Why the 2024 Election Was Defined by “Crazy S–t After More Crazy S–t”

On a frigid morning in Iowa last January, when some in the Republican party could still delude themselves into believing their party could be taken away Donald Trump I asked a woman who had voted for him twice why she was supporting him now Nikki Haley in the Republican primaries. “Chaos follows him,” she said explained during one of the former South Carolina governor’s events, held at a brunch spot in suburban Des Moines.

It was not a new observation, and – in its passive construction – it made Trump seem like a victim of the chaos rather than its source. But it would prove to be just as good a framework for his quest to return to power: chaos has reigned in the months since, in this election year like no other. “It’s just more crazy shit, after more crazy shit, after more crazy shit,” the Democratic strategist said Rebecca Pearcey recently presented it to me.

Crazier than normal? Well, America is a very strange place, so strangeness is often a hallmark of elections. But the last three, with Trump as the candidate, have been particularly tumultuous: in 2016 there was the shock of his initial rise, with its daily barrage of scandals; in 2020, the election took place against the backdrop of a pandemic and civil unrest, culminating in a MAGA uprising; and now, in 2024, the race featured Trump’s felony conviction, two apparent assassination attempts on him, the departure of his incumbent rival and the emergence of a new contender who – in a three-month sprint to the finish – seemed to make him even more unhinged than he normally is.

“The New Normal,” Wisconsin Rep Mark Pocan told me on the phone last week: “is ‘not normal.’”

And a central question hanging over this race as it enters its final day is: Will the election be a continuation — and perhaps even an acceleration — of the past decade of Trump tumult? Or would the country finally, like Kamala Harris put it in the closing message of her campaign last week, would begin to “turn the page on the drama and conflict” of the past decade?

It’s hard to say. After all, while Trump himself has been the most obvious cause of the disorder, his rise as a serious political force came about as a result of institutional dysfunction and social erosion that preceded his ride down the golden escalator in 2015. That’s part of the reason the feeling of fear has persisted Joe Biden‘s presidency: He may have succeeded in calming our politics after the endless noise of the Trump years, but that only seems to have made it easier to hear the tinnite murmur of disillusionment that was already there.

“It’s just depressing,” said one student told me at a small rally in Wisconsin in April, when Biden touted his plan for student loan relief at a technical college in Madison. The student was referring to the cold reality of American foreign policy – ​​as evidenced by the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza, which would become the subject of larger and more heated protests on campus over the spring – but the sentiment also seemed to reflect a broader frustration with the way our government sometimes fails to deliver on the high values ​​it espouses.

Trump has made a political career out of exploiting that divide and convincing a large number of disaffected Americans that the answer to the flaws and imperfections of our systems is to burn them down. He started numerous fires during his presidency, inflicting burns on the public and political norms. But the nation was not consumed because enough members of his party were willing to throw buckets of water on the flames. The difference between now and 2016, or even 2020, is that the Republican Party has become a party of political arsonists, those who spent Biden’s term dousing our institutions with gasoline and trying to hand Trump a pack of matches.

That unit was featured at the Republican National Convention in July. Trump was already planning to enter Milwaukee as some kind of conquering hero, having prevailed over what supporters saw as his political persecution — a 34-felony conviction in a hush-money case — to become the frontrunner after a disastrous Biden debate performance. But in their eyes he was elevated to martyr status after he was wounded in a shooting during one of his rallies in Pennsylvania just two days before the kick-off for his nominating party. At the beginning of the week, supporters wore shirts that read: “I VOTE FOR THE CONDEMNED PARTY.” By the end, many had added an accessory: a white bandage over their right ear, like the one Trump wore when he made his grand entrance at the Fiserv Forum.

It was a perfect summation of Trumpism: during the day, the convention had a carnival-like quality, and among many of its supporters there was a nihilistic, it’s just a joke anyway. But when they gathered for the evening’s programming, the arena was alive with a dark energy. Trumpworld had promised a softer, more unifying former president in the aftermath of the attempt on his life; instead, he seemed even more openly fueled by resentment, and his supporters seemed even more agitated by it. At Trump’s first RNC as a presidential candidate, Ted Cruz— once a bitter rival — told delegates to “vote their conscience,” even if it meant defying the man GOP voters chose as their nominee; Eight years later, Cruz practically dismissed Trump’s candidacy as a divine decree. “Thanks to God Almighty for protecting President Trump,” Cruz said, “and for turning his head on Saturday when the shot was fired.”

Trump would leave Milwaukee with the wind at his back. His party was energized, while Democrats were in disarray not only over disagreements over internal policies, but also over their candidate, who spent all of his 81 years in a debate with Trump and subsequent damage control efforts. “The morale of the caucus,” said one Democrat put it during those dog days “is at an all-time low.”

How quickly things would change. Days after the RNC concluded, Biden bowed to pressure from party leaders, dropped his re-election bidand supported his vice president.

This was in late July, well past the point that many Biden supporters and some experts predicted would be too late in the process to switch candidates. There was no real precedent for such a dramatic move, they warned. And besides, they argued, Harris was not popular enough or politically skilled enough to lead the party, especially since there was so little time to get an operation off the ground. In the most compelling argument against Biden leaving the race: The New Yorker‘S Jay Caspian Kang had written that to combat Trump’s “chaos,” it “might be better to present the most stable and known option.”