Grappling With the Catastrophe
The voters wanted change, and they’re going to get it.
IT ISN’T A HARD CHOICE, we said. On one side was a candidate who, whatever her particular policy predilections, would abide by the Constitution and laws of the United States and accept the outcome of elections. On the other was a candidate refusing to accept a 2024 defeat even as memories of his attempted coup in 2020 remain fresh; someone vowing to punish the “enemy within;” and promising that mass deportations will be “bloody.”
That was what we meant by democracy being on the line.
But it seems that the anti-democrat was preferred, not just by a plurality, but by an actual majority of our fellow citizens. How to process this?
Some are coping by pointing out that when an incumbent president is as unpopular as Joe Biden, it’s a near impossibility for his party to retain the White House. Perhaps no Democrat could have escaped the Biden undertow, but it was particularly challenging for his vice president. As Andrew Egger observed, Harris “needed to run away from Biden to escape the voters’ wrath at his term. But she also needed to run toward him as her only defense against Republican charges that she was too far to the left . . .”
As to why Biden was so unpopular, some of us (myself included) wrongly attributed it mostly to his age. But exit polls suggest that the economy and the border were also anvils shackled to his—and then Kamala Harris’s—ankles. Though the economy may be, as the Economist recently reported, the “envy of the world,” and while by many metrics (employment, investment, productivity, wealth creation) things are going remarkably well, inflation was the overriding indicator for voters, and not just in the United States. As David Dayen of the American Prospect noted, 2024 saw half the world’s population head to the polls, and “with a few notable exceptions, and to the extent that those elections were free and fair, the result has been largely the same: Virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world has lost.”
Could Harris have done a better job of blunting the inflation issue? In 2012, the economy had not yet fully recovered from the great recession of 2008-2009. In his reelection bid, Barack Obama shifted blame for the lackluster performance backwards towards George W. Bush. The economy was in a ditch, Bill Clinton told the Democratic Convention on Obama’s behalf, and “no president” could have pulled it out completely in four years, but Obama was on the right track.
Perhaps Harris would have been well-advised to tell a similar story about inflation—that it peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and has been dropping steeply since then to a rate of 2.4 percent in September 2024, which is below where it stood in January 2020. Would that have worked? Maybe. Then again, recessions are not as politically lethal as inflation. They affect only a portion of the electorate, whereas inflation affects everyone. And while wages did catch up to and surpass the inflation rate in February 2023, people tend to think their raises were attributable to their own good performance, while inflation is entirely laid at the feet of elected officials.
As for the border, how could Harris separate herself from Biden? Should she have declared that Biden’s approach was a mistake that she would correct once in office? That’s a dicey proposition politically—even more so when one remembers that she was entrusted at the beginning of the administration with trying to stem migration flows to the United States.
Why would voters upset about the border choose a reformed dove over an aggressive hawk? She might have had a rule-of-law argument—that the Congress must reform asylum law and until they do, the president lacks the power to address the issue. But when Biden imposed executive orders in June, dramatically reducing border crossings, he vitiated that case and inadvertently prompted the question of why the administration hadn’t moved sooner. (For the record, the successful demonization of immigrants and immigration is both a scandal and a self-inflicted wound that we will pay dearly for in years to come when we lack home health aides, truck drivers, nurses, home builders, farm laborers, meat processors, and other taxpayers.)
According to this coping mechanism, the voters were in a sour mood (just consult the right track/wrong track polls) and did what voters always do: punish the incumbent by voting for the change candidate. Nothing more to see here.
But those of us who see a second Trump presidency as a hinge moment of history—a fateful departure from what made us a great nation—there is a great deal more to see here. To follow Trump’s behavior closely is to feel that this election is not like any other. This outcome is not just suboptimal (as is every election in which your preferred candidate loses) but unthinkable. With this vote, Americans are turning their backs on basic decency, the founding documents, and the social contract. This lying cretin was seen a few days ago pantomiming fellatio on a microphone. It’s not as if his policy chops somehow counterbalance his vulgarity, cruelty, and self-absorption. His campaign promises consist of ludicrous proposals to magically balance the budget and eliminate the income tax through tariffs, to round up and deport 11 million or more people, and to solve foreign conflicts through his supposed power of intimidation (even as he contradicts this by constantly abjuring war).
The voters have chosen to elevate (for a second time) a cartoon character to the highest office in the land. From that perch, he will close down the federal cases against himself; pardon the January 6th “hostages” or “political prisoners” or whatever he’s calling them these days; appoint a series of toadies, fantasists, and low-lives to head the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Justice, and other agencies; and then set about firing most of the capable, responsible civil servants in the government to replace them with the likes of Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, Boris Epshteyn, and other loyal goblins.
Trump often derides the United States as a Third World country. Now he will start to transform us into one.
To be sure, many of the people who voted for Trump were not voting for what they will get. And still, it’s their fault for not doing their duty to shun him.
Perhaps the voters have never prioritized democracy, the rule of law, or fair play. Perhaps they’ve always simply voted their pocketbooks. Either way, this is an elite failure of the first order. The opinion shapers have signally failed to perform their function. In a healthy polity, it falls to entities like political parties, churches, newspaper editorial boards, radio hosts, business executives, and news analysts to shape public opinion, not follow it. Our elites failed to protect us. They found reasons, for their own advancement, to normalize Trump. If not for the excusers and explainers; if not for the whataboutism at places like the Wall Street Journal and National Review; if not for the craven capitulation of Wall Street wizards and Silicon Valley prima donnas, if not for the cowardice of 95 percent of elected Republicans, ordinary voters would not have felt comfortable voting for a clown with a flamethrower.
That clown has no idea how to bring down prices. His tariffs will only send them higher. Though he knows how cruel and unjust an effort to deport millions of people will be, he has no idea how damaging it will prove to the economy and national morale. He has no plan to stop the war in Ukraine except to force Kyiv to submit, which will send an unmistakable signal of weakness to China and other adversaries. And he has zero concern about drastically increasing our already dangerous levels of national debt.
If he succeeds in imposing tariffs that spark inflation and a trade war; if his deportations, firings, abuse of the justice system, corruption of law enforcement, and degradation of the health care system cause America’s quality of life to decline, what then? Will the voters do what voters always do and vote for the change candidate next time? Perhaps. Or will the elites who greased the skids for Trump’s second election also excuse and explain away every failure as the work of the “deep state” or “saboteurs”? We are about to find out.