Trump: America’s Revolutionary

A GREAT CALM APPEARS to have descended over this vast and cantankerous nation, a great and blessed sense of relief. If the calm and the relief dissipate in the new year, after Donald Trump takes office, so be it. But for the moment, let us give thanks for an election that was conducted and tabulated without incident on the appointed day, and which concluded— Hallelujah!—within hours of the last polls closing. We do not have to wait for days, or weeks, or even, as some feared, into the new year.

Donald Trump won. He won fair and square. He won without a shadow of doubt or suspicion. He overpowered Kamala Har­ris in the Electoral College, 295-226. (Trump’s tally will rise by 17 once his victories in Arizona and Nevada are confirmed formally.) Most galling of all for the self-righteous Democrats, Trump won the popular vote nationwide—71,180,475 to 66, 251,503 (or 51 per cent-47.5 per cent). In doing so he robbed his opponents of their last vestige of dignity. Unlike in 2016, when Trump unleashed on Hillary Clinton the Mother of all Defeats, the Democrats cannot soothe themselves with the knowledge that they have a majority of the American people on their side, despite the loss of the White House. Astonishingly—and this fact made me gasp when it was pointed out on CNN in the middle of the night—Harris secured fewer votes than Joe Biden did (in 2020) in every single county in the US (those she won, and those she lost).

The nation and its citizens, as well as the watching world, will give thanks for the calm that now prevails. There will be no ‘January 6’. There will be no ruckus, no mayhem, no brouhaha, no running amok. There was an old-fashioned quality to Trump’s night of vic­tory, redolent of elections past—in the prelapsarian era before Bush vs Gore in 2000—when victory was elegant and defeat was graceful. Harris’ concession was late in coming, but when it did come, it was a credit to American democracy.

The winner of this election—in a sense far broader than the presidency itself—is Trump. Inevitably, the man himself described his win in superlative terms: “the greatest political movement of all time.” He can be forgiven, in this instance, the rollicking hyper­bole that courses through his veins. His running-mate, JD Vance, put it more accurately when he said that Trump’s was “the greatest political comeback in the history of America.” Who could argue against that? His is only the second example in American history of a president winning a second term after losing his first bid for re-election. Every American schoolboy could once have told you—as schoolboys today no longer can, since no one teaches proper his­tory in schools anymore—that the only other instance was that of Grover Cleveland, in 1892. (That made him the 22nd and 24th president; Trump is the 45th and 47th.)

Trump aside, the winners were:

JD VANCE. His smooth and cerebral side—which exists alongside a Machiavellian ability to be cutting and deceitful—brought to the “ticket” a certain educated dimension, an aura of postgradu­ate learning that complemented Trump’s demotic, folksy, foul-mouthed tendencies.

ELON MUSK. His zany, technocratic enthusiasm lit up Trump’s campaign in ways for which the Democrats were wholly unpre­pared. How on earth do you take on a man like Musk, who owns X (formerly Twitter), the most popular social-media platform in the land, which was given over to the service of Trump?

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. Yes, Trump body-snatched the GOP, hijacking it, and casting aside many of the core (Reaganite) princi­ples to which it subscribed even through its years in the wilderness under Barack Obama. Trump has remade the party into a freewheeling, populist movement with a very 21st-century understanding of patriotism and nationalism. As a party it is considerably less genteel, less elitist, less formulaic. Make no mistake, the Trump remake of the party—go on, let’s call it a revolution!—is every bit as profound as the one wrought by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The Trump Revolution in the GOP has marked the most profound cultural and civilisational shift in Ameri­can politics since Reagan’s first victory in 1980. Yet the elec­tion of Trump was different from the election of Reagan, as it marked the end of orthodox political conventions in the US and the empowerment of vast sections of Ameri­can society who had hitherto been voiceless. Trump’s first win saw the eclipse of the elites, and of a privileged, loosely technocratic, broadly patrician, subtly dynastic, often Ivy League establishment that had held unbroken sway in American politics since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

JOE BIDEN. I’m not sure if the old man is given to Schadenfreude, but he must surely look at the plight of Kamala—a woman who has contrived, somehow, to be both astonishingly lucky and profoundly luckless—and chuckle to himself with the satisfaction of a wronged man who can see his tormentors get their comeuppance. He has never liked Harris. Both he and Jill Biden, his wife, have hated her ever since she accused him of racism in the course of the Democratic primaries. Her selection as his vice president was pure identity poli­tics, or affirmative action. And he promptly saddled her with the most thankless task in American governance—supervision of the porous southern border. She made a dog’s dinner of the job, a pig’s ear, a calamitous mess. And this came back to haunt her in the battle against Trump. Call it Biden’s Revenge.

As for the losers in the election, let’s start with the most obvious:

KAMALA HARRIS. She campaigned with all the lack of convic­tion of someone who knew in her heart that the presidency was unwinnable. She was even farther to the left of Hillary Clinton, the last Democrat to come a cropper against Trump, without herself having any of Hillary’s brains, heft and political pedigree. Her strategy amounted to no more than this repeated, mewling incantation: I am not Trump. Of course she’s not. That’s why she lost. And painting him repeatedly as Hitlerian and fascist was just hysterical and silly. It allowed Trump and his supporters to dismiss her as a pearl-clutching weakling. Add to all this her breathtakingly obtuse choice of Tim Walz (Tim Who?) as her co-pilot instead of Josh Shapiro (the robust and substantial governor of Pennsylvania, a state she had to win), and you have a chronicle of a defeat foretold.

BARACK OBAMA. The former president needs to look himself in the mirror and ask: Did I do the right thing by commandeering the Democratic Party, masterminding the defenestration of Biden, and believ­ing that I have ownership of Kamala Harris? The answers have to be no, no, and no. Obama’s hubris spelled doom for Harris. Watching him campaign for her, and make racial appeals on her behalf, en­sured that fewer “undecided” Americans would cross over to the Democrats. It’s time for him to retreat gracefully. As we say in India, he has reached the age of sanyasa: it’s time for him to renounce tem­poral ambition and retreat, like an ascetic, into the nearest forest.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. How can this once-proud institu­tion recover from its inability to defeat a man as flawed and dis­concerting as Trump? In fact, how can this once-proud institution recover from its inability to find someone—anyone—better than Harris, possibly the weakest, most vacuous, candidate available to the party, against a consummate bruis­er like Trump? Nothing less than a wholesale reconstitution of the party will save it from being in the wilderness for the next generation.

THE ‘MAINSTREAM’ MEDIA. I feel almost apologetic when I flog this tired, wheezing old horse, but flog it I must. The orthodox, metropolitan-cosmopolitan American media is an elitist disgrace, whose editors and journal­ists showed once again their incomprehension of—and contempt for—the American people.

Barack ObamaDonald TrumpJoe BidenKamala Harrispolitical campaignUS Elections 2024