The Republican’s second presidential term heralds a more inward-looking US where resentment has replaced idealism and nobody wins without someone else losing
Andrew Gumbel
Sat 9 Nov 2024
Adozen years ago – an eternity in American politics – the Republican party was reeling from its fourth presidential election loss in six tries and decided that it needed to be a lot kinder to the people whose votes it was courting.
No more demonising of migrants, the party resolved – it was time for comprehensive immigration reform. No more demeaning language that turned off women and minorities – it needed more of them to run for office.
“We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them too,” the party asserted in a famously self-flagellating autopsy after Barack Obama’s re-election as president in 2012.
Even Dick Armey, a veteran Texas conservative, told the authors of the report: “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you.”
Just one voice on the right begged to differ: Donald Trump. “Does the @RNC [Republican National Committee] have a death wish?” he asked in a tweet.
His objection received little attention at the time, but it wasn’t long before he was offering himself as flesh-and-blood proof of how wrong the autopsy was. In announcing his first campaign for president in 2015, Trump called Mexicans rapists and criminals.
He demeaned a female TV moderator, Megyn Kelly, at his first Republican candidates’ debate, saying she had “blood coming out of her wherever” and later implied she was a “bimbo”. He also called for migrants to be deported en masse and for Muslims to be banned from entering the US.
No serious presidential candidate had ever talked this way, and for several months, mainstream Republicans regarded his approach as electoral suicide. Even once it became apparent Trump might win the party nomination, they still feared his candidacy would go down in flames because swing voters in the presidential election would “flock away from him in droves”, as party stalwart Henry Barbour put it.
Then Trump won – and American politics has not been the same since.
The country has not been the same since. It’s true, the US has never been quite the shining beacon of its own imagination.
On the international stage, it has frequently been belligerent, bullying, chaotic, dysfunctional and indifferent to the suffering of people in faraway nations – traits that bear some passing similarity to Trump’s leadership style.
But it has also, for more than a century, been the standard-bearer of a certain lofty vision, a driver of strategic alliances between similarly advanced democratic nations intent on extending their economic, military and cultural footprint across continents.
After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.
Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.
Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.
Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.
Last week’s election was a contest between a unifying, consensus vision laid out by Kamala Harris – and by that Republican autopsy document of the pre-Trump era – and Trump’s altogether darker, us-versus-them, zero-sum vision of a world where nobody can win without someone else becoming a loser and payback is a dish best served piping hot. The contest could have gone either way – there has been much talk of a different outcome with a different Democratic candidate, or with a different process for selecting her.
Still, the fact that the zero-sum vision proved so seductive says something powerful about the collapse of American ideals, and the pessimism and anger that has overtaken large swaths of the country.
In 2016 and 2020, that anger was largely confined to the white working-class staring down a bleak future without the manufacturing jobs that once sustained them.
Now it has spread to groups once disgusted by Trump, or whom Trump has openly disparaged – Latinos, young voters, Black men. Kelly, the TV personality memorably insulted by Trump during his first campaign, stumped for him in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign. Even undocumented migrants, ostensibly facing mass deportation once the new administration takes office, have been voicing cautious support for Trump because they believe his economic policies will improve their prospects, risks and all.
At first glance, this is a baffling state of affairs. How could so many Americans vote against their own self-interest, when it is plain – both from past experience and from the stated intentions of Trump and his allies – that the chief beneficiaries of the incoming administration are likely to be the billionaire class? When the depressed, disaffected communities of the rust belt can expect little if any of the relief Trump has been promising but failing to deliver for years?
The answer has a lot to do with the zero-sum mentality that Trump has sold so successfully.
People across the country have lost all faith in the American dream: the notion that hard work and a desire for self-improvement are all it takes to climb up the social ladder, to own a home, to lay the foundations for the success of your children and grandchildren.
They have lost their faith because the dream simply does not correspond to their lived experience.
As in Britain and other post-industrial societies, too many lives are a constant struggle to get by month to month, with no end in sight to the bills and day-to-day living expenses and crippling levels of personal debt.
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The majority of jobs in the US now require some qualification beyond high school, but college is dizzyingly expensive and dropout rates are high enough to deter many people from even starting. Medical debt in a country without a national health service is rampant. Home ownership is simply out of reach.
When people think of prosperity and success, what many of them see is an exclusive club of Americans, recipients of generations of wealth who live in increasingly expensive big cities, who have the financial flexibility to get through college, find a high-paying job and come up with a down payment on a house.
The fix is in, as Trump likes to say. The game is rigged, and if you’re not a member of the club at birth, your chances of being admitted are slim to none.
Under such circumstances, the Democrats’ promise of consensus leadership rings largely hollow. The consensus arguably broke a long time ago, when the bursting of the housing bubble of the early 00s left many would-be homeowners crippled by debt and led to the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
It broke all over again during the Covid pandemic, when the economy ground to halt, unemployment rocketed and prices of everyday goods spun alarmingly out of control. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the past 16 years, yet their idea of consensus has failed to reach much beyond the big-city limits.
More appealing by far to those on the outside looking in are Trump’s promises of retribution, of tearing down the entire system and starting again.
Those promises may also prove to be hollow over time, but to people only intermittently focused on politics as they struggle to put food on the table for their families, they feel at least fleetingly empowering. In a zero-sum world, blaming migrants for the country’s woes feels like its own kind of victory. It means some other group is at the bottom of the social heap for a change.
Overlaid on this grim picture is the slow implosion of the two main political parties. The coalitions held together by Republicans and Democrats were always complicated affairs: an awkward marriage of big business and Christian fundamentalism on the right; a patchwork of union workers, racial minorities, intellectuals and, for a long time, old-guard southern segregationists on the left.
Now, though, what is most apparent is not their intricacy but their weakness. The Republican party was as powerless to stop Trump’s hostile takeover in 2016 as the Democrats were to hold on to their bedrock of support in the “blue wall” states in the upper midwest – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
What drives American politics now is, rather, the unfettered power of money, much of it managed by groups outside party control who do not have to declare their funding sources and can make or break candidates depending on their willingness to follow a preordained set of policy prescriptions.
The sway of special interest groups is a longstanding problem in American politics; think of the pharmaceutical industry lobbying to keep drug prices higher than in any other western country, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending tens of millions to keep critics of the Israeli government out of Congress.
But it has grown exponentially worse since the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which has fuelled an unprecedented growth in “dark money” – untraceable lobbying funds that far outstrip anything candidates are able to raise on their own behalf and tilt the political playing field accordingly.
This, too, has given an edge to a demagogue such as Trump, whose vulgarity and bluster serve as useful distractions from a corporate-friendly policy agenda driven largely by tax cuts, deregulation and the dismantling of what Trump’s former political consigliere Steve Bannon calls the “administrative state”.
The Democrats, meanwhile, can talk all they want about serving the interests of all Americans, but they too rely on dark money representing the interests of Wall Street, big tech companies and more, and are all but doomed to come off as hypocritical and insincere as a result.
Two generations ago, the avatars of the civil rights movement were under no illusions about the brutal nature of the forces driving US society – “the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak”, as Langston Hughes wrote in his famous poem Let America Be America Again.
The hope then was this was at least a correctable problem, that the oppressed could push back against their oppressors and create a fairer, more just world.
What nobody then envisaged was that the oppressed themselves – the working class, disaffected young Black and Latino men, even undocumented manual labourers – would one day support the rise of an autocratic government willing to overthrow every sacred tenet of American public life, and even the constitution itself, with its promise of creating “a more perfect union”.
Yet here we are. In January 2021, at Joe Biden’s inauguration, the young poet Amanda Gorman invoked the spirit of the civil rights era in describing “a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished”.
It now appears that her faith was misplaced. The US we thought we knew is broken indeed, and may well be finished.
Trump's political comeback is complete. What it says about American voters:
ANALYSIS
"He's an angry man and they think, 'He's angry like I am,'" one observer said.
ByAlexandra Hutzler
November 9, 2024,
In 2016, Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton to win the presidency.
Some called it a fluke.
But now, eight years later, Trump has come back stronger than ever despite a failed reelection bid in 2020, a second impeachment after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol and a conviction on 34 felony counts that made him the first former president to be found guilty of a crime.
While votes continue to be counted, Trump was projected the winner in the early hours of Nov. 6. He captured six of seven swing states (ABC News has not yet projected Arizona, where Trump is also leading in the vote count); overperformed in blue states like Virginia and New York; and could be the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote since George W. Bush did so in wartime.
It is a capstone to his singular stamp on American politics, one that's been defined by his relentless defiance of institutional norms.
What many Americans now expect of a president has changed dramatically. And by winning them over, some experts argue, Trump has changed America.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump depart the stage at an election night watch party, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Evan Vucci/AP
A new coalition
Trump won, in part, by building an unprecedented multiracial coalition within the Republican Party. White working-class men, as they did in 2016, fueled his success but Trump also drew in Black and Latino voters -- two demographics that traditionally vote for Democrats.
First-time voters also flocked to Trump 54-45% -- a reversal from 2020 when the group overwhelmingly went for President Joe Biden.
"It's hard to imagine another Republican doing that well, but Trump was able to capture this sentiment from people who felt they weren't getting ahead despite having worked hard and played by the rules," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a presidential historian and professor at the University of Houston.
"There's a difference in politics between being looked at and being seen," Rottinghaus said. "And the Trump campaign made people feel like they were seen."
Trump, when he declared victory, argued he had received a "powerful mandate."
"This is a movement like nobody's ever seen before and, frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time," he said.
How Trump flipped the script
Trump was shunned by much of his party after putting democracy to the test with his election denialism, which culminated in his supporters violently attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Then when an anticipated "red wave" never materialized in the 2022 election as many of Trump's hand-picked candidates lost, his influence over the party was seriously questioned. When he announced his third campaign for president that same year, it was a relatively lackluster affair that prompted a tepid response from GOP leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
A turning point, according to Republican strategist Mark Weaver, were the criminal investigations and indictments against Trump in 2023.
"So many Republicans were put off by the weaponization of the legal system against one person that their anger sparked the rise of Trump, not quite from the ashes, but close to it," Weaver said.
At his first campaign rally, held in Waco, Texas, Trump's message to supporters was that the "deep state" was also coming after them and their way of life. He said he would be their "retribution."
That theme remained the undercurrent of the campaign even as Trump turned to focus heavily on immigration and the economy. He painted Democrats as out of touch on cultural issues like transgender rights. America was broken on all fronts, he said, and only he could "fix" it.
In the process, he leaned into authoritarian rhetoric at a level that alarmed critics and even some of his former staff, including a retired general who said in his view Trump fit the description of a fascist.
Both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spent a large portion of their campaigns hitting Trump as a threat to democracy. They pounced on his suggestions to expand executive power, gut the civil service, use the military to go after U.S. citizens and more policies that flout the guardrails of the Constitution.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech after the 2024 presidential election, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
But it appears most voters either didn't believe he would carry out such extremes in office, voted for him in spite of it or even liked the idea of Trump's "strongman" style in the White House.
ABC News exit poll results showed among candidate qualities, voters rated "has the ability to lead" as most important. A close second was whether the candidate "can bring needed change."
Trump trounced Harris in both categories. Among those who cited leadership ability as the top candidate attribute, Trump beat Harris by a whopping 33 points. On bringing about change, the gap widened to 50 points.
And even though democracy ranked high as an issue of importance to voters, with a vast majority (73%) viewing democracy as threatened, it didn't automatically translate into success for Harris as some thought it would.
"Democracy polls well, but the threat to democracy is in the eye of the beholder," said Weaver, who asserted Trump's projection that Democrats were the actual danger (accusing them of weaponizing the government and censorship) must have resonated.
'They think, 'He's angry like I am''
For all the debate around democracy or abortion rights or Trump's dark and inflammatory rhetoric, the economy was the issue of the day for the electorate.
More than two-thirds of voters, according to ABC News preliminary exit polls, said the economy was in bad shape. Forty-five percent said their own financial situation was worse now than four years ago, exceeding the level of those who said the same during the "Great Recession" in 2008. Much of the dissatisfaction was attributed to Biden, and by association to Harris.
Key to Trump's political staying power, strategists on both sides of the aisle said, is the way he's managed to reorient the GOP's image from "Country Club Republicans" to the party of the working class despite being a billionaire himself and despite some of his proposals, like tariffs, being frowned upon by economists.
"He has completely remade the party and remade its appeal so that now non-college voters of multiple races are much more likely to consider voting Republican than they ever have in the past," said longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
Democrats, amid finger-pointing over who is to blame for the loss, is reckoning with how these voters slipped from their grasp. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders eviscerated the party, saying it "abandoned" those Americans. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hitting back, suggested they spent too much time on cultural issues rather than easing economic anxieties caused by high prices.
Elaine Kamarck, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution who served in the Clinton administration, said the economic chasm between Americans with four-year degrees and those without is one of the biggest forces in modern politics, with the latter feeling increasingly left behind.
"It's a very difficult public policy problem, which is why Trump will probably not solve the problem either, but at least he talks to them in a way that they understand and they feel he understands their lives," she said.
"He's an angry man and they think, 'He's angry like I am,'" Kamarck said.
Robin Galbraith walks near the entrance as Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington.
Nathan Howard/AP
That anger, experts said, doesn't just apply to the economy. Trump has tapped into a greater feeling of discontent among Americans who are hyper polarized and disillusioned with the political establishment.
"It's become clear that our country has divided itself into two completely separate Americas, and neither one of those Americans understands much about the other or seems to have much interest in learning about the other, whether Trump or Harris had won this week," said Daniel Schnur, a political analyst at the University of California Berkeley.
Trump's ascension to the White House in 2016 was considered a symptom of a resentful and distrustful country, Schnur said. Those divisions have only intensified since then, in no small part because of Trump stoking the flames.
"We've had eight more years to reinforce them and to let them fester," Schnur said.
ABC News exit poll results found Trump prevailed by a wide margin among so-called "double haters" -- a small voting bloc but one that has an unfavorable opinion of both candidates.
"What strikes me is that the issues, the candidates, the ideology was perhaps less important than just people's flat-out unhappiness with the present state of American politics," said Rottinghaus.
"You can call it the economy. You can call it immigration or the border. There's a lot of reasons that you could tab this election to a particular issue, but the underlying nature of people's preferences led them to reject the status quo and side with Donald Trump."
