The resistance starts now
Robert Reich
November 8, 2024
Photo by visuals on Unsplash
I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too.
Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.
I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.
Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.
Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.
America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.
Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.
Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.
Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.
Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.
We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.
We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.
We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.
We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.
We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.
How will we conduct this resistance?
By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.
We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.
But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.
We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.
The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.
We the people will fight for the general welfare.
We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.
This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.
I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.
If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.
All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.
We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.
Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.
It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.
We will never give up on America.
The resistance starts now.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
Robert Reich
November 8, 2024
Photo by visuals on Unsplash
I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too.
Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.
I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.
Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.
Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.
America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.
Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.
Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.
Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.
Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.
We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.
We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.
We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.
We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.
We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.
How will we conduct this resistance?
By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.
We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.
But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.
We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.
The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.
We the people will fight for the general welfare.
We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.
This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.
I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.
If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.
All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.
We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.
Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.
It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.
We will never give up on America.
The resistance starts now.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
The real reason behind Trump's surprise win
John Stoehr
November 8, 2024
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., September 26, 2024. REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
I was wrong about this election. I was wrong about a bunch of things. Maybe I erred largely on the side of hoping too much. I hoped that most people in America understood that Donald Trump was the worst candidate of our lifetimes. And as a consequence of understanding that, I hoped that most people would make the right decision for themselves, their children and their country. How wrong I was
I don’t blame Kamala Harris. I don’t think anyone should. The vice president ran pretty much the perfect campaign, according to people who have worked with presidential nominees. In terms of policy, in terms of messaging, in terms of get-out-the-vote – it was as good as anyone could expect from a candidate who started in July. Her campaign was “all gas, no brakes.” I think she did everything she could. So did all the pro-democracy people out there. It just wasn’t enough.
We can and will argue about why this happened. Some will say that Joe Biden should have decided sooner against running for reelection. Some say that Harris didn’t take this or that policy position to appeal to this or that voting bloc. Some say that a woman, especially a biracial woman, was never going to win anyway. Some say that the Washington press corps failed to inform the electorate properly. And so on.
While all of these complaints have merit in and of themselves, I think none of them explains what happened on their own. Bottom line: most people, which is to say, most white people in this still majority-white country, wanted what Trump was offering them, even though what he was actually offering was little more than machismo and vengeance.
Trump is, as a shrewd observer put it, the whitest white man we have ever seen. That can erase a multitude of sins. “So am I to understand that leading a coup, promoting the Big Lie, being found liable for rape and guilt of fraud, growing more extreme, threatening to be a dictator and suffering dementia actually strengthened Trump politically?” David Rothkopf said. “It does not compute.” But it kinda sorta does.
If it was hard for my liberal and Democratic brethren to hear before the election, it shouldn’t be now. Lots of Americans do not believe in democracy in any universal sense. They believe in democracy that is exclusive, indeed that is punitive. Trump has promised retribution against his enemies and lots of Americans liked the sound of that.
My hope was that there were more people who wanted our democracy to be inclusive than there were those who wanted it to be exclusive. My hope was that the story of progress in America, with expanding rights and opportunities for all, would continue the way it seemed to after Joe Biden’s election. It’s moments like this, in the aftermath of a shocking election, when I find myself second-guessing such hopes.
Some are already saying that the Democrat Party needs to soul-search. The election, said Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, “was a real wake up call for Democrats. It was overwhelming. We can point to Trump’s personality, whatever you want to say, but Democrats lost a lot of the working families. We lost a lot of males — lost males of different races, color and creed. And it ought to be a wake up call, and we’ve got to be fighting for the middle class and fighting for them every day. And I think they feel like we lost sight of that.”
But I don’t think the Democrats need to change who they are and what they stand for to reach just enough white people in just enough swing states. The Biden presidency put the federal government on the side of the working and middle classes. Indeed, Biden talked endlessly about the dignity of work, a clear signal to “a lot of males.” The Harris campaign aimed to build on that by expanding Medicare, cutting taxes for families, helping small businesses grow, fighting for labor rights and so on. The Democratic Party as it stands is a multiracial party oriented economically toward everyone who works for a living.
In other words, the Democratic Party is populist in that it stands for and advances policies that are popular. The Republicans know and fear that. Otherwise, they would not have taken credit for infrastructure projects nationwide that Biden and the Democrats enacted and that nearly every congressional Republican voted against. Moreover, when pollsters ask respondents which policies they like best, majorities usually favor Democratic policies over policies that the GOP offers.
What the Democrats do not do, but that the Republicans do do, is single out to ridicule a subgroup or subculture for the purpose of making just enough white people in just enough swing states feel better about themselves. To be precise, the Democrats do not tear down immigrants or trans people or anyone to give the impression of justice being served to voters who believe that minorities are taking something from them. They do not dance around that gray area between bigotry and “the economy.” They don’t do that and never should. If they do, they will collapse, as a party, from the inside out.
But what should the Democrats do?
For now, I’ll say this: whatever they do, it had better be with the understanding that we are now living in a new age of fear, ignorance and superstition to such a staggering degree that we will go back, to paraphrase Harris, if the Democratic Party doesn’t take it seriously. Lies, propaganda and disinformation are coming from all corners of the globe, including from places like Russia, China and Iran, but the clearinghouse here is the GOP and the rightwing media apparatus.
Joe Biden and the Democrats saved the economy and made it the envy of the world. They pulled us out of a pandemic that killed a million of us. They brought prosperity back to every one of the so-called “left behind” counties. They tamed inflation post-covid without triggering a ruinous recession. But none of that mattered to swing-state voters awash in lies. The Forward’s Alex Zeldin put it this way: “If your media consumption is a Fox morning show, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, Prager, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, rightwing memes on reddit, Twitter and Instagram, and your nightly consumption is Fox, you will have no way of knowing anything good Democrats do.”
John Stoehr
November 8, 2024
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., September 26, 2024. REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
I was wrong about this election. I was wrong about a bunch of things. Maybe I erred largely on the side of hoping too much. I hoped that most people in America understood that Donald Trump was the worst candidate of our lifetimes. And as a consequence of understanding that, I hoped that most people would make the right decision for themselves, their children and their country. How wrong I was
I don’t blame Kamala Harris. I don’t think anyone should. The vice president ran pretty much the perfect campaign, according to people who have worked with presidential nominees. In terms of policy, in terms of messaging, in terms of get-out-the-vote – it was as good as anyone could expect from a candidate who started in July. Her campaign was “all gas, no brakes.” I think she did everything she could. So did all the pro-democracy people out there. It just wasn’t enough.
We can and will argue about why this happened. Some will say that Joe Biden should have decided sooner against running for reelection. Some say that Harris didn’t take this or that policy position to appeal to this or that voting bloc. Some say that a woman, especially a biracial woman, was never going to win anyway. Some say that the Washington press corps failed to inform the electorate properly. And so on.
While all of these complaints have merit in and of themselves, I think none of them explains what happened on their own. Bottom line: most people, which is to say, most white people in this still majority-white country, wanted what Trump was offering them, even though what he was actually offering was little more than machismo and vengeance.
Trump is, as a shrewd observer put it, the whitest white man we have ever seen. That can erase a multitude of sins. “So am I to understand that leading a coup, promoting the Big Lie, being found liable for rape and guilt of fraud, growing more extreme, threatening to be a dictator and suffering dementia actually strengthened Trump politically?” David Rothkopf said. “It does not compute.” But it kinda sorta does.
If it was hard for my liberal and Democratic brethren to hear before the election, it shouldn’t be now. Lots of Americans do not believe in democracy in any universal sense. They believe in democracy that is exclusive, indeed that is punitive. Trump has promised retribution against his enemies and lots of Americans liked the sound of that.
My hope was that there were more people who wanted our democracy to be inclusive than there were those who wanted it to be exclusive. My hope was that the story of progress in America, with expanding rights and opportunities for all, would continue the way it seemed to after Joe Biden’s election. It’s moments like this, in the aftermath of a shocking election, when I find myself second-guessing such hopes.
Some are already saying that the Democrat Party needs to soul-search. The election, said Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, “was a real wake up call for Democrats. It was overwhelming. We can point to Trump’s personality, whatever you want to say, but Democrats lost a lot of the working families. We lost a lot of males — lost males of different races, color and creed. And it ought to be a wake up call, and we’ve got to be fighting for the middle class and fighting for them every day. And I think they feel like we lost sight of that.”
But I don’t think the Democrats need to change who they are and what they stand for to reach just enough white people in just enough swing states. The Biden presidency put the federal government on the side of the working and middle classes. Indeed, Biden talked endlessly about the dignity of work, a clear signal to “a lot of males.” The Harris campaign aimed to build on that by expanding Medicare, cutting taxes for families, helping small businesses grow, fighting for labor rights and so on. The Democratic Party as it stands is a multiracial party oriented economically toward everyone who works for a living.
In other words, the Democratic Party is populist in that it stands for and advances policies that are popular. The Republicans know and fear that. Otherwise, they would not have taken credit for infrastructure projects nationwide that Biden and the Democrats enacted and that nearly every congressional Republican voted against. Moreover, when pollsters ask respondents which policies they like best, majorities usually favor Democratic policies over policies that the GOP offers.
What the Democrats do not do, but that the Republicans do do, is single out to ridicule a subgroup or subculture for the purpose of making just enough white people in just enough swing states feel better about themselves. To be precise, the Democrats do not tear down immigrants or trans people or anyone to give the impression of justice being served to voters who believe that minorities are taking something from them. They do not dance around that gray area between bigotry and “the economy.” They don’t do that and never should. If they do, they will collapse, as a party, from the inside out.
But what should the Democrats do?
For now, I’ll say this: whatever they do, it had better be with the understanding that we are now living in a new age of fear, ignorance and superstition to such a staggering degree that we will go back, to paraphrase Harris, if the Democratic Party doesn’t take it seriously. Lies, propaganda and disinformation are coming from all corners of the globe, including from places like Russia, China and Iran, but the clearinghouse here is the GOP and the rightwing media apparatus.
Joe Biden and the Democrats saved the economy and made it the envy of the world. They pulled us out of a pandemic that killed a million of us. They brought prosperity back to every one of the so-called “left behind” counties. They tamed inflation post-covid without triggering a ruinous recession. But none of that mattered to swing-state voters awash in lies. The Forward’s Alex Zeldin put it this way: “If your media consumption is a Fox morning show, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, Prager, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, rightwing memes on reddit, Twitter and Instagram, and your nightly consumption is Fox, you will have no way of knowing anything good Democrats do.”
Jon Stewart’s election postmortem: Trump 'used our electoral system as it is designed'
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 8, 2024
Actor turned activist Jon Stewart gives remarks at a PACT Act rally to support funding veterans who are victims of burn pit related illnesses. (Shutterstock.com)
Donald Trump's critics on both the left and the right were hoping that Election Night 2024 would bring a repudiation of the former president.
Instead, Trump's detractors — from Democratic strategist James Carville to author Mary Trump (his niece) to conservative attorney George Conway — were horrified when Trump enjoyed a decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris despite awaiting sentencing on 34 criminal charges and promising to rule like an autocrat if given a second term.
Comedian/late-night television host Jon Stewart weighed in as well, expressing shock that Trump is returning to the White House without engaging in the type of election denial that characterized his 2020 loss to now-President Joe Biden.
On his podcast "The Weekly Show," Stewart explained, "Each one of those scenarios, it was, 'How is Donald Trump going to finagle his way back into the White House? How is he going to use undemocratic principles? What measure of intimidation and underhanded shenaniganery will this man use to worm his way back into the Oval Office?' And it turned out, he used our electoral system as it is designed."
Stewart compared Trump's 2024 victory to "vertigo" (the physical condition, not the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film).
"I'd love to sit back and think about the autopsy and where you move from there, but I think I still feel as though I'm in that moment of vertigo to some extent," Stewart told "Weekly Show" listeners. "In the same way that I, when I decided to stop drinking I didn't do it while the room was still spinning. I didn't stop doing booze and drugs in that moment of lying on the floor facedown trying to wonder if I just move my hand here, will the room stop. And I think that’s a wise way of looking at it."
Stewart went on to say, "I think you have to be more clear-eyed, have your balance, and your feet underneath you before you can start really thinking about what it was that made what you think your worldview is, and the things that you were certain about, not certain."
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 8, 2024
Actor turned activist Jon Stewart gives remarks at a PACT Act rally to support funding veterans who are victims of burn pit related illnesses. (Shutterstock.com)
Donald Trump's critics on both the left and the right were hoping that Election Night 2024 would bring a repudiation of the former president.
Instead, Trump's detractors — from Democratic strategist James Carville to author Mary Trump (his niece) to conservative attorney George Conway — were horrified when Trump enjoyed a decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris despite awaiting sentencing on 34 criminal charges and promising to rule like an autocrat if given a second term.
Comedian/late-night television host Jon Stewart weighed in as well, expressing shock that Trump is returning to the White House without engaging in the type of election denial that characterized his 2020 loss to now-President Joe Biden.
On his podcast "The Weekly Show," Stewart explained, "Each one of those scenarios, it was, 'How is Donald Trump going to finagle his way back into the White House? How is he going to use undemocratic principles? What measure of intimidation and underhanded shenaniganery will this man use to worm his way back into the Oval Office?' And it turned out, he used our electoral system as it is designed."
Stewart compared Trump's 2024 victory to "vertigo" (the physical condition, not the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film).
"I'd love to sit back and think about the autopsy and where you move from there, but I think I still feel as though I'm in that moment of vertigo to some extent," Stewart told "Weekly Show" listeners. "In the same way that I, when I decided to stop drinking I didn't do it while the room was still spinning. I didn't stop doing booze and drugs in that moment of lying on the floor facedown trying to wonder if I just move my hand here, will the room stop. And I think that’s a wise way of looking at it."
Stewart went on to say, "I think you have to be more clear-eyed, have your balance, and your feet underneath you before you can start really thinking about what it was that made what you think your worldview is, and the things that you were certain about, not certain."
Why millions of Americans just voted against their own self-interest
Michaelangelo Signorile, The Signorile Report
November 7, 2024
Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash
In 2016, when Pennsylvania was called for Trump and he won the election in the early hours of the morning, I had tears in my eyes as I lay in bed and posted on social media that we would fight. It was a complete aberration, I remember thinking, a jarring anomaly.
Last night, as the returns were coming in, again stunning so many of us, I felt differently.
I didn’t see it as some fluke in the making, as in 2016. Then, Hillary Clinton was hounded by the exaggerated email story, which surfaced again, thanks to FBI Director James Comey, days before the election, only to be a nothingburger. Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin at all. There was deep Russian interference from early on in the election.
Trump was a celebrity who had no political record, and a lot of people just voted for him without knowing much about his positions. Many people didn’t vote at all, thinking Clinton would win, because the polling was so out of whack. Third parties took just enough of the vote to pull from Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote, but the injustice of the Electoral College brought Trump to victory.
This time, however, Donald Trump won a majority of American voters in the popular vote. He won after having been a dangerous, brutal president who harmed many people, stripped the rights of Americans, put extremists on the Supreme Court, and mismanaged a pandemic, allowing millions to die. I could go on, but the bottom line: we can’t say people didn’t know him.
So last night, I didn’t cry. I felt anger and outrage, more than anything else, at those millions of Americans who willingly voted for someone who would harm this country and hurt others and even themselves. And I’m still feeling that anger right now.
Trump was even more cruel, racist, and misogynistic in his 2024 campaign than in any prior campaign. And yet, he won the majority of voters expanding his rural vote but also cutting into some of the suburban counties and urban counties just enough.
Exit polls are to be taken with a grain of salt, as they're always off and often revised later. But we can look at them directionally rather than precisely. According to those polls, Trump improved upon his 2020 results with Black voters, just a little, and with Latino voters—particularly Latino men—by a more substantial amount, in both rural areas and urban areas. And he improved quite a bit with young voters and people voting for the first time.
That was all enough to put him over the top. He started with his floor, his base of support. Unlike losing presidents of the past, who just faded away, very unpopular with their parties, Trump had used the Big Lie to make his base see Democrats, not him, as the losers and, more nefariously, as degenerates who stole the election. This kept his base with him for four years, even after first being jarred by January 6th. They pushed aside the attempt to overturn the election and the violence, already predisposed to forgive him. And stuck with him. Then it just became about adding a few more people here and there.
As a con man, he was able to do that. But we can’t overlook that his base and any new voters backed him knowing 100% what Trump was about. They backed him even though the Democrats had a very good candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris who ran a pretty flawless campaign—and no, I’m not going to get into the blame game I’m already seeing some Democrats engage in—a candidate who spoke to their needs at the moment regarding the economy, offering actual, detailed plans.
Trump’s misogyny, his cruelty, his racism, and his history of hate were embraced by those voters. You can say many overlooked them, but that’s still an embrace. Some may have liked his bigotry more than others—getting off on his attacks on the left, on his perceived enemies in Congress, on marginalized groups—but that doesn’t make those who didn’t like it any less responsible for their actions.
Much of what happened last night can be traced back to the COVID pandemic and how our whole world was turned upside down. The isolation and then the economic turmoil caused real shockwaves for many Americans. President Biden did an enormous, historic job at passing legislation to bring this economy back to a juggernaut, the envy of the world. GDP is surging; unemployment is 4%. Wages are up.
But for too many voters, the jolt of inflation—and the fact that prices would never come down even if the inflation rate itself slowed dramatically—was heavy. This election split along education lines, even as it cut across racial ones—non-college educated vs. college-educated—and obviously then across income brackets and those who could buffer the shock of inflation better than others.
Those most affected just didn’t grasp how inflation soared as a result of the economic turmoil of the pandemic and supply chain shortages and just blamed Biden—with the help of Republicans fanning exaggerations about spending and falsehoods, and a corporate media that was complicit. And they didn’t see how Biden was revitalizing the economy as Trump and Republicans played into their unease and promised to make things better.
Too many of them believed that because their own finances were in a better place before the pandemic it was somehow due to Trump—who, in reality, did nothing to make their lives better and, in fact, caused more economic inequality with his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The fond memories of the economy in the pre-pandemic Trump years were actually because of the rebuilt economy that President Obama left Trump.
Republicans and Trump exploited these voters’ short memories—many of the youngest voters today, don’t forget, were 15 or 16 years old during Trump’s presidency, and, like most teenagers, weren’t paying much attention to national news. Republicans exploited the lack of awareness among many about how the economy works, how Covid shocked it, and what Biden was doing.
Again, we could blame the media for this too, as I have many times, but it still doesn’t absolve these voters of their responsibility. They were warned many times in this campaign, and the truth was laid out for them. Many simply got caught up in the cult and became unreachable.
Millions of Americans voted for a man who will cause prices to spike dramatically when he imposes his 20% tariffs across the board on foreign goods. They will see members of their families, their colleagues, their neighbors and their friends, taken from their homes and sent off to camps to be deported. They will themselves experience the horrors of the Dobbs decision on women’s health, either personally or with regard to women in their lives. They will see their transgender family members or friends demonized and harmed.
They will watch discrimination against minorities—Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people of color—play out before their eyes, and sometimes it will affect them personally, as members of those groups themselves. They will see marriage equality weakened and may see entire departments of the government abolished—like the Department of Education—as Project 2025 is put into action.
Part of me wants many of those who voted for Trump to experience this as punishment—particularly those who voted on the economy and now will see prices soar from the tariffs. That’s how angry I am.
But I realize we have to fight to protect the vulnerable, no matter how uninformed they are. And the truth is, millions more among the groups that will be affected by a Trump presidency—the majority of most of the groups I mentioned—voted against him and for a new future with Kamala Harris. Many of them worked day in and day out to get her elected, worried about their own rights and the threat to democracy.
So, we have to realize that, while also realizing that the country has changed, that through a few votes here and a few votes there, Trump has remade his coalition and willingly got people to vote for his authoritarian agenda even as it will hurt many of them. We have to face that we’re in a different landscape, and our duty now is to protect people who will be hurt, stand for the truth, and still fight for democracy, as painful as this will be to do.
Grieving is important—and the anger I’m feeling is part of that—but in a short time we have to get beyond it because transformations will happen rapidly. As in other countries that faced authoritarians, we’ll need to be the pro-democracy movement. And we have to steel ourselves for the fight ahead.
Michaelangelo Signorile, The Signorile Report
November 7, 2024
Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash
In 2016, when Pennsylvania was called for Trump and he won the election in the early hours of the morning, I had tears in my eyes as I lay in bed and posted on social media that we would fight. It was a complete aberration, I remember thinking, a jarring anomaly.
Last night, as the returns were coming in, again stunning so many of us, I felt differently.
I didn’t see it as some fluke in the making, as in 2016. Then, Hillary Clinton was hounded by the exaggerated email story, which surfaced again, thanks to FBI Director James Comey, days before the election, only to be a nothingburger. Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin at all. There was deep Russian interference from early on in the election.
Trump was a celebrity who had no political record, and a lot of people just voted for him without knowing much about his positions. Many people didn’t vote at all, thinking Clinton would win, because the polling was so out of whack. Third parties took just enough of the vote to pull from Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote, but the injustice of the Electoral College brought Trump to victory.
This time, however, Donald Trump won a majority of American voters in the popular vote. He won after having been a dangerous, brutal president who harmed many people, stripped the rights of Americans, put extremists on the Supreme Court, and mismanaged a pandemic, allowing millions to die. I could go on, but the bottom line: we can’t say people didn’t know him.
So last night, I didn’t cry. I felt anger and outrage, more than anything else, at those millions of Americans who willingly voted for someone who would harm this country and hurt others and even themselves. And I’m still feeling that anger right now.
Trump was even more cruel, racist, and misogynistic in his 2024 campaign than in any prior campaign. And yet, he won the majority of voters expanding his rural vote but also cutting into some of the suburban counties and urban counties just enough.
Exit polls are to be taken with a grain of salt, as they're always off and often revised later. But we can look at them directionally rather than precisely. According to those polls, Trump improved upon his 2020 results with Black voters, just a little, and with Latino voters—particularly Latino men—by a more substantial amount, in both rural areas and urban areas. And he improved quite a bit with young voters and people voting for the first time.
That was all enough to put him over the top. He started with his floor, his base of support. Unlike losing presidents of the past, who just faded away, very unpopular with their parties, Trump had used the Big Lie to make his base see Democrats, not him, as the losers and, more nefariously, as degenerates who stole the election. This kept his base with him for four years, even after first being jarred by January 6th. They pushed aside the attempt to overturn the election and the violence, already predisposed to forgive him. And stuck with him. Then it just became about adding a few more people here and there.
As a con man, he was able to do that. But we can’t overlook that his base and any new voters backed him knowing 100% what Trump was about. They backed him even though the Democrats had a very good candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris who ran a pretty flawless campaign—and no, I’m not going to get into the blame game I’m already seeing some Democrats engage in—a candidate who spoke to their needs at the moment regarding the economy, offering actual, detailed plans.
Trump’s misogyny, his cruelty, his racism, and his history of hate were embraced by those voters. You can say many overlooked them, but that’s still an embrace. Some may have liked his bigotry more than others—getting off on his attacks on the left, on his perceived enemies in Congress, on marginalized groups—but that doesn’t make those who didn’t like it any less responsible for their actions.
Much of what happened last night can be traced back to the COVID pandemic and how our whole world was turned upside down. The isolation and then the economic turmoil caused real shockwaves for many Americans. President Biden did an enormous, historic job at passing legislation to bring this economy back to a juggernaut, the envy of the world. GDP is surging; unemployment is 4%. Wages are up.
But for too many voters, the jolt of inflation—and the fact that prices would never come down even if the inflation rate itself slowed dramatically—was heavy. This election split along education lines, even as it cut across racial ones—non-college educated vs. college-educated—and obviously then across income brackets and those who could buffer the shock of inflation better than others.
Those most affected just didn’t grasp how inflation soared as a result of the economic turmoil of the pandemic and supply chain shortages and just blamed Biden—with the help of Republicans fanning exaggerations about spending and falsehoods, and a corporate media that was complicit. And they didn’t see how Biden was revitalizing the economy as Trump and Republicans played into their unease and promised to make things better.
Too many of them believed that because their own finances were in a better place before the pandemic it was somehow due to Trump—who, in reality, did nothing to make their lives better and, in fact, caused more economic inequality with his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The fond memories of the economy in the pre-pandemic Trump years were actually because of the rebuilt economy that President Obama left Trump.
Republicans and Trump exploited these voters’ short memories—many of the youngest voters today, don’t forget, were 15 or 16 years old during Trump’s presidency, and, like most teenagers, weren’t paying much attention to national news. Republicans exploited the lack of awareness among many about how the economy works, how Covid shocked it, and what Biden was doing.
Again, we could blame the media for this too, as I have many times, but it still doesn’t absolve these voters of their responsibility. They were warned many times in this campaign, and the truth was laid out for them. Many simply got caught up in the cult and became unreachable.
Millions of Americans voted for a man who will cause prices to spike dramatically when he imposes his 20% tariffs across the board on foreign goods. They will see members of their families, their colleagues, their neighbors and their friends, taken from their homes and sent off to camps to be deported. They will themselves experience the horrors of the Dobbs decision on women’s health, either personally or with regard to women in their lives. They will see their transgender family members or friends demonized and harmed.
They will watch discrimination against minorities—Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people of color—play out before their eyes, and sometimes it will affect them personally, as members of those groups themselves. They will see marriage equality weakened and may see entire departments of the government abolished—like the Department of Education—as Project 2025 is put into action.
Part of me wants many of those who voted for Trump to experience this as punishment—particularly those who voted on the economy and now will see prices soar from the tariffs. That’s how angry I am.
But I realize we have to fight to protect the vulnerable, no matter how uninformed they are. And the truth is, millions more among the groups that will be affected by a Trump presidency—the majority of most of the groups I mentioned—voted against him and for a new future with Kamala Harris. Many of them worked day in and day out to get her elected, worried about their own rights and the threat to democracy.
So, we have to realize that, while also realizing that the country has changed, that through a few votes here and a few votes there, Trump has remade his coalition and willingly got people to vote for his authoritarian agenda even as it will hurt many of them. We have to face that we’re in a different landscape, and our duty now is to protect people who will be hurt, stand for the truth, and still fight for democracy, as painful as this will be to do.
Grieving is important—and the anger I’m feeling is part of that—but in a short time we have to get beyond it because transformations will happen rapidly. As in other countries that faced authoritarians, we’ll need to be the pro-democracy movement. And we have to steel ourselves for the fight ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment