More than a week late to the post-election punditry party, I’m still trying to come to terms with the second coming of Donald Trump. It’s a reckoning I tried to forget, or at least blunt, at first. I left early Wednesday morning on a long hike, then watched a movie in the evening. Maybe you have a similar tale of self-distraction to tell.
Avoidance will only get you so far. But the delay gave me time to think, and perhaps to arrive at a few points that don’t seem to have been made amid the blizzard of lamentations and analysis.
I shouldn’t be shocked; I certainly wasn’t surprised. A week before the election, my closest rightwing friend – who loathes both Trump and Harris and the Democratic Party generally, and basks in a Camelot-like nostalgia for the Reagan years – said, again, that he thought “Trump fatigue” would finally catch up and carry Harris through the finish. This time he added, “I’d bet money on it.”
“You’re on,” I replied. Worst $20 I ever won, but safest bet I ever made. Like the pollsters and the Republican grandees who think they can control him or at least blunt the damage, my buddy has consistently underestimated Trump’s malignity and his appeal. Democrats and the Left have meanwhile wallowed in the obverse complacency, right up through this election, believing that the truth, deployed again and again, of his outrages and cruelties, his derangement and depravity, will finally set us free. Everyone will see him for what he is. Kamala Harris, who can frame an indictment though she can’t articulate a policy position, jabbed him masterfully – just as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, to just as much effect.
Forget about the MAGA faithful, the superfans and cultists who cheered Disco Donald’s rants and rambles, even when he turned up the music and lurched around the stage for 39 minutes. J.D. Vance put it best (in The Atlantic!), back before he sold his soul: “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” Or, as Alcoholics Anonymous preached, the addicted have to hit bottom before they can recover.
The MAGAites were never enough to put Trump over the top, however. He needed tens of millions of nice, ordinary, mostly nonideological, nonpartisan people who believe he and the Republican Party are better able to deliver what they need than Kamala and the Dems. Part of that is a matter of timing, since absence from office makes the citizen’s heart grow fonder of you. (Look how many former haters have softened toward Reagan, Carter, even Nixon and Dick Cheney.) If he’d chosen to make a comeback in 1996, the very un-Trumpian George H.W. Bush would surely have had a better chance against Bill Clinton than Bob Dole did.
Trump enjoyed the advantages of incumbency, and the rough edges of his first term have been ground on memory’s wheel. Again and again we’ve seen not just Trump’s barkers but the politically less engaged, proverbially low-information voters remember the first Trump years (excuse me, the first four Trump years) as a time when the economy was better (i.e., prices were lower, the most visible indicator) and there were “no new wars,” just old wars grinding away in Syria, Ukraine, Congo.
They forget his erratic, deadly mishandling of the covid pandemic aside from approving Operation Warp Speed (a boon that won’t come again if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becomes Immunization Czar). Harris by contrast was saddled with all the disadvantages of recent incumbency but none of the gravitas that comes with the title “President.”
Josh Barro writes on his Substack and in The Atlantic that he can’t help feeling “Democrats deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.” I think of a young woman, call her Marta, a daughter of Mexican immigrants who married into my extended family and lives in the San Diego area. She works fulltime and raises her two children alone. She has little time for or interest in the news and no fondness for Trump or MAGA. But she sees the disorder at the nearby border, the prices at the supermarket, the zombie encampments, the crimes that the statistics don’t catch and the police don’t even try to stop. She’s afraid to step out at night in the neighborhood she grew up in. She voted for Trump, for the first time. Her parents already had.
We’ve all heard such accounts, and such inter-Democratic recriminations. But here are three election takeaways no one seems to have noted:
1. Missing in action: the biggest issue of all in terms of future impact and daylight between the two candidates. Climate and the environment were almost entirely absent from the conversation, aside from Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” chants and rants about windmills, solar power, and any electric car not made by Elon Musk, and Harris’s contortions over fracking. In her convention speech she did give a nice one-sentence nod to “The freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis,” but that was it.
In her ballyhooed “summing up” speech on the Ellipsis: not a word. In the debate: not a single question. The last time that happened in a presidential debate there as an uproar and an apology afterward. We’ve fallen far from the 2000 debates, when G. W. Bush tried to out-green Al Gore by promising to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. (To whatever extent Bush was serious, Dick Cheney quickly headed him off.)
All this in the year when we blew past 1.5 degree C global temperature increase, the consensus ceiling for manageable change. After four years of record drought, the Amazon is drying up and Amazonia, the emphysemic “lungs of the planet, is on its predicted way to desertification. Home insurance became unaffordable in coastal Florida, despite all the federal subsidies the rest of the country pays for. Hurricane Helene devastated supposed climate refuges in the Appalachians. At the COP Biodiversity Conference in Cali, rich countries pledged just $163 million of the $20 billion promised to the global south by 2025.
Climate changes everything — except political campaigns. Surveys find ever more Americans acknowledge the reality of human-driven (or at least human-influenced) warming, but the political class offers less and less encouragement to action, and obscures energy transition as job creation and “inflation reduction.”
2. Entitlement and Hillary Clinton’s legacy. No, not the pantsuits, despite the jibes at Harris for being too glamorous (when did a male candidate get dissed for wearing sharp suits?). Consider the indulgent chuckling at Trump’s figurative dick waving, the rise of the bro vote and strongman mystique, and the widened gap between young male and female voters — all of which suggest that we’re a long way still from gender-blind voting, and the political glass ceiling and attendant myths persist at the very top.
Harris was inescapably, perhaps fatally, burdened by another echo of 2016: the stench of entitlement and coronation rather than popular choice. In 2016 the Democratic Central Committee put its thumb on the scale for Clinton, and millions of disenchanted Bernie-or-busters and other progressives sat out the election or voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. This time, third-party votes couldn’t even in theory have flipped the race to Trump. But the high share of voters who sat it out likely did.
It was easy to sneer when Trump railed about Harris’s instant nomination as “undemocratic,” but once again he had a bead on the zeitgeist. The race was really lost in 2023 when Biden insisted on running again and the Democrat establishment rallied around him. A year later, Harris’s ascension made a “struggle for democracy” look like an insider job, compounding Democrats’ image as the establishment party in an anti-establishment year.
Worse, it prevented the open primaries that would have aired issues, hashed out an agenda, tested candidates in plain sight, and, with luck, found the best one. That one surely wouldn’t have been Kamala Harris, who was both unknown and over-familiar and had enough weaknesses and, as vice president to an unpopular prez, carried enough baggage to sink a candidacy in the best of circumstances.
Sadly, nostalgia for the good old days of selecting candidates in smoke-filled back rooms has resurged. This race ought to put paid to that fond notion.
3. The death of Story. The Obama era was the high-water mark of politics as autobiography. Obama rose on his story and his storytelling gifts, in the process elevating the idea of Story as a transcendent moral and political value. This was always a dubious notion; Hitler exploited it when he titled the book that powered his rise “My Struggle” rather than, “The Jewish Menace.” Nevertheless, journalists took to calling themselves “storytellers,” until they discovered (and researchers confirmed) that this made the public trust them even less.
The 2024 election ought to put paid to that notion too. Kamala Harris reveled in storytelling, reverting again and again to gauzy recollections of her hard-working immigrant mother, her wise grandmother, and the urban village that helped mama raise her kids. But this couldn’t mask her inability (echoing Hillary Clinton’s) to articulate a mission, a policy agenda, or even a reason to run, beyond stopping Trump.
Trump, by contrast, understandably doesn’t dwell on his dysfunctional silver-spoon upbringing. He can’t tell a story or a joke to save his life, though you might say he embodies an overstory of grievance, scorn, and megalomania. Instead he spins sweeping policies and grandiose promises that, however untethered to reality, tell voters he’s working for them, not just telling bracing stories.
