Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
EXCERPT
At first, it seemed hard to grasp that we’d really done it. Not even Trump seemed to believe his victory that November night in 2016. We had plenty of excuses, some exculpatory, some damning. The hangover of the Great Recession. Exhaustion with forever wars. A racist backlash against the first Black president. A populist surge in America and beyond. Deaths of despair. If not for this potent mix, surely no one like Trump would ever have come to power.
If only the Clinton campaign had focused more on Wisconsin. If only African American turnout had been stronger in Michigan. If only WikiLeaks and private servers and “deplorables” and so much more. If only.
Now we’ll come up with more, no matter how contradictory or consistent they may be. If only Harris had been more attuned to the suffering in Gaza, or more supportive of Israel. If only she’d picked Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, as her running mate. If only the lingering fury over Covid had landed at Trump’s feet. If only Harris hadn’t been so centrist, or if only she weren’t such a California progressive, hiding all those positions she’d let slip in her 2019 campaign. If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw from the race, or if only he hadn’t mumbled stuff about garbage.
Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant. She called him divisive, angry, aggrieved. And that was a smart case to make if, deep down, most voters held democracy dear (except maybe they didn’t ) and if so many of them weren’t already angry (except they were). If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was bad, then Harris was the right candidate with the right message at the right moment. The prosecutor who would defeat the felon.
But the voters heard her case, and they still found for the defendant. A politician who admires dictators and says he’ll be one for a day, whom former top aides regard as a threat to the Constitution — a document he believes can be “ terminated ” when it doesn’t suit him — has won power not for one day but for nearly 1,500 more. What was considered abnormal, even un-American, has been redefined as acceptable and reaffirmed as preferable.
The Harris campaign labored under the misapprehension, as did the Biden campaign before it, that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.
It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.
Trump has long conflated himself with America, with the ambitions of its people. “When you mess with the American dream, you’re on the fighting side of Trump,” he wrote in “The America We Deserve,” published in 2000.
The Democrats tried hard to puncture those fantasies in this latest campaign. They raised absurd amounts of cash. They pushed the incumbent president, the standard-bearer of their party, out of the race, once it became clear he would not win. They replaced him with a younger, more dynamic candidate who proceeded to trounce Trump in their lone presidential debate.
None of it was enough. America had voted early, long before any mail-in ballots were available, and it has given Trump the “powerful mandate” he claimed in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
This time, that choice came with full knowledge of who Trump is, how he behaves in office and what he’ll do to stay there. He hasn’t just shifted the political consensus on a set of policy positions, though by moving both parties on trade and immigration, he certainly has done that . The rationalization of 2016 — that Trump was a protest vote by desperate Americans trying to send a message to the establishment of both parties — is no longer operative. The grotesque rally at Madison Square Garden, that carnival of insults against everyone that the speakers do not want in their America, was not an anomaly but a summation. It was Trumpism’s closing argument, and it landed.
The irony of one of the more common critiques of Harris — that her “word salad” moments and default platitudes in extended interviews made it hard to know what she believed — is that Trump manages to seem real even when his positions shift and his words weave. Authenticity does not require consistency or clarity when it is grounded in pitch-perfect cynicism.
We don’t call this period “the Trump era” just because the once and future president won lots of votes and has now prevailed in two presidential contests. It remained the Trump era even when Biden exiled him to Mar-a-Lago for four years. It is the Trump era because Trump has captured not just a national party but also a national mood, or at least enough of it. And when Democrats presented the choice this year as a referendum on Trumpism more than an affirmative case for Harris, they kept their rival at the center of American politics.
Harris gave it away whenever she called on voters to “turn the page” from Trump. Didn’t we do that in 2020 when we chose Biden and Harris? Not really. Trump was still waiting in the epilogue.
For those who have long insisted that Trump is “not who we are,” that he does not represent American values, there are now two possibilities: Either America is not what they thought it was, or Trump is not as threatening as they think he is. I lean to the first conclusion, but I understand that, over time, the second will become easier to accept. A state of permanent emergency is not tenable; weariness and resignation eventually win out. As we live through a second Trump term, more of us will make our accommodations. We’ll call it illiberal democracy, or maybe self-care.
“We’re not going back,” Harris told us. The tragedy is not that this election has taken us back, but that it shows how there are parts of America’s history that we’ve never fully gotten past.
In her book “America for Americans,” Erika Lee argues that Trump’s immigration policies and statements are part of a long tradition of xenophobia — against Southern Europeans, against newcomers from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East — a tradition that has lived alongside our self-perception as a nation of immigrants. In his book “The End of the Myth,” Greg Grandin warned of the “nationalization of border brutalism” under Trump, whereby harsh policies at the U.S.-Mexico border would spread elsewhere, an “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.”
When Trump first began his ascent into presidential politics, some readers turned to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” about homegrown authoritarianism in the United States. In the story, Doremus Jessup, a liberal-minded newspaper editor, marvels at the power of Buzz Windrip, a crudely charismatic demagogue who captivates the country and imposes totalitarian rule. The stylistic similarities between Trump and Windrip are evident, but Lewis’s real protagonists are the well-meaning, liberal-minded citizens, like Jessup, who can’t quite bring themselves to grasp what is happening.
Jessup tells his readers that the insanity won’t last, that they can wait it out. “He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure,” Lewis wrote. When it does endure, Jessup blames himself and his class for their obliviousness. “If it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another. … We had it coming, we Respectables,” he laments.
For too long, today’s Respectables have insisted on Trump’s abnormality. It is a reflex, a defense mechanism, as though accepting his ordinariness is too much to bear. Because if Trump is normal, then America must be, too, and who wants to be roused from dreams of exceptionalism? It’s more comforting to think of Trumpism as a temporary ailment than a pre-existing condition.
When Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” in September of 2016, she did more than dismiss a massive voting bloc and confirm her status as a Respectable in good standing. What she said about those voters moments later was even more telling: “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable. But, thankfully, they are not American.”
It’s a neat move: Rather than accept what America was becoming and who Americans could become, just write them out of the story.
Are we what we say, or what we do — are we our actions or our aspirations? From America’s earliest moments, we have lived this tension between ideals and reality. It may seem more honest to dismiss our words and focus on our deeds. But our words also matter; they reveal what we hope to do and who we want to be. That yearning remains vital, no matter in what direction our national reality points.
The way to render Trump abnormal is not to insist that he is, or to find more excuses, or to indulge in the great and inevitable second-guessing of Democratic campaign strategy. It begins by recognizing that who we are is decided not only on Election Day — whether 2024 or 2016, or 2028 for that matter — but every day. Every day that we strive to be something other than what we’ve become.
I remember when I thought Trump wasn’t normal. But now he is, no matter how fiercely I cling to that memory.
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Before giving my take on this article, I would say that Trump's "mandate" to change America is a lot less impressive than people are claiming it is.
When all is said and done the popular vote margin between Trump and Harris will be less than the margin was between Biden and Trump in 2020, and I dont recall anyone saying Biden had a mandate to change America. The hyperbolic media are saying Trump won in a landslide, but he is going to end up with 51 or 52 percent of the popular vote. That is simply not a landslide, and in earlier times it would have been considered something of a squeaker. The "blue wall" states which could have led Harris to the presidency if she won all three of them were pretty close, with roughly a 49 -48 edge for Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan , and a 51-48 edge for Trump in Pennsylvania.
He flipped every single state that Biden won, picked up 4 Senate seats and it looks like they will gain a couple house seats, his electoral college victory, the one that matters will be larger than Bidens was. but it would be ridiculous in my opinion to say he won because he was the better candidate, he won because Harris was that terrible of one, and completely unlikable.
Democrats refuse to acknowledge that's even possible. She represents their worldview, therefore she is the perfect candidate who ran a flawless campaign. Even Queen Latifah endorsed her!
They are a party of scolds, the church ladies of a bygone era, and that doesn't play well. Calling half the country deplorable, or garbage, or wannabe Nazis just doesn't work outside the circle of true believers. Normal people interact with other people who aren't in their bubble and recognize how silly the name calling is.
Nobody is more unlikeable than Donald Trump, unless you are like Donald Trump. That is where we are.
We all saw and see what Trump is. To boil it down , he is the biggest asshole in America today, and is in the running for biggest asshole of all time. Who elects such a person? People who are desperate not to lose "their country".
There have been times when inflation has been higher, crime has been higher, and the immigration problem goes back decades. Trump's appeal is to throw down against multiculturalism. A demagogic clown like Trump could not have won in the earlier eras of high crime and high inflation, because America wasnt on the brink of 'catastrophic' demographic change for whites in those earlier periods.
And Harris lost despite spending a billion dollars calling him one.
Being an asshole sure didn't hurt LBJ at the ballot box either , did it?
, because America wasnt on the brink of 'catastrophic' demographic change for whites in those earlier periods.
Sure. The racialist theory sure explains why American Indians were Trump's strongest supporting demographic and why his minority vote significantly increased since 2016 while his share of the white vote went down. Keep pushing that square peg through a round hole.
Trumps political career is based on race. It is well known and no need to go over it again and again .
‘When all is said and done the popular vote margin between Trump and Harris will be less than the margin was between Biden and Trump in 2020’
Harris got 12 million votes less than Biden did in 2020 and Trump got about the same as he did in the same period. That tells me that even 12 million American liberals knew Harris was a crappy candidate with a dolt who was her running mate and had no chance against Trump.
If you want to blame anyone for Trump’s victory, blame those 12 million liberals.
The last I saw Trump was around 3 million votes ahead of Harris. That is a figure that will go down a little, not up, as the western states finish counting all their mail in votes.
Biden won by 7 million.
Yea…..and?
Again, Harris received about 12 million less votes than Biden did in 2020. What happened to those votes because it doesn’t look like they went to Trump as he is about where he was in 2020.
Common sense will tell you those people knew Harris had no chance against Trump and decided it would be a waste of time voting for her………or those votes never really existed in 2020.
We may never know
No, he ran to be a transition president but changed his mind.
This is the key point. Trump's Madison Square Garden rally was repulsive, or so we thought. His campaign rhetoric , more often than not was repulsive. His personal behavior is often repulsive. His attempt to steal the 2020 election was repulsive as was his calling Jan 6th a day of love. I could spend the rest of the day listing the truly Mt Everest level of his corruption, dishonesty, jackassery , and treachery.
In a just world, Trump would never have had a political career at all, that is how unfit he has always been, and I mean always. But, running as a great white hope he got his foot in the door , and now he wont leave and half the country is willing to sell our national honor and principles out for cheaper prices at the grocery store. When prices dont go down Trump will blame Democrats or "elites" and his MAGA will quite agree. Trump is , of course, elite himself, he is very rich , and a graduate of an Ivy League college. His home in Trump Tower is decorated to look like a palace from either Europe or one of Sadam Husseins. He has a golden toilet. Non elites dont partake in such things.
So what is going on. Why is Trump able to override all bad aspects of "Trump" ? "I want my country back" There is someone here at Newstalkers that seemingly has that phrase stamped on his forehead, and repeats the idea with great enthusiasm.
The demographics of America will change whether anyone likes it or not. Every year there are more and more interracial babies born and before too long (this century) most Americans will be some level of bi-racial. It is inevitable. Do you know what the one drop rule is? For some the idea will never die.
Donald Trumps entire political career has been based on white grievance , there is in your face evidence of this.
Well the white grievers have won for now.
‘Well the white grievers have won for now. ’
So 25 percent of the black population and a larger percentage of Hispanic voters, not to mention the large numbers of Arab Americans that usually vote democrat but voted for Trump are now white grievers?
Maybe you should tell them that and see what kind of a response you will get.
powerful shit, as i'll again state my moniker joke, rings truer now, than when o thought, had jokingly came up with it, bout a dozen years ago. Congratulations US,i feel like Nostradamn dumasz,but, i was correct....
"Well, the white grievers have won for now."
Oh, nonsense! So why did he get support from large numbers Blacks and Hispanics?
The simple and correct answer is that a very diverse electorate voted against a continuation of the far left's usurpation of the democrat party. This a complete repudiation of the leftist agenda and policies. Harris was just a sacrificial lamb that got slaughter in the process.
Trump won by default
90% of black women did not vote for him, nor did 80% of black men.
Hispanics seemingly liked his style.
Also many many hispanics consider themselves to be white, even if other white people dont.
The AP has it at 4 million. The significance isn't the raw number, but the change since 2020.
Maybe but he got more of their vote than any Republican candidate since the '70s...
Trump is not who we are, working class is who we are......
You do know that Democrats also won elections? You do know that voters have been making their voices heard on the issue of abortion?
Why does the ruling classes consistently ignore reality? We are a divided country. Beyond the caricatures, phony outrage, and hair-on-fire false intellectualism what does the reality of division really mean?
The smartest dimwits in the country want us to believe that our divisions are an either/or binary division. The smartest dimwits in the country cannot wrap their heads around the reality of a Trump voter who supports abortion. That is beyond the comprehension of the smartest dimwits in the country. The reality of our division is that we are not a monolithic society. Our country is imploding because the smartest dimwits in the country cannot understand reality; a Trump voter really can support abortion and tax increases.