Trump won the 2024 US election, a result that I think is shocking to most of the rest of the world. America is a big, complex nation, so trying to generalize why people voted a certain way is a fool's errand. But here I go anyway...
Trump won because at least some of the electorate would eat belly button lint before having a woman as their leader. A large majority of Trump voters picked him because they thought he would be better for their wallets. The high inflation the whole world experienced after the pandemic was blamed on the Biden Administration, and many people thought they were better off when Trump was president. To me, this is pretty comical; the economy was fine from 2016-2019 despite Trump, not because of him. This time around, he is talking about huge tarrifs on everything, abolishing the Federal Reserve, and deporting millions of workers. In reality, he doesn't have even the faintest clue how tariffs, deficits and the Federal Reserve actually work - and that's after he had four years in office to learn this stuff. But apparently, one of the magical powers of a penis is it automatically makes you smart, especially when it comes to practical matters that involve at lot of math and technical concepts.
Like all conservative parties, the Republicans always have a built-in advantage when times are tough because they are the party of unreflective self-interest. Perversely, the worse things get, the better it is for the right-wing parties, and make no mistake, it has been their policies that largely have created the mess we have in the world today. Some people are going to make a lot of money off of the second Trump Administration; that's why people like Musk and all the other billionaires and assorted grifters supported him in the first place. (You thought they had principles? That's adorable.) The business class always votes Republican, and they love the fact that Trump says he is going to get rid of all those pesky regulations on health, safety, pollution, unions, etc.
The denial/hypocrisy/bitterness of Trump's voters is quite remarkable. Trump rambled on incoherently and slurred his words, but it was only Biden who was too old. Trump constantly said idiotic and offensive things that would end anyone else's candidacy, but this was discounted as mere showmanship, as if he were a pro wrestling villain. In the bizarro world view of 75 million Americans, his vile rhetoric is a sign of authenticity - Trump being Trump. The only way this makes sense is if you are deeply cynical. I hear this a lot: "all politicians are the same, they're all liars and crooks who are only in it for themselves." If you believe this, then Trump doesn't look so bad at all. But if you believe this, it says everything about you and nothing at all about reality.
As a Democratic congressman put it, "Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far-left." Good policies get wrecked by the extremists ; for example, "defund the police" was never meant to actually defund and abolish the police, it was meant to reform their tactics and responsibilities. The far-left continually sabotages the Democrats. Think of how far women's sports have come over the last 40 years. Women now commonly get athletic scholarships to college and they can play professionally in basketball, hockey and soccer. This is unequivocal progress, brought about by liberals. But now for the sake of trans rights, women are being told they should be fine with competing in sports against biological men. This makes zero sense to a large majority of the population.
And when the extremists don't get their way, they take their ball and stay home. The far-left considers Israel an imperialist state, so they were enraged by Biden and Harris's continued support of Israel after its invasion of Gaza. Trump got almost exactly the same number of votes he got in 2020, while Harris got 8 million less votes than Biden did, and it seems very likely that Gaza was responsible for a lot of that number. If these voters think Gaza will fare better under Trump, they are delusional beyond repair. Trump will let Netanyahu do whatever he wants with the Palestinians. He will also sell Ukraine and Taiwan down the river without a second thought, and neither Putin nor Xi care a lick about morality or human rights. Let's see what the Columbia students will have to say about that.
Why are the Democrats consistently losing working class voters? Certainly, part of it has been the effectiveness of conservative media agitprop. But the focus on identity politics hurts the Democrats with all working class voters. Nearly 46 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump, a man who repeatedly used the most despicable slurs to describe Mexican immigrants. I frequent some of the left-wing media sites like Slate and Daily Kos and their explanation for pretty much everything is racism and misogyny - that's it. Here is a basic truth: the US economy craps on all workers, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender; yes, it's worse for minorites and women, but to people who are struggling, that's irrelevant, if not insulting. Telling poor whites that they are privileged and that they benefitted from slavery and the exploitation of immigrants may be factual, but it isn't a message that will work. No group of any kind is a monolith, and dividing society into victims and oppressors based merely on skin colour is self-defeating.
If politics is all about messaging, then Trump and the Republicans did a great job. They got people to believe things that weren't true about the economy, inflation, crime, immigration, etc. Yes, it sure seems like a lot of people don't really understand what they are voting for, but calling people stupid isn't going to get you any more votes, either. The bright side is that based on how poorly Trump's campaign was going at the end - half empty venues, people leaving well before he was done speaking - I think it's safe to say a lot of people voted for Trump without much enthusiasm. It won't take much for those people to turn against him when they see that the Republicans' extremist agenda is only going to benefit the wealthy elites they hate so much.
But since the Republicans now control the entire government and seem determined to radically change society to fit their warped view (see Project 2025), the question really is, will what the people want even matter? Trump is just an empty narcissist; the real power to radically alter American society and subvert democracy lies with the people behind him- Musk and the Tech bros, the Federalist Society, the hedge fund billionaires - and they are, unlike Trump, competent and determined. By the time his voters figure out they've been duped yet again, it may well be too late.
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