A friend sent me this article in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols:
Trump Voters Got What They Wanted
Those who expect that Donald Trump will hurt others, and not them, are likely to be unpleasantly surprised.
I love the article because it reveals that most of Trump’s opponents such as the author want to live in delusion that they are so much wiser and morally superior to Trump voters, and that Trump’s appeal is just demagoguery when in reality Trump 100% won on substance both times (restrict immigration, shift trade policy, avoid forever wars) and he lost on substance one time (he was too chaotic). I love the article’s pious talk about the “rule of law” when Trump’s opposition had to pass laws (in New York State) to pursue lawfare against Trump because they didn’t trust the voters to make a choice on Trump. As long as Trump’s haters refuse to face the reality of his appeal, they will be constantly humiliated by life.
People who follow Mark Halperin knew for months that Trump was going to win the battleground states as private polling (far superior and more expensive than the public polls) on both sides of politics showed that.
Halperin is in the center, I think he’s a bit like my memory of Aussie journalist Paul Kelly, not a partisan and not a Trump supporter, but he goes to the effort of understanding things from different points of view, an effort far beyond Tom Nichols. The Atlantic only publishes anti-Trump articles, hundreds of them, no pro-Trump articles are permitted there. It’s a silo for Trump haters. People who live in that bubble get humiliated by life.
Halperin wrote:
1. As I wrote a few days ago on http://foxnews.com, the Democratic Party, lacking clear agreement about why Trump won and lacking an obvious once-in-a-generation talent to lead them back, is going to be at Trump’s mercy for a good long while.
2. Trump’s government will be filled with a lot of senior officials who will reassure Wall Street, foreign capitals, and a lot of Trump haters (at least the ones with open minds).
3. Trump will at the start have an enormous amount of influence over Congress, from leadership elections to the legislative agenda.
4. The Dominant Media won’t come close to taking responsibility for their role in helping Trump win, won’t fire those whose bias and incompetence has been on display for as long as a decade, won’t take the steps necessary to understand the Trump movement, and won’t reorient for the next four years in any meaningful way.
5. None of the Democrats who some pined for in 2024 to be their presidential nominee will play a significant role in trying to shape the party or the nation.
6. When honest political scientists study the dimensions of Trump’s win, they will realize that Trump’s remaking of the Republican Party in 2016 (turning it into a white working-class party) was nothing compared to what happened this time – turning it into a Black, Hispanic, white, young, independent working-class party.
7. Trump will, in fact, end the Ukraine war, safeguard Israel’s security, increase energy production, decrease regulations, cut taxes, control the Mexico border, conduct a mass deportation, and change a myriad of social policies.
8. The remarkable achievement of Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita will be adequately appreciated in some quarters, but not in others.
9. As already predicted, we will now see the largest mental health crisis in American history, as tens of millions of Americans – and many of the nation’s liberal cultural institutions, including Hollywood – can’t handle the truth about what happened and why.
10. The Lincoln Project leaders will do even less soul searching than the newsroom denizens of the Washington Post and New York Times.
11. The stories of how Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the pasts of Harris and Doug Emhoff, the coverup of Joe Biden’s loss of mental acuity, and how the attempts to keep Trump off the ballot, lawfare, and other anti-democratic efforts aimed at stopping Trump ironically backfired will only be told if the right people get the right book deals.