The biggest f-you in American history

Last night, a political earthquake shook America. Donald Trump – a man whose political obituary had been written many times – won a decisive victory over Kamala Harris. His projected 312 to 226 electoral-college votes sealed a commanding victory. Trump’s Republicans also gained majority control of the Senate and are expected to do the same in the House of Representatives, handing them an opportunity to shape the political landscape for years to come.

Trump’s victory represents the most amazing comeback in American political history. Not since Grover Cleveland in 1892 has a president been re-elected after losing office. It is also more impressive than Richard Nixon’s political rebound to take the White House in 1968.

It’s hard to overstate the weight of opposition Trump had to overcome to achieve this victory. He has faced multiple investigations and was impeached twice by Congress. He was declared politically dead after the ‘January 6’ Capitol riot. He’s been charged with four criminal indictments and convicted on 34 felony counts in Manhattan. He faced two assassination attempts in the space of two months.

Democrats have always claimed that they weren’t pursuing a ‘lawfare’ campaign against Trump, just applying the law in a non-partisan way. But it was unprecedented to undertake a massive, banana-republic effort to jail a political opponent. This move totally backfired on Democrats, as it made Trump a sympathetic victim of a repressive state and consolidated Republican support behind him.

Now, with Trump’s resounding victory, a majority of the American public is effectively saying they judge the Democrats’ lawfare charges to be so much trumped-up bullshit, an abuse of state power. It’s a triumph of democracy over an overreaching legal system.

Trump’s win is a giant ‘f-you’ to all who sought to declare him illegitimate. And to the condescension and hysteria of the Democrats more broadly. As their arrogant yard signs read: ‘Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously.’ Kamala Harris called him a ‘fascist’. The media, who have been consistent backers of the Harris campaign, echoed the ‘Trump is Hitler’ message. In reality, this name-calling only expressed Harris’s desperation, as she sensed she was losing, and indicated her unwillingness to try to convince voters with policy arguments.

The Democrats’ demonisation campaign was not only targeted at the man himself – by implication, if not explicitly, it also extended to his supporters. Attendees at Trump rallies were labelled ‘Nazis’, ‘semi-fascists’, ‘garbage’. But to the Harris campaign’s apparent surprise, it turns out insulting the electorate isn’t a winning strategy. It’s as if Harris and her team learned nothing from the backlash to Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ slur ahead of her loss to Trump in 2016.

The unsubtle message from Harris and the Democrats was a threat: dare to vote for Trump and we’ll denounce you as bigot, a person deserving of social opprobrium and ostracism. Barack Obama sought to shame black men into voting for Harris, suggesting that they were motivated by sexism (rather than, say, their view of which candidate would improve their economic prospects). But, in this election, the Democrats’ threat lost its power. A majority of voters defiantly stood up and said: ‘I don’t care what you call me, I’m voting for Trump.’

How Trump won was as interesting as the victory itself. It blew apart the establishment’s denunciations of him as a racist. He significantly increased his vote among groups traditionally associated with the Democrats – including blacks, Hispanics and Jews. As the NBC exit polls show, Hispanic men supported Trump on election day over vice-president Kamala Harris by a 10-point margin. The media predicted that Puerto Ricans would punish Trump for an insult comic’s dumb joke at his recent Madison Square Garden rally. But on election day, many Puerto Ricans backed Trump, as in Osceola County in Florida, which has a significant Puerto Rican population. Trump’s ability to forge a multiracial coalition was a repudiation of the Democrats’ ridiculous charge of Nazism. As the meme says of Trump, he is the ‘Worst. Nazi. Ever.’

The Democrats’ arrogance was astounding. They pretended that Joe Biden was in robust health, despite obvious signs of his deterioration. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, they dumped him and handed the nomination to Harris – with no primary contest. Before this, Harris was considered a liability, but afterwards, assisted by a pliant media, they pretended that she was an amazing political athlete. All along the Democrats assumed that voters would not notice.

Harris was a terrible candidate, running one of the most lacklustre campaigns in modern times. She could not distance herself from Biden, nor defend their joint record in office. About two-thirds of voters said the country was on the wrong track. One of Trump’s most effective slogans was a very simple one: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ Harris had no answer to this.

Trump polled better on the economy, but his source of support was much broader than that. His No1 issue was the wave of illegal immigration. The Biden-Harris open border has brought chaos and violent crime to cities around the country. But the issue of illegal immigration also touched on a fundamental issue. As many voters said, if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.

Transgenderism was the sleeper issue of the campaign. Trump’s main TV ad, played over and over, highlighted Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded surgery for trans prisoners. It concluded with the slogan: ‘Kamala is for they / them – President Trump is for you.’ Democrats’ push on so-called trans rights, such as letting boys compete in girls’ sports, made them appear as the crazy party. In particular, their woke extremism repelled many black and Hispanic working-class voters, not just rural white workers.

Trump certainly has his flaws, and we don’t know exactly what he and the Republicans have in store. But this re-emergence of class politics and rejection of the Democrats’ woke identity politics is something to cheer.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.