NASA satellites reveal abrupt drop in global freshwater levels

The Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. The shift could indicate Earth's continents have entered a persistently drier phase.

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

 

image: 

This map shows the years that terrestrial water storage hit a 22-year minimum (i.e., the land was driest) at each location, based on data from the GRACE and GRACE/FO satellites. A significantly large portion of the global land surface reached this minimum in the nine years since 2015, which happen to be the nine warmest years in the modern temperature record.

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Credit: Image by NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang with data courtesy of Mary Michael O’Neill

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth's continents have entered a persistently drier phase.

From 2015 through 2023, satellite measurements showed that the average amount of freshwater stored on land — that includes liquid surface water like lakes and rivers, plus water in aquifers underground — was 290 cubic miles (1,200 cubic km) lower than the average levels from 2002 through 2014, said Matthew Rodell, one of the study authors and a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s two and a half times the volume of Lake Erie lost.”

During times of drought, along with the modern expansion of irrigated agriculture, farms and cities must rely more heavily on groundwater, which can lead to a cycle of declining underground water supplies: freshwater supplies become depleted, rain and snow fail to replenish them, and more groundwater is pumped. The reduction in available water puts a strain on farmers and communities, potentially leading to famine, conflicts, poverty, and an increased risk of disease when people turn to contaminated water sources, according to a UN report on water stress published in 2024.

The team of researchers identified this abrupt, global decrease in freshwater using observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, operated by the German Aerospace Center, German Research Centre for Geosciences, and NASA. GRACE satellites measure fluctuations in Earth’s gravity on monthly scales that reveal changes in the mass of water on and under the ground. The original GRACE satellites flew from March 2002 to October 2017. The successor GRACE–Follow On (GRACE–FO) satellites  launched in May 2018.

The decline in global freshwater reported in the study began with a massive drought in northern and central Brazil, and was followed shortly by a series of major droughts in Australasia, South America, North America, Europe, and Africa. Warmer ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific from late 2014 into 2016, culminating in one of the most significant El Niño events since 1950, led to shifts in atmospheric jet streams that altered weather and rainfall patterns around the world. However, even after El Niño subsided, global freshwater failed to rebound.  In fact, Rodell and team report that 13 of the world’s 30 most intense droughts observed by GRACE occurred since January 2015. Rodell and colleagues suspect that global warming might be contributing to the enduring freshwater depletion.

Global warming leads the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, which results in more extreme precipitation, said NASA Goddard meteorologist Michael Bosilovich. While total annual rain and snowfall levels may not change dramatically, long periods between intense precipitation events allow the soil to dry and become more compact. That decreases the amount of water the ground can absorb when it does rain. 

“The problem when you have extreme precipitation,” Bosilovich said, “is the water ends up running off,” instead of soaking in and replenishing groundwater stores. Globally, freshwater levels have stayed consistently low since the 2014-2016 El Niño, while more water remains trapped in the atmosphere as water vapor. “Warming temperatures increase both the evaporation of water from the surface to the atmosphere, and the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere, increasing the frequency and intensity of drought conditions,” he noted.

While there are reasons to suspect that the abrupt drop in freshwater is largely due to global warming, it can be difficult to definitively link the two, said Susanna Werth, a hydrologist and remote sensing scientist at Virginia Tech, who was not affiliated with the study. “There are uncertainties in climate predictions,” Werth said. “Measurements and models always come with errors.”

It remains to be seen whether global freshwater will rebound to pre-2015 values, hold steady, or resume its decline. Considering that the nine warmest years in the modern temperature record coincided with the abrupt freshwater decline, Rodell said, “We don’t think this is a coincidence, and it could be a harbinger of what’s to come.”

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Journal

Surveys in Geophysics

DOI

10.1007/s10712-024-09860-w 

Article Title

An Abrupt Decline in Global Terrestrial Water Storage and Its Relationship with Sea Level Change

Garrison Payne, the U.S. Navy's First Black Commissioned Officer

USS SC 83 underway. Lt. j.g. Payne was awarded the Navy Cross for his service as commanding officer. (Photo: National WWI Museum via subchaser.org.)

Published Nov 10, 2024 7:40 PM by CIMSEC

 

 

[By Reuben Keith Green]

The hidden story of the U.S. Navy’s first Black commissioned officer spans five decades, three continents, two world wars, two wives from different countries, and one hell of a journey for an Indiana farm boy. For mutual convenience, both he and the United States Navy pretended that he wasn’t Black. This story had almost been erased from history until the determined efforts of one of his extended relatives, Jeff Giltz of Hobart, Indiana, brought it to light.1

From before World War I until after World War II, leaders in the U. S. government and Navy would make decisions affecting the composition of enlisted ranks for more than a century and that still echo in officer demographics today. Memories of maelstroms past reverberate in today’s discussions regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), affirmative action in the military academies, meritocracy over so-called “DEI Hires,” who is and is not Black, and in renaming – or not – bases and ships that honor relics of America’s discriminatory and exclusionary past.

Before Doris “Dorie” Miller received the Navy Cross for his actions on December 7th, 1941, and long before the Navy commissioned the Golden Thirteen in 1945, Lieutenant (junior grade) William Lloyd Garrison Payne was awarded the Navy Cross for the hazardous duty of commanding the submarine chaser USS SC-83 in 1918. While his Navy Cross citation is sparse, the hazards of hunting submarines from a 110-foot wooden ship were considerable. His personal and professional history, still emerging though it may be, reveals much about the nation and Navy he served and deserves to be revealed in full. Understanding the racial and political climate during which he received his commission is crucial to understanding the importance of his place in Navy history.Quietly Breaking Barriers

William Lloyd Garrison Payne was born on Christmas day in 1881 to a White Indiana woman and a Black man, and completed forty years of military service by 1940 – before volunteering for more service in World War II. Garrison Payne’s virtual anonymity, despite his groundbreaking status as the first Black naval officer and a Navy Cross recipient, stemmed from pervasive racial discrimination, manifested in political and public opposition (notably by white supremacist politicians like James K. Varner and John C. Stennis), and internal resistance within the Navy. His long anonymity exemplifies a failure to learn from the past.2

Fig. 02. Ensign Payne (seated), in command of USS SC-83. (Photo credit: subchasers.org.)

Garrison Payne, or W.G. Payne, served in or commanded several vessels and had multiple shore assignments during his five-decade career. His officer assignments include commanding the aforementioned USS SC-83 and serving aboard the minesweeper USS Teal (AD-23), the collier USS Neptune (AC-8), submarine chasers Eagle 19 and Eagle 31, which he may have also commanded, and troop ship USS Zeppelin. He had a lengthy record as a Chief Boatswain’s Mate (Chief Bos’n).

Fig. 03: 1917 North Carolina Service Card, thirty-three year-old Chief Boatswain’s Mate Garrison Payne was discharged from the Navy and immediately “Appointed Officer” (Commissioned) on 15 December 1917 while assigned to the USS Neptune (AC-8) at Naval Base, Plymouth, England. (Credit: Public record in the public domain.)

After his commissioning in Plymouth, he presumably stayed in England and later took command of the USS SC-83 after she transited from New London, Connecticut to Plymouth, England in May 1918.

Garrison Payne took Rosa Manning, a widow with a young daughter, as his first wife in 1916. The 1910 North Carolina Census records indicate that she was the daughter of Sami and Annie Hall, both listed as Black in the census records. Later census records list Rosa Payne as White, and using her mother’s maiden name (Manning), as she did on their 1916 marriage license. His race was also indicated as White on the license, and his parents listed as Jackson Payne and Ruth Myers (Payne), his maternal grandparents.

Fig. 04: Garrison Payne and an unidentified woman, possibly his second wife Mary Margaret Payne, presumably taken in the later 1920s, location unknown. Courtesy of Jeff Giltz.

In the photo above, Payne, wearing the rank of lieutenant, stands beside an unidentified Black woman, who may be his wife. He brought back Mary Margaret Duffy from duty in Plymouth, England on the USS Zeppelin, a troop transport, in 1919, listing her on ship documents as his wife. He used various first names and initials to apparently help obscure his identity.

Jeff Giltz of Hobart, Indiana is the great grandson of Gertrude “Gertie” Giltz, Garrison’s half-sister by the same mother, Mary Alice Payne. She was unmarried at the time of his birth in 1881. Her father, Jack Payne was the son of a Robert Henley Payne, who traveled first from Virginia to Kentucky, and then settled in Indiana, may have been mixed race. During the U.S. Census, census takers wrote down the race of household occupants as described by the head of the household. Many light-skinned Blacks thereby entered into White society by “turning White” during a census year. It is unknown when Garrison made his “transition” from Black or “Mulatto” to White.

None of Garrison’s half-siblings, who were born to his mother after she married Lemuel Ball, share his dark complexion. When she married, Garrison was sent to live nearby with his uncle, William C. Payne, whose wife was of mixed race. In the 1900 Census, Garrison is listed as a servant in his uncle’s household, not his nephew.

Taken together – Garrison Payne’s dark skin, the fact that the identity of his father was never publicly revealed and that he was born out of wedlock with no birth certificate issued, that he was named for a famous White Boston abolitionist and newspaper publisher,3 that his White mother gave him her last name instead of his father’s, that he was sent away after his mother married, and the oral history of his family – all point to the likelihood that Garrison Payne was Black.

In the turn of the century Navy, individuals were sometimes identified as “dark” or “dark complexion” with no racial category assigned. Payne self-identified as White on both of his known marriage licenses. According to Jeff Giltz, there are many references to Garrison Payne in online genealogy, military records and newspaper sites, but none appear on the Navy Historical and Heritage Command (NHHC) website. His military service likely began in 1900.

Rolling Back Racial Progress during Modernization

In his 1978 book Manning the Navy: The Development of a Modern Naval Enlisted Force, 1898-1940, former U.S. Naval Academy Associate Professor Frederick S. Harrod discusses several of the policies enacted during that period that helped shaped today’s Navy.4 He describes how the famously progressive Secretary of the Navy (1913-1919) Josephus Daniels, otherwise notorious for banning alcohol from ships, brought Jim Crow policies to a previously partially integrated Navy (enlisted ranks only) and banned the first term enlistment of Negro personnel in 1919, a ban that would last until 1933. No official announcement of the unofficial ban was made, but Prof. Harrod asserts that it was instituted by an internal Navy Memorandum from Commander Randall Jacobs, who later issued the Guide to Command of Negro Personnel, NAVPERS-15092, in 1945. President Woodrow Wilson and Daniels were both staunch segregationists and White supremacists. The Navy became more rather than less racially restrictive during the Progressive Era because of the lasting effects of both Secretary Daniels and President Wilson.

The number of Negro personnel dropped from a high of 5,668 in June of 1919 – 2.26% of the total enlisted force – to 411 in June of 1933, a total of 0.55% of the total force of 81,120 enlisted men. Most of the Black sailors were in the Stewards Branch, and most were low ranking with no authority over White sailors, despite their many years of service and experience. Those very few “old salts” outside that branch, like Payne, were difficult to assign, as the Navy did not want them supervising White sailors, despite their expertise and seniority.

Following his temporary promotion to the commissioned officer ranks – rising as far as lieutenant on 01 July 1919 – Garrison Payne was eventually reverted to Chief Bos’n, until he was given an honorific, or “tombstone”, promotion to the permanent grade of lieutenant in June of 1940, just before his retirement. Payne died on 14 October 1952 in a Naval Hospital in San Diego California, and was interred in nearby Fort Rosacrans National Cemetery on 20 October 1952, in Section P, Plot P 0 2765 – not in the Officer’s Sections A or B, despite being identified as a lieutenant on his headstone. Garrison Payne’s hometown newspaper’s death notice indicates that he was the grandson of Jack Payne, with no mention of his parents. A handwritten notation on his Internment Control Form indicates that he enlisted on 31 March 1943, making him a veteran of both world wars, as also reflected on his headstone. His service in World War II – as a volunteer 62-year-old retiree – deserves further investigation.

Fig. 05: Garrison Payne’s final resting place, in Section P, Plot P 0 2765 of Fort Rosacrans National Cemetery. Courtesy of U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Veteran’s Legacy Memorial.

The Navy reluctantly commissioned the Golden Thirteen in 1945 only because of political pressure from the White House and from civil rights organizations like the NAACP, led by Walter F. White, the light-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Atlanta Georgia native who embraced his Black heritage. Unlike Walter White, though, Garrison Payne likely hid his mixed-race heritage to protect his life, his family, and his career. When he married Mary Margaret Duffy in 1937, at the age of 54, he travelled more than 170 miles from San Diego, California to Yuma, Arizona to do so. Why? His new wife, Mary Margaret Duffy, was 37, and an immigrant from Ireland. He had previously listed her as his wife when he transported her to America in 1919. Are there records of this marriage overseas? Would that interracial marriage have been recognized, given that interracial marriage would remain illegal in both states for years to come? On their marriage certificate, as with Payne’s first marriage certificate, both spouses are listed as White.

The Navy’s Circular Letter 48-46, dated 27 February 1946, officially lifted “all restrictions governing the types of assignments for which Negro naval personnel are eligible.” Despite that edict, and President Truman’s Executive Order desegregating the armed forces in 1948, it would be decades before the Navy’s officer ranks would include more than fifty Blacks.

The stories of several early Black chief petty officers are missing from the Navy’s Historical and Heritage Command’s website, though it does include the story of a contemporary of Payne’s, Chief Boatswain’s Mate John Henry “Dick” Turpin, a Black man. That Payne, a commissioned officer, is absent and unrecognized can be attributed to at least five possible reasons.

The first is that the Navy didn’t know of his existence, significance, or accomplishments. Table 5 in Professor Harrods’s book is titled “The Color of the Enlisted Forces, 1906 – 1940,” and is compiled from the Annual Reports of the Chief of Navigation for those years, with eleven different racial categories, including “other.” Where Garrison Payne fell in those figures during his enlisted service is uncertain, but he was present in the Navy for each of those year’s reports.

The second is that Payne had no direct survivors to tell his story, and no one may have asked him to tell it. He and his first wife Rosa likely divorced sometime after the death of their only child. It is unknown if his Irish-born wife Mary Margaret produced any children by Garrison.

The third reason could be that the Navy may have kept his story quiet for his own protection, and that of the Woodrow Wilson administration and the Indiana political leadership. Garrison Payne was commissioned by the same President Woodrow Wilson who screened the movie Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915, re-segregated the federal government offices in Washington DC, refused to publicly condemn the racial violence and lynching during the “Red Summer” of 1919, and whose Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, was one of the masterminds behind the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection, which violently overthrew an elected integrated government in Wilmington, North Carolina. Acknowledging Payne as a decorated and successful Black naval officer would have been an embarrassment to Wilson, Daniels, and undercut their political and racist agendas.

Black veterans were specifically targeted after both world wars, by both civilians and military personnel, to reassert White supremacy. Payne was from Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915 and became a very powerful organization in the 1920s. Such organizations may have sought out and harassed Payne and his family, had they known that this Black Indiana farm boy, born to a White mother, had not only received a commission in the U.S. Navy but had commanded White men in combat.

The fourth reason is that the Navy may have wanted to hide his racial identity. His record of accomplishment as a Navy Cross recipient and ship’s C.O. would have undermined the widespread belief that Black men could not perform successfully as leaders, much less decorated military officers. He was not commissioned as part of some social experiment or social engineering, but because the Navy needed experienced, reliable men to man a rapidly-expanding fleet and train inexperienced crews. Garrison Payne did just that, during years of dangerous duty at sea.

The fifth reason may be that Payne recognized the benefits of passing for White to his life and career, which may have compelled him to do so. He was raised in a largely white society, by white-appearing relatives. Had he not successfully “passed,” he likely would not have been commissioned.

Regardless of the reasons in the past, it is now time to herald the brave naval service of Garrison Payne. The Navy Historical and Heritage Command, the Smithsonian Institution, the Indiana Historical Society, the Hampton Roads Navy Museum, and others should work together to bring his amazing story out of the shadows.

Why Garrison Payne’s Story Matters

For years, many Black naval officers have searched in vain for stories of their heroic forebearers. Actions taken by politicians regarding nominations to military academies for much of the 20th century helped ensure that Black military officers remained a rarity, particularly those hailing from Southern states.5 The life story of Lieutenant Garrison Payne needs to be thoroughly documented and publicized because representation matters.

On a personal note, knowing of his story while I was serving as one of the few Black officers in the Navy would have inspired me immensely. Garrison Payne served as likely the only Black officer in the Navy for his entire career. He showed what was possible. Heralding his trailblazing career can only positively impact the discussions about the future composition of the U.S. Navy’s officer corps as it inspires generations of sailors. Historians and researchers should continue the work of archival research to gain a fuller understanding of his story and significance. My hope is that veteran’s organizations and national institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution begin the effort to flesh out the story of Lieutenant Garrison Payne.

This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and may be found in its original form here. 

Reuben Keith Green, Lieutenant Commander, USN (ret) served 22 years in the Atlantic Fleet (1975-1997). After nine years in the enlisted ranks as a Mineman, Yeoman, and Equal Opportunity Program Specialist, he graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1984 and then served four consecutive sea tours. Both a steam and gas turbine qualified engineer officer of the watch (EOOW), he served as a Tactical Action Officer (TAO) in the Persian Gulf, and as executive officer in a Navy hydrofoil, USS Gemini (PHM-6). He holds a Master’s degree from Webster University in Human Resources Development, and is the author of Black Officer, White Navy – A Memoir, recently published by University Press of Kentucky.

Endnotes

1. Except as otherwise cited, research in this article is based on documents in the author’s possession and oral history interviews with Mr. Jeff Giltz.

2. War and Race: The Black Officer in the American Military. 1915-1941, 1981, Gerald W. Patton, Greenwood Press

3. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, 2008, Henry Mayer, W. W. Norton and Company

4. Manning the New Navy: The Development of a Modern Naval Enlisted Force, 1899-1940, 1978, Frederick S. Harrod, Greenwood Press.

5. The Tragedy of the Lost Generation, Proceedings, August 2024, VOL 150/8/1458, John P. Cordle, Reuben Keith Green, U.S. Naval Institute.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

The US has lost faith in the American dream. Is this the end of the country as we know it?


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.

Trump supporters in Nevada last month. Photograph: Andri Tambunan/AFP/Getty Images

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.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s unifying and consensus-driven vision for the US was rejected by voters. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

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?

Donald Trump hosting a roundtable with Latino community leaders in Miami, October 2024. Photograph: Cristóbal Herrera/EPA

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.

US broadcaster Megyn Kelly, whom Donald Trump derided in a 2015 TV debate during his first presidential campaign, joins him at a rally in Pennsylvania in November 2024. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

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."