It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Elon Musk predicts Justin Trudeau's future in Canada's next election
Elon Musk predicted Justin Trudeau's defeat in the upcoming Canadian elections. Trudeau is facing challenges from Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party and Jagmeet Singh's New Democratic Party.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (Photo: AP)
Elon Musk, one of the world's richest person and tech giants, on Thursday predicted that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would lose his position in the upcoming elections.
"He will be gone in the upcoming election," Musk tweeted while responding to a user's request for help in ousting the incumbent Canadian PM from his post.
Thhttp://e comes as Trudeau gears up to face Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party and Jagmeet Singh's New Democratic Party in the upcoming elections.
Musk, a key figure behind Donald Trump's victory in US polls, had previously voiced criticism of the Canadian government's approach to free speech, especially in reference to the new regulations mandating online streaming services to register for government oversight.
With Donald Trump returning to the White House next year, Trudeau's administration is preparing to face additional challenges. As Canada's economy relies heavily on the United States, Trump's proposed policies will have a significant impact on bilateral ties. Canada directs 75 percent of its exports to the US.
The proposed 10 percent tariff on all imports by Donald Trump has raised concerns among Canadian economic experts, including government officials, asserting the vulnerability of the North American country to shifts in US policies.
Apart from the economy, the fragile relationship between Trudeau and Trump could add stress points to US-Canada bilateral ties. In September, Trump, in his 'Save America' photobook, wrote that Trudeau’s mother was “somehow associated” with the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. To this end, the Canadian government rejected the allegations and said that Trudeau’s parents never visited Cuba until several years after Justin was born.
Additionally, the bilateral ties between India and Canada have plunged significantly, as Ottawa has consistently dismissed New Delhi’s calls for strict measures against Khalistani extremists in Canada. Instead, Canada has accused India of targeting Khalistani individuals within its borders, escalating a diplomatic standoff.
Published By:
Akhilesh Nagari
Published On:
Nov 8, 2024
'He'll be gone by…': Elon Musk's bold prediction for Canada PM Justin Trudeau
Pressure on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to mount, especially with his opponents currently favoured to win the 2025 elections.
Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk made a bold prediction about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, predicting his “downfall in the upcoming Canadian federal election,” which is set to take place before October next year.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (L) and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau
“He will be gone in the upcoming election,” Musk wrote on X, reacting to a post that mentioned the collapse of Germany's “socialist government.”
This election will be a crucial challenge for Trudeau, who has led the Liberal Party since 2013. Trudeau’s Liberal Party will face competition from several major parties, including the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, and the New Democratic Party, led by Jagmeet Singh. The Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party will also be contesting for seats. What made Elon Musk say that?
Elon Musk's comment likely reflects Trudeau's position in a minority government, making him more susceptible to losing power. The discussion about Canada's government and Trudeau surfaced when Musk called German Chancellor Olaf Scholz a “fool” following the collapse of his three-party coalition.
Musk posted in German on X: “Olaf ist ein Narr,” which translates to “Olaf is a fool.”
In response, a user commented, “Elon Musk we need your help in Canada getting rid of Trudeau.” Musk then replied, predicting Trudeau’s loss in the upcoming election.
On Wednesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz dismissed his finance minister, intensifying instability within the government, CNN reported. Scholz explained in a televised address that he had removed Finance Minister Christian Lindner, saying it “was necessary to prevent harm to our country.” This firing followed intense political negotiations among the leaders of Germany’s ruling “traffic light” coalition — Scholz from the Social Democratic Party, Lindner from the Free Democratic Party, and Robert Habeck of the Green Party.
CNN reported that the announcement comes amid concerns that a potential Trump administration could further challenge Germany’s struggling economy. Canadian political situation
Pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to mount, especially with his opponents currently favoured to win the 2025 elections. Earlier on Thursday, following the Republican Party’s and Donald Trump’s sweeping success in the US elections, Canada also felt the ripple effects of a potential “conservative government” next door.
Trudeau was criticised by People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, who said, “With the election of a Republican administration south of the border, Canada needs to cut government spending, cut taxes, cut excessive red tape, get rid of its costly and inefficient climate policy, abolish all its insane DEI programs, stop mass immigration, and create a business climate where workers, entrepreneurs and investors can thrive. Or else we will be hopelessly outcompeted by the US, suffer a major brain drain and loss of investments, and our standard of living will drop like a rock.”
Trudeau, now seeking a fourth term, faces historical odds. No Canadian prime minister has won four consecutive terms in over a century.
Doubts about his leadership have grown after recent losses in Toronto and Montreal during special elections. The Liberal Party, lacking an outright majority, also depends on at least one major party in Parliament to govern.
The federal election could be called anytime between now and next October. Currently, the Liberals trail the Conservatives 38 per cent to 25 per cent in the latest Nanos poll, Associated Press reported.
Moreover, Canada’s relations with India have worsened, with India expressing concerns over extremism and anti-India activities within Canada, calling on Canadian authorities to address these issues. Relations soured further after Canadian leaders made allegations, without evidence, regarding the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
This diplomatic tension prompted India to recall its High Commissioner from Canada.
On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned the “deliberate attack” on a Hindu temple in Canada, saying that “cowardly attempts to intimidate” Indian diplomats were unacceptable. He urged Canadian authorities to ensure justice and uphold the rule of law.
Up close with the 300 tonne driverless trucks
Zoe Corbyn Technology Reporter Reporting from Pilbara, Western Australia
Zoe Corbyn Fifty of these giant driverless trucks work in the Greater Nammuldi iron ore mine
It doesn't get much more remote than this. I'm in inland Western Australia, at Rio Tinto’s Greater Nammuldi iron ore mine.
It's about a two-hour flight north from Perth in a region called the Pilbara.
No-one lives permanently here. Around 400 workers are on the site at any one time, and they are flown in, working between four and eight days, depending on their shift pattern, before flying home.
Giant trucks the size of townhouses, capable of hauling 300 tonnes, criss-cross red-earth roads in various sections of this open-pit mine complex.
For an outsider like me their size is intimidating enough, but multiplying that feeling is the knowledge that there's no driver at the wheel.
During a tour of the site in a normal-sized company vehicle, one of the trucks comes into view, approaching from a side road.
I sigh with relief as it deftly turns and continues in the direction we have just come. “Did it make you feel uncomfortable?,” asks the vehicle’s driver Dwane Pallentine, a production superintendent. Advertisement
Zoe Corbyn "Henry" the autonomous water cart sprays roads to keep the dust down
Greater Nammuldi has a fleet of more than 50 self-driving trucks that operate independently on pre-defined courses, along with a handful that remain manually driven and work separately in a different part of the mine.
Being trialled is also an autonomous water cart affectionately known as Henry, which, along with manually driven ones, sprays the mine roads to keep the dust down.
The company vehicle I am in is able to operate alongside the autonomous trucks only because it has been fitted with high-accuracy GPS, which allows it to be seen within a virtual system.
Before entering the mine’s gated autonomous zone, we logged onto this system and a controller verified over the radio that we were visible.
It has encased our vehicle in a virtual bubble that the self-driving trucks "see" and which causes them to manage their proximity by slowing or stopping as necessary.
A touch screen in our cabin displays all the staffed and autonomous vehicles and other equipment in the vicinity, along with "permission lines" that show the immediate routes the self-driving trucks are intending to take. Had I looked at the screen instead of fretting I would have seen that truck was going to turn.
In addition to all vehicles being fitted with a big red emergency button that can stop the system, the autonomous trucks have lasers and radars front and rear to detect collision risks.
The sensors also detect obstacles. If a large rock fell off the back of a truck, the sensors on the next truck along would notice it and the vehicle would stop.
However, some trucks seem extra sensitive – on my tour I see a couple foiled simply by rough roads. Advertisement
Co-ordinating and monitoring these robots is Rio Tinto’s Operations Centre (OC) in Perth, about 1,500km (930 miles) to the south.
It’s the nerve centre for all the company’s Pilbara iron ore operations, which span 17 mines in total, including the three making up Greater Nammuldi.
Guided from here by controllers, include more than 360 self-driving trucks across all the sites (about 84% of the total fleet is automated); a mostly autonomous long-distance rail network to transport the mined ore to port facilities; and nearly 40 autonomous drills. OC staff also remotely control plant and port functions.
Autonomy isn’t new to Rio’s Pilbara operations: introduction began in the late 2000s.
Nor is it unique: Australia has the greatest number of autonomous trucks and mines that use automation of any country, and other mining companies in the Pilbara also use the technology.
But the scale Rio has grown its operations to here, including at Greater Nammuldi – which has one of the largest autonomous truck fleets in the world – gives it global significance.
And it's a global trend. According to GlobalData the number of self-driving haul trucks worldwide has roughly quadrupled over the past four years to more than 2,000, with most made by either Caterpillar or Komatsu.
Rio Tinto The trucks and other mining equipment are monitored at a control room in Perth
The biggest reason for introducing the technology has been to improve the physical safety of the workforce, says Matthew Holcz, the managing director of the company’s Pilbara mines.
Mining is a dangerous occupation: heavy machinery can be unpredictably operated by people who can also become fatigued. “The data clearly shows that, through automation, we've got a significantly safer business,” says Mr Holcz.
It has also improved productivity – to the tune of about 15%, he estimates. Autonomous equipment can be used more because there are no gaps due to shift changes or breaks. And autonomous trucks can also go faster when there is less staff-operated equipment on the scene.
Such automation does not come cheap. Rio won’t disclose what it has spent in total on its Pilbara automation journey to date, but observers put it at multiple billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, employment opportunities have evolved. The narrative might be one of robots taking jobs, but that doesn’t seem the case here so far.
While the OC has about one controller for every 25 autonomous trucks – according to Rio, no one has lost their job because of automation.
Instead, there have been redeployments: truck drivers have joined the OC as controllers themselves, been reskilled to operate different pieces of equipment, such as excavators, loaders and dozers, or gone to drive manual trucks at different sites.
On the OC’s large open plan floor, amid the banks of monitors arranged in clusters for the different mines, I meet Jess Cowie who used be a manual driller but now directs autonomous ones from the central drill pod. “I still put holes in the ground…just without the dust, the noise and being away from the family,” she says. Advertisement
Zoe Corbyn Each mining truck can haul 300 tonnes of rocks
Automation is delivering a “step change” in terms of safety in the mining industry says Robin Burgess-Limerick, a professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane who studies human factors in mining. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.
Professor Burgess-Limerick has analysed incidents involving autonomous equipment reported to regulators.
As he sees it, the interfaces used by staff both in the field and in control centres to gain information aren’t optimally designed. There have been situations where field staff have lost awareness of the situation, which better screen design may have prevented. “The designers of the technology should put a bit more effort into considering people,” he says.
And there is also a risk that controllers’ workloads can be overwhelming - it is a busy, high stakes job.
Over-trust, where people become so confident the autonomous equipment will stop that they start putting themselves at risk, can also be an issue, and he notes effort needs to be directed into improving the ability of trucks themselves to detect moisture. There have been incidents where wet roadways have caused them to lose traction.
There can be legitimate safety concerns with autonomous equipment, says Shane Roulstone, co-ordinator for the Western Mine Workers Alliance, which represents mining-related workers in the Pilbara.
He points to a serious incident this May where an autonomous train slammed into the back of a broken-down train, which workers at the front end were repairing (they evacuated before it hit but were left shaken).
But Mr Roulstone also praises Rio generally for having, over time, developed “some good strategies, procedures and policies” around how people interact with automated vehicles.
Mr Roulstone expects that at some point options for redeployment will lessen and there will job losses. “It is just the mathematics of it,” he says.
Meanwhile, Rio’s automation journey in the Pilbara continues with more trucks, drills and Henry the water cart. It is also closely watching work by Komatsu and Caterpillar to develop un-staffed excavators, loaders and dozers.
Late in the afternoon, waiting at Greater Nammuldi’s airport for the last flight back to Perth, the announcement comes that it has been cancelled due to an issue with the plane. That’s 150 extra people who will now need to be fed and accommodated. It is nothing for Rio, but I can’t help but think we humans are complicated compared to robots.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
Zoe Corbyn
