy" is.
But the people have spoken, and it turns out that many of us have seen through the lies. We want to leave this twisted, far-left fantasy world and get back to reality.
It's comforting to watch the left's once semi-secret agenda get exposed once and for all — just before the new administration rips it up.
I feel confident we will see the cost of goods come down as a result of less inflationary spending, smaller government, regulations being rolled back, and American food producers being given priority within the supply chain. I know it will be easier to get my kids healthy food without having to spend a mortgage payment. There's a lot of work to be done, but winning the election was the most important first step.
—Chef Andrew Gruel, restaurant owner and author of "Andrew Gruel's Family Cookbook"
Folie à Duh
Ollie Millington/To all the members of the intellectual dark web who could not bring themselves to endorse Trump, hereby known as the ineffectual dork web:
Listen, you guys had a good run. Everyone had high hopes that your breakaway sect of intelligentsia would recognize that your little pet anti-woke topics weren't just isolated problems but endemic to the entire rotting corpse of the left.
We thought you guys would realize that the issues you were stumbling upon had actually been clocked years before by the ordinary, uneducated Americans despised by the elites and that this might engender some humility.
Congrats for realizing trans people are mostly perverts and DEI is wildly unpopular. It doesn't take a great genius to realize castrating children and villainizing white people is wrong. In fact, these are basic moral intuitions that the intellectual class somehow deluded themselves into suppressing, before tepidly rolling back their cultural revolution while expecting great acclamation for such efforts.
We are sick of gentility and nuance, because we rightly perceive it as another form of intellectual skullduggery. That's different from genuine analysis and argument, which have tremendous energy and dynamism. Your role, whether you realize it or not, has been to sterilize these insights at every turn, stripping them of their charisma and repackaging them into ineffectual and glib "discourse."
For whom? You have irreparably alienated yourself from the left and will never be welcomed back there again. The left's fundamental tenet is not freedom or equality or the exchange of ideas, but eradicating all opposition on its ineluctable, grand march toward progress.
Understandable mistake, but you only get to make it once.
You're done. Nobody is going to take away your little Substacks or your sparsely populated conferences or your anti-woke nonprofits, but they're going be irrelevant.
Nobody on the right will engage with you again. These are our issues now, and any useful ideas we can extract from your self-serving, butt-covering pontification will be repurposed by those of us who actually want to do something about these problems.
— Catherine Sulpizio , writer and co-host of the podcast "Temple of Friendship"
Win or die
Universal History Archive/Trump has won. Although this incredible victory is cause for celebration, I believe the risk of disaster has never been higher than it is right now.
As one Russian official said of attempts by the czar to modernize Imperial Russia shortly before the revolution: "The most dangerous thing you can do to a bad system is try to reform it."
For the American right, this is the eye of the storm. It's only going to get crazier from here, and only organization and discipline will carry us through the challenges ahead. We could go into a new golden age and reach higher than anyone else has done before, or we could collapse into despair and passivity in just a few years.
It really is up to us. We get to choose whether we win or die. That's the only choice.
— Conundrum Cluster, writer and critic
Vibe shifting
Barbara Freeman/There's been a "vibe shift."
Our decade of shameless anti-Americanism is over. The climate in which former New York governor Andrew Cuomo said "America was never that great" is finished.
Being an American patriot is "in" again. Crank up the rock 'n' roll. Have a cigarette. From here on out, every day is the Fourth of July. Stand tall like an American should — because you don't have to walk on eggshells any more.
I've spent more than a decade traveling this country and I now spend most of my time writing and thinking about America and celebrating this great country. As we forge into the next few years, I'm up for the task of dedicating all of my energy toward provoking the greatest resurgence in national spirit, romance, and mythos this country has ever seen. And I know I'm not alone on that score.
What the liberals get wrong about today's paradigm shift is that we're not about "American History X"-style curb-stomping rage and goose-stepping crap.
This is about the rhythm of the Rolling Stones, the Mississippi Delta blues, the little barbeque shacks and honky-tonks on the side of the highways. It's about the view from the top of Mount Washington and the stars from the beaches on Lake Superior. It's about old colonial-era homes on the Mohawk and ice cream socials at the town hall.
If there's any "populist rage" here, it's only a rage at the fact that a class of sleek, self-interested, globe-trotting elites ever sought to bleed the color from this nation. They tried to take away the fun, the vigor, the head-high pride that so many of us feel for this land. They tried to make us into a giant "human resources pool" instead of the big, weird, wild nation we always were.
Sure, there'll be policy changes. Some of them will be good; others might not be. That doesn't matter. What matters is that the dark days are over. We're done flying the flag at half-mast.
— A.M. Hickman , itinerant geographer and proprietor of "Hickman's Hinterlands"
Whose freedom?
Kirn Vintage Stock/Abortion doesn't save women. It doesn't stop or fix rape. It doesn't end poverty. It doesn't stop domestic violence.
It doesn't do anything except undo a woman's healthy biology, kill her child, and send her right back to whatever circumstances she came from.
This is our freedom? This is our equality?
I am legitimately angry on behalf of all the people who think the election results mean they have no agency or control over their own bodies, lives, or futures.
These people are in despair because they've been lied to. They've been told that women need to go to war with their bodies to be free, that limits on abortion limit access to lifesaving care, that surgical and hormonal intervention is the way to "treat" gender dysphoria, that restricting abortion or "gender-affirming" care leads to suicidal ideation.
These lies demand that you, an individual, rely upon your government to be safe, free, and successful.
You are so much stronger and more capable than you have been told. You have so many more options and paths to a joyful life than you have been led to believe.
— Robin Atkins , licensed mental health counselor and founder of Charis et Veritas
Dad energy
Gary Leonard/I never thought this would happen. I've been living in an insane world that put into practice the worst kind of child abuse anyone could imagine in a perverted nightmare.
People acted like it was normal. They acted like it was loving. And applauded the permanent destruction of the health and wholeness of children around the country.
Mothers, evil, wicked mothers, got spots on breakfast television and heart emojis from America for practicing Munchausen by proxy on their children. Mostly their sons.
Had I been born a little later, I could have been one of them. I was a sweet, sensitive, fey boy who thought God had cursed him with a freakish defect, one that would forever set him apart. Had someone promised to ease my pain with this warped "health care," I would have embraced it.
And I would have woken up years later even more broken than I am.
Donald Trump and his team, for the first time in our history, have called this what it is and have said no more in plain terms. "Mutilation." "Abuse."
A matriarchal, smothering mother culture has held America hostage for too long. We need a father energy now.
To any liberal reading this: I used to "hate" Trump every bit as much as you do. My hope for you, man or woman, is that you understand how blatantly you've been lied to about Trump.
And I hope you consider the psychological manipulation that has given these lies such power: the lingering father wounds you haven't wanted to attend to, because it was easier to rage against the big imaginary "fascist" than to face the demons of your childhood
This was me. And if you recognize yourself in it, I want you to know that you don't have to pretend any more. Believe me, it's better on the other side.
— Josh Slocum , host and co-creator of the "Disaffected" podcast
Man the lifeboats
Universal History Archive/The Trump Restoration will look less like "righting the ship" and more like launching the lifeboats.
Giving Americans the freedom to exit failing financial, political, educational, and corporate systems is the right thing to do, but it will accelerate their failure of those systems.
After this week, we are much shorter on U.S. government and much longer on America.
