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Palm Beach, Florida
Donald Trump’s bid to take back the White House has been triumphant. It is a decisive victory and even Trump’s bitterest enemies should recognize him for what he is: an American titan, the most extraordinary politician of our time. He has just pulled off arguably the biggest comeback in US history — a feat greater even than Richard Nixon’s Lazarus-like return in 1968.
To understand the scale of his victory, recall how weakly he began. On November 15, 2022, when Trump launched his now-triumphant bid to regain the presidency, he did not seem himself. His formal campaign announcement, delivered in the ballroom of his club in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, lacked the zing of his famous entry into the 2016 race, when he floated down the escalator of Trump Tower in New York.
The Trump of 2022 had countless legal problems and he’d been widely blamed for the Republican Party’s disappointing performance in the midterm elections. Republican donors and the right-wing media were lining up behind Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, the coming man. Back then Trump looked disgruntled. “I don’t like to think of myself as a politician,” he said. “But I guess that’s what I am. I hate that thought.” Critics called his performance “low-energy” — turning one of his favorite insults against him.
The Donald was only ever down, not out. ‘Trump fatigue’ turned out to be a mirage
But the Donald was only ever down, not out. “Trump fatigue,” as people called it, turned out to be a mirage and the Trump of 2024 is jubilant, albeit exhausted, having accomplished his extraordinary reelection mission. “I’ll never be doing a rally again, can you believe it?” he said in his victory speech, sounding truly sad. But, he added, “success is going to bring us together.” Whatever else you think of him, it would be hard not to admit that Trump has grit. He has survived eight years of the most brutal political warfare — two impeachments, two assassination attempts, four criminal indictments, endless media ridicule and opprobrium — and emerged victorious again. He has won back the presidency.
It was at around 10:30 in Palm Beach on Tuesday night when the mood at the Trump campaign’s “watch party” started to brighten. Nobody wanted to speak too soon, but the crowd began to whoop louder and louder as the good news poured in from Georgia and North Carolina. The Democratic Blue Wall — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — took time to fall. But there was a quiet confidence that the Democrats were about to face a great repudiation. “We’ve delivered for people in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And [Kamala Harris] hasn’t,” said Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s longtime advisor.
In 2016, Trump forged a new working-class coalition to beat Hillary Clinton. That coalition fell short in 2020 so he strengthened it by adding more Latino and African-American voters. He became the first politician to engage successfully with the “manosphere,” the growing group of disgruntled men who feel ignored and alienated by progressive policies. In key swing states, young men leapt on the Trump train. “This is karma, ladies and gentlemen,” said Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who joined Trump’s victory speech. “Nobody deserves this more than him.”
Of course, Trump’s enemies won’t accept his victory just yet. The results may well be contested, as Democrats indulge in exactly what they accused Trump of four years ago: election denialism. The “lawfare” against Trump, paused for the election, will be waged anew. But the Republicans will probably have the House of Representatives and the Senate, too, which will limit what the Democrats can do. “They’ve kind of shot the bullet when it comes to legal challenges,” said a cautiously optimistic Trumpworld insider on Monday, sitting near the heart of power on Capitol Hill. “But I guess the question is: how crazy is the left? And the answer is we don’t know.”
The irony is that from last year onwards, the lawfare against Trump turned out to be his political salvation. The “deep state” really was out to get him. Each of the four criminal indictments against him boosted him in the polls and eased his path towards the Republican nomination. The clever-clever theory among Washington insiders was that the Biden administration felt so confident in its ability to beat Trump that it was happy to let him be the Republican candidate. Well, if that was the ploy, it backfired spectacularly.
The 2024 presidential election has proved that political polls cannot divine the future and that the so-called “legacy media” — print newspapers and most television networks — are increasingly unimportant. The pollsters went to great lengths this year not to underestimate the strength of Trump’s movement — so much so that self-appointed experts on both sides of the Atlantic (such as Rory Stewart) argued that most surveys had, in fact, become biased against the Democrats. We were told that the “high-quality” polling, with its ingenious modeling, showed Harris with an edge. The less sophisticated data pointed towards a Trump victory. But once again, polling companies managed to exaggerate the Democratic Party’s popularity, for the simple reason that Democrat-leaning voters are more likely to respond to surveys than Trump supporters, who regard the polls as suspicious at best.
Some will argue that what swung it for Trump was Elon Musk’s support on Twitter/X, arguably the world’s most influential social media platform. More significant perhaps was the fact that legacy media has lost its credibility and with it, the ability to shape the conversation. Since 2016, journalists have taken it upon themselves to act as the sanctioned opposition to Trumpism. In recent days, major news networks have repeatedly insisted that Trump actually threatened to kill his opponent Liz Cheney at the end of last week. They grossly exaggerated the number of pregnant women dead as a result of abortion bans and lost the trust of ordinary, undecided, voters.
The Democratic Party and its cheerleaders must ponder a painful question: might Joe Biden, for all his apparent senility, have won? “Kamala Harris is more threatening to swing voters than a dead Joe Biden or a comatose Joe Biden,” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, in July. “So if Joe has to go, it’s gonna be Kamala and if it’s Kamala, it’s gonna be harder.”
Biden will go down in history as a failed one-term president. But he was the only Democrat who beat Trump. Harris will blame sexism and racism for her defeat, as she did when her first presidential campaign flamed out in 2019. But even with a billion-dollar war chest this year, she was unable to overcome her glaring flaws. She gave a decent speech at the Democratic National Convention in August and outfoxed Trump in their first — and last — debate. But she fluffed her lines in her biggest interviews and seemed unable to answer difficult questions.
She campaigned at times almost exclusively on the emotive topic of abortion and seemed to go out of her way to put off men, especially blue-collar men who tended to prefer Biden to Trump. One of the Democrats’ late campaign adverts, starring Julia Roberts, encouraged women to lie to their husbands about how they voted because the voting booth “is the one place where women still have a right to choose.” An odd pitch, to put it mildly.
The Democrats all but forgot that they are meant to be the party of the working man. Team Trump made the GOP the party of the forgotten man. Team Harris-Walz spoke more to working-from-home women and affluent college graduates. In other words, the people for whom “the system,” as Team Trump calls it, works. But a large majority of Americans feel their country is on the wrong track and the system works against them.
Harris’s campaign message was confused and confusing. “I’m not Joe Biden,” she said. But as vice president, she also had to present herself as the continuity candidate: Bidenism with a fresher face. She posed as a force for moderation against extremes, yet her record as a senator put her far to the left of the American mainstream on culture-war issues.
As someone who seemed to have no knowledge of international relations, Harris stuck to the Biden administration’s line on Ukraine and Gaza. But voters tended to agree with Trump and his more eloquent vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance: the world seemed safer with Donald in charge.
The economy seemed better off, too. In the 2022 midterms, anger at “Bidenflation” and the exorbitant cost of living didn’t translate into a sweeping set of victories for the Republicans. But as Trump put it in that downcast campaign launch address: “The citizens of our country have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through. They don’t quite feel it yet. But… I have no doubt that by 2024, [they] will.” The results proved his point.
Harris seemed to go out of her way to put off men, especially blue-collar men who preferred Biden to Trump
An even bigger Democratic mistake was to ignore what has always been Trump’s strongest campaign issue: the crisis at America’s southern border. Since Biden took office, more than 7 million illegal immigrants have entered the United States.
Democrats blamed Trump and the Republicans in Congress for “putting partisan politics ahead of our national security” and blocking Democratic-led efforts to control the problem. Then, in June, Biden finally issued an executive order to stem the flow of undocumented migrants and limit asylum. If his administration had listened to voter concerns and acted sooner, Harris would have been in a stronger position. But she wasn’t.
Trump has been elected on a promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants. Vance, now the vice president-elect, has also been clear that he is fully committed to that policy. The Trump 2.0 immigration agenda is bound to generate waves of international outrage. The UK government, for instance, will come under pressure to denounce the incoming administration as a far-right tyranny. This could further exacerbate tensions between Britain’s governing Labour Party and Trumpworld, especially after the fuss over 100 Labour activists being sent across the Atlantic to canvas for Harris. Moreover, if Trump and Vance move quickly to end the war in Ukraine, British politicians may feel compelled to denounce Republicans for rewarding Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
But 2024 is not 2016, and Trump can no longer be dismissed as a freakish aberration from politics as usual. He is the new normal.
Will the British political establishment be shrewd enough to recognize Trump’s mandate? “It’s almost certain that the UK now has a pro-British president,” said Nigel Farage. “Labour must roll out the red carpet.”
A more final point about Trump 2.0 is that he will be seventy-eight at his inauguration — 159 days older than Biden was when he became commander-in-chief in 2021. On the one hand, that could mean that Vance, as vice president, will do much of the executive legwork. On the other, it means Trump doesn’t have to govern for re-election. “That means he can focus on things that matter in the long term, like debt,” says an advisor. This could be Trump’s greatest challenge yet.
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This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
