Our previous post on “The Seven Reasons Kamala Harris Lost the 2024 Election” would be incomplete if we did not follow up with a companion post on why Donald Trump won. It goes without saying that elections are decided not only by the mistakes made by the losing candidate, but by the decisions the winning candidate made that turned out to be strategically shrewd.
In Donald Trump’s case, not only did Trump and his advisors make a number of clever moves that helped to neutralize Trump’s weaknesses as a candidate, but Trump’s own resilience, relentlessness, and refusal to back down – about anything – all served to strengthen his position.
Many commentators and political analysts have dissected the causes of Trump’s victory since last Tuesday, November 5. The best analysis that I’ve read so far was actually penned on October 20 – 15 days before the election – by Nate Silver of “538” and “The Silver Bulletin” fame. I urge our regular readers to take a look at Silver’s “The 24 Reasons Trump Could Win the Election” post, which pretty much called the election before it actually happened.
Greymantle finds Silver’s analysis to be both reasonable in the cold, analytical sense and astute in terms of its understanding of human nature and the role public biases play in deciding elections. My brief commentary below is influenced by Silver’s piece, but focuses on a smaller number of factors that I believe were the most decisive, including two that Silver does not mention. Greymantle views 7 factors as most critical, hence: “The Seven Reasons Donald Trump Won the 2024 Election”.
#1 DONALD TRUMP’S RESILIENCE AND RELENTLESSNESS
Donald Trump has essentially been hounded by the mainstream media and Democratic prosecutors since the day he left the White House on January 20, 2021, when his first term ended. Much, or even most, of this harassment he brought upon himself through his own actions, but it’s also true that it takes a great deal of resilience to survive a constant onslaught of legal actions, subpoenas, savagely negative press coverage, judicial attempts to dismember Trump’s business empire, physical violence against his person, and a constant stream of impudent mockery by “the creative class”.
Most human beings simply could not survive mentally under such hurricane of invective, abuse and legal assaults. The overwhelming majority of people would buckle under and probably sink into a deep depression, or even take their own lives. Instead, Trump launched another presidential campaign.
Questions or how Trump financed his campaign and his use or misuse of funds raised by donations to cover his legal expenses aside, few men or women have the sheer willpower and audacity to run a campaign for U.S. president to the finish through two grueling years. During this time, Trump was obliged to make numerous humiliating court appearances to defend himself against the variety of charges brought against him by four prosecutors in two U.S. states, plus two federal prosecutions.
It has been clear for years now that Donald Trump lacks any normal sense of shame or the kind of self-consciousness possessed by most other human beings. His audacity is well-known, but Trump’s resilience had never been tested in circumstances of this kind. That Trump made it through and won the election, even surviving an assassination attempt in June, is proof of tremendous resilience.
Most 78-year-olds spend time at the golf course or napping. Trump ran a campaign, and looked quite energetic doing so for a man his age. Greymantle believes this convinced many undecided voters of Trump’s mettle in a way his prior two campaigns in 2016 and 2020 did not.
#2 NINE YEARS OF OUTRAGEOUSNESS HAVE ACCUSTOMED THE PUBLIC TO TRUMP’S STYLE
While Trump’s wild statements, inflammatory rhetoric, strange digressions and incessant bullying and invective against his opponents were first received with shock in 2015 and 2016, nine years of shout-outs to dictators, hobnobbing with rightist militias and assorted fringe kooks, medical advice involving pouring acid into one’s body, and other extraordinary statements have exhausted the public.
Exhausted, in the sense that the public is too tired being outraged by Trump to assign much weight to each additional inflammatory or crude statement Trump makes. Americans have simply become so accustomed to Trump’s style and antics that they are no longer shocked.
The public has been desensitized to Trump, and that has worked to Trump’s advantage.
By shifting the Overton Window in his direction, Trump now controls that political wind that blows behind all candidates for public office in the U.S. As one British political historian once said of Tony Blair at his height: “He makes the political weather”. The same is true for Trump.
Kamala Harris never had the ‘weather gauge’, in the words of 19th century British naval officers. Her campaign was always sailing into the wind, while Trump’s campaign had the wind at their backs. That Trump generated most of that gale-force wind is proof enough of his media savvy.
#3 TRUMP’S CO-OPTING OF RFK JR. WAS THE STRATEGIC COUP OF 2024
Early in 2024, it looked as if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s independent, third-party campaign for U.S. President would be an insurmountable obstacle to a Trump victory, as Kennedy was attracting many of the same discontented “weird” voters, “barstool conservatives” and “Reddit Bros” that Trump had won over during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Kennedy looked like he was going to wrap up the ‘Joe Rogan‘ vote and walk away with a substantial chunk of Trump’s base.
Rather than trying to persuade Kennedy to quite the race altogether with nothing in return, Trump was shrewd enough to co-opt Kennedy when the latter’s campaign was short on cash and began running into problems with being kept off or kicked off the ballot in several key states such as New York. As Kennedy perceived the rising odds stacked against his being placed on the ballot in all 50 states, Trump sent out feelers to Kennedy that he might find an influential spot for him in a second Trump administration.
After chewing over these offers and running various scenarios through his staffers, Kennedy set up a series of meetings with Trump to talk over the offer personally. What Trump offered must have been very appealing to Kennedy. He dropped out of the race in early August shortly after the GOP convention. Mr. Trump has now offered Kennedy a cabinet-level role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, which will allow him to oversee a vast portion of the federal government and influence all medical and health policies, including vaccine research and gene therapy.
Perhaps this is what RFK Jr. wanted all along. In any event, Kennedy’s decision to bow out of the race and endorse Trump for President apparently convinced Kennedy’s supporters to switch their allegiance back to Trump under the theory that, if they were getting Kennedy and Trump as a package deal, why quibble about which man was at the top of the ticket?
An astute and timely move by Trump during the summer likely saved his campaign.
#4 THE LEGAL CASES BROUGHT AGAINST TRUMP BACKFIRED, CREATING SYMPATHY
After President Trump’s refusal to concede his loss in the 2020 election and the shock of the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s most ardent supporters, Democratic prosecutors and other elected officials felt duty-bound to bring Trump to heel. That was doubly the case after the Senate’s second impeachment trial of Trump in January 2021 ended with another acquittal.
America’s decentralized federal system of government, which gives state and local governments more power than is the case in most other industrialized nations, has much to recommend it. The lack of centralizing authority was intentional from the nation’s creation, as the Founders intended that it would act as a check against tyranny from the top.
The American system has its drawbacks, however, and these shortcomings played a pernicious role when it came to the legal cases brought against Trump since 2021. America’s federal system allowed six different prosecutors in three separate jurisdictions to bring charges against Trump at their own behest and at the urging of local voters. This legal pile-on should have finished Trump, and did cost him considerable expense and much distraction, but was ultimately counter-productive.
The American public tends to be ill-informed despite having so many news outlets at their disposal. In some ways, fewer news organs would serve them better. The multiplicity of news sources tends to introduce a great deal of extraneous opinions into the coverage of major news events, blurring the facts and meaning of high-profile events until what should be a clear story becomes cloudy.
In addition, Americans’ level of civic knowledge has declined since the 1970s, and conspiratorial thinking has grown like a weed in its place. That Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg are elected officials in separate cities, answerable to different groups of voters, was a fact that tended to be overlooked by Americans, particularly Trump’s supporters. What they saw were a group of Democratic politicians – mostly urban, Black Democratic politicians attacking their hero using in some cases novel legal theories.
The multitude of prosecutions against Trump not only was a pile-on, but it looked like a pile-on to the casual observer, lending support to Trump’s claims that ‘the system’ was persecuting him. As far as many Americans could see, and certainly believed, the prosecutions were part of a coordinated legal strategy against Donald Trump masterminded by the Biden White House.
Trump turned what would certainly have broken most other political leaders, and most other men, to his advantage. He used the legal actions to bolster his narrative of an out of control system with no accountability ‘coming after’ ordinary people to create sympathy for himself. By October 2024, a large number of Independent voters saw the situation the way Trump wanted them to see it.
#5 WARS ABROAD STOKED VOTERS’ FEARS OF A MORE DANGEROUS WORLD
Since the American debacle in Vietnam in the 1970s, Americans have viewed foreign wars, and indeed any major foreign commitment, with apprehension and suspicion. When U.S. embassy staff and troops flew out of Saigon in helicopters just ahead of the advancing North Vietnamese army in April 1975, amidst scenes of chaos, Americans felt their government had reached a low point.
The Iraq War of 2003-2011 was perceived as a second Vietnam by Americans. Despite the fact that America did not lose the Iraq War, and by most conventional measures can be said to have won it, American voters continue to view the Iraq War as one fought mainly on false pretences.
Foreign wars that affect America’s allies therefore carry a high level of anxiety for Americans. The Afghanistan situation, which turned into a 20-year commitment after the U.S. invaded the country in 2001 to root out Osama Bin-Laden and his Al-Qaeda network of terrorists, likewise brought American anxiety over foreign commitments to a fever pitch.
When President Biden pulled America out of Afghanistan in August 2021 to chaotic scenes broadly reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, it stirred up deep feelings of cynicism and disappointment among Americans with regard to their leaders that had been just below the surface for some time. That Trump had negotiated most elements of the deal that ended the American occupation seemed to be beside the point: the disastrous pull-out had occurred on Biden’s watch.
Adding to the negative feelings over Afghanistan, Russia’s launch of its war on Ukraine in 2022 and the Hamas terror attacks on Israel in 2023 – and the bloody ongoing wars that have followed – provide evidence to Americans of the United States’ increasing impotence in a more dangerous world.
Americans don’t appear to appreciate that Biden provided material support to Israel and Ukraine, but did not deploy actual troops on the ground. After years of being lied to and misled by politicians when it came to foreign sacrifices, Americans feel like throwing their hands in the air. Their attitude seems to be, ‘no more!’ They are simply out of patience.
This attitude aided Trump in his quest to regain the White House, and he certainly stoked it to his advantage. Even if he had not, the growing disorder in the world was bad optically for Biden and his vice president. Like Americans’ growing tolerance of coarseness and declining social trust, spreading global conflict was another ‘weather gauge’ that blew sharply against Harris’s campaign.
In a dangerous world, people seek protection from leaders they perceive to be strong.
#6 THE MORE AMERICANS LEARN ABOUT ‘WOKENESS’; THE MORE THEY DESPISE IT
One subject Nate Silver did not touch on in his analysis, but which Greymantle believes to have been most relevant to the outcome of the 2024 election, was the spreading awareness of ‘wokeness’ among ordinary Americans outside the West Coast and the Northeast.
Up until 2015 or, in many cases, until 2020, the overwhelming majority of Americans had not encountered the strange melange of ideas known under the moniker of ‘wokeness‘ in their daily lives, and ‘woke’ ideas were not a part of their common discourse. That changed very rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when school lockdowns upended the lives of anyone with children or grandchildren and concepts like ‘safetyism’ and ‘harm reduction’ suddenly leapt into people’s awareness.
The pandemic lockdowns also happened to coincide with, or follow shortly upon, the great intensification of the American ‘culture war’ during the first Trump presidency. The culture war has mainly been a case of the Cultural Left engaging offensively against the mainstream culture since it began in earnest in the 1970s with sex education in schools and the legalization of abortion via Roe v. Wade in 1973.
During the 2010s, the pace and intensity of the culture war was greatly accelerated by social media and the rising to power of a younger generation of activists, artists and educators who grew up steeped in various social justice ideology concepts and sought to bring these ideas into the mainstream.
Using a variety of platforms and organizations ranging from Black Lives Matter to GLAAD to a number of transgender advocacy groups, the young generation of progressives flooded mainstream society and schools with their ideas and influence campaigns between 2015 and 2020. Predictably, they have encountered widespread resistance, or what they would term a ‘backlash’ against progress.
During his first presidency, Donald Trump became the happily willing embodiment and chief spokesman for this ‘backlash’. His election loss in 2020 engendered widespread panic among conservative leaning Americans about the ‘woke mobs’ that were coming to get their children, now lacking the protection of Donald Trump, and they were not entirely mistaken in their believe.
During the Biden years, even as what many have termed ‘Peak Woke‘ has begun to fade due to exhaustion and the wilting effects of the pandemic, the activists of the 2010s have begun to entrench their power in the 2020s in primary and secondary schools, colleges, the film industry, the news media, and other powerful institutions. As they have done so, Americans in parts of the country that had not encountered ‘wokism’ prior to 2017 have experienced its effects for the first time, and the negative reaction to it has been growing.
As was the case with affirmative action in the 1980s, most Americans find that they don’t agree with the basic premises of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ or DEI, transgender rights, gender ideology, or some of the other, wilder aspects of progressive thought. The powerful right-wing media complex of podcasters, news sites, talk radio and other platforms (e.g. Fox News) have worked their hardest to fan this unease, and Greymantle believes that this anti-woke campaign has been effective.
Donald Trump and his surrogates, in addition to hammering high inflation, foreign turmoil, and the immigration mess during the campaign, hit hard at wokism and, in particular, gender ideology as taught to children in schools, as major campaign themes. This approach seemed to pay large dividends, especially among less-educated, Asia, Hispanic and some Black voters. The only voter blocks that stuck hard with Kamala Harris were educated Whites and Black women – the two groups that have been the chief proponents of wokism. Campaign 2024 can be judged an anti-woke reaction.
#7 TRUMP IS A UNIQUE KIND OF CELEBRITY POLITICIAN
Finally, Greymantle believes Donald Trump’s long-standing status as a celebrity, a status that began locally in New York City in the late 1970s and was cemented during the 1980s ‘Decade of Excess’ when Trump became a major national figure, continues to provide him a kind of media super-power that conventional politicians can’t touch, much less replicate.
Other celebrities have also run for office and occasionally achieved success — Clint Eastwood, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger being three of the most notable (and memorable) examples.
Trump’s celebrity has a unique quality to it, however. Rather than being an actor or ‘movie star’ like Reagan and Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump came to prominence as a businessman. He built tall buildings, skyscrapers, hotels and casinos. Trump didn’t just appear on television hawking goods – he was out their constructing things, negotiating deals, and employing people.
Add to Trump’s business acumen his great knack for publicity and a long track record of publishing books that explain his business philosophy and give advice to those looking to become wealthy, and you have someone who is as much a self-help guru as a corporate chieftain. Trump’s well-known “The Art of the Deal” has sold millions of copies, as have some of his other books such as “Think Big and Kick Ass”. Trump was a household name decades before he ran for office.
Donald Trump’s uniquely powerful celebrity brand in America, which loves successful businessmen in the same way the Mongols and Arabs loved great horsemen and medieval Europeans loved knights in armour, and you have someone who carries the glamour of a potent national myth with them whenever he walks into a room. Coupled with Trump’s other strengths mentioned above, this all translate into making Trump a strong candidate for office, whatever his manifold other flaws.
America will be living with him as President for another four years – at least – as a result.
Until the next time, I remain —
Greymantle
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