Supporters of former U.S. president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump show their support on Election Day near his residence at the Mar-a-Lago Club, in West Palm Beach, Fla.GIORGIO VIERA/AFP/Getty Images
Barely two years ago, Donald Trump looked like a spent force.
After leading the Republican Party to a midterm-election shellacking in 2018, losing the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020 and watching a slew of his personally endorsed candidates go down to defeat in 2022, Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory began looking like it might have been a fluke of history.
On Tuesday, he showed it was no was fluke. The Republican nominee is heading back to the White House more popular and powerful than ever after once again defying the conventional rules of politics. His populist message drew new recruits among minority voters and young men, broadening his base beyond the white working class and building a new GOP coalition in the process.
Political comebacks do not get more spectacular than this.
Two years ago, many Americans who had previously supported Mr. Trump appeared to have grown tired of his self-centred antics, vulgar personal attacks and distortions of the truth. They seemed, for a moment at least, to yearn for a fresh face and generational change.
Instead, Mr. Trump steamrolled to the Republican nomination, making short work of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the Iowa caucuses, before scoring massive primary victories over Nikki Haley in every state except reliably blue Vermont.
By then, it may already have been too late for Democrats to stop the Trump train. But they wasted precious months denying Mr. Biden’s cognitive decline despite the President’s obvious deterioration. It took a career-ending debate meltdown by Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump’s defiant fist pump, after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear, for Democrats to finally wake up.
In choosing Vice-President Kamala Harris as their nominee, Democrats briefly regained momentum. Yet, for all of her “brat” appeal among young and minority voters, Ms. Harris faced the nearly impossible task of defending an unpopular Biden administration’s record all while promising “a new way forward.” She ran a risk-averse campaign and mistook her initial bounce in the polls as a signal that voters wanted more of her “politics of joy.”
Most Americans felt they and their country had been losing economic ground under Mr. Biden. More Americans described the economy as an “extremely important” factor determining their vote than in any presidential election since 2008, when financial markets were in a freefall.
It was not wrong for Ms. Harris and Democrats to warn voters about the dangers of a second Trump presidency. They had an obligation to history to point out his deep flaws of character. But that was not what most voters wanted to talk about.
Mr. Trump focused on a trifecta of woes driving American angst – inflation, immigration and crime – and tied Ms. Harris to each of them. Though inflation was coming down, most Americans said they had lost purchasing power under Mr. Biden. Illegal crossings from Mexico dropped after Mr. Biden signed a June executive order to turn back asylum seekers. But most Americans still did not trust Ms. Harris to manage the border. Mr. Trump linked illegal immigration to violent crime and reminded voters that, as a presidential candidate in 2020, Ms. Harris had called for the decriminalization of illegal border crossings.
The Harris campaign kept warning that Mr. Trump’s vow to slap blanket tariffs on foreign goods would leave most U.S. households worse off financially. That strategy belied widespread support for Mr. Trump’s “America First” trade policy. Though Ms. Harris is no ardent free-trader, she largely ceded the trade issue to Mr. Trump. That was a fateful misstep.
It is unclear whether another GOP candidate could have leveraged Americans’ anxieties as effectively as Mr. Trump. What is clear is that the countless indictments against Mr. Trump, and his May conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, only strengthened his aura. Two assassination attempts elevated him to near-mythical status. Even non-Trump voters were impressed by his resiliency.
Like it or not, Mr. Trump is a one-of-a-kind political figure.
He inspires awe and fealty among millions of Americans who feel disparaged and ignored by the country’s political, media and academic elites. Distrust of government, the mainstream media and “so-called experts” metastasized as COVID-19 lockdowns fuelled anger over state overreach and abuse of power. Many Democrats’ embrace of calls to “defund the police” and of an anti-racism movement that depicted the United States in white supremacist terms further steeled the resolve of Mr. Trump’s supporters and alienated moderate voters.
That Mr. Trump has tapped so successfully into this well of anger and disgust toward the elites should spark much soul-searching among, well, the elites. Blaming his popularity on his lies and the gullibility of “low-information” voters misses the point. Mr. Trump, like Trumpism itself, is not done with them yet.