Why Trump won – The Atlantic

Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that earned him a return trip to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was blatantly on display in the United States last few weeks of the campaign. But Trump consistently delivered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration with the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical. Trump, for example, promised to both stoke inflation and impose massive tariffs, a combination that virtually all economists agree is impossible. The mass deportation that Trump has promised would also likely drive up prices, rather than calm the economy. But in a country where about three quarters of Americans think things are going in the wrong direction; a promise to resolve matters was powerful.

David Frum: Trump won. What now?

Trump is perhaps the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers included my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s attitude and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal immigrants. But for those who fall under Stephen Miller’s rubric: “America is for Americans and only for Americans,” Trump promised a way out.

“We are going to help our country heal,” Trump said in his remarks early this morning. “We are going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we made history tonight for a reason, and the reason will be just that.

You can compare that to the message of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was outwardly more hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps irreparable flaw.

Read: The night they weren’t prepared for

Harris received praise for her positive campaign message, especially in the early weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she became the nominee. Biden had warned somberly for months about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking — explicit. “We are not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative response, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become noticeably conservativebut it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted by the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take the economic pain of inflation seriously. In its first two years, the Biden administration focused solely on stimulating and restructuring the post-COVID economy, treating inflation more as a passing annoyance than a long-term danger. But it also seems to have concluded that there was no right answer to inflation. The administration argued in frustration that inflation was a global trend caused by COVID, pointing out that inflation in the US had fallen faster than in comparable countries, and that the US economy was doing better than any other. This was all true and also politically useless. You can’t convince people to feel better with statistics.

David A. Graham: The Democrats are now America’s conservative party

In theory, Harris’s mid-summer switch to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris struggled to create distance from Biden. When she was given the opportunity to do so, she hesitated. The hosts arrived at the beginning of October The view asked her what she would have done differently than the president, and she replied, “There’s nothing that comes to mind when it comes to – and I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have had an impact, the work that we’ve done. ” Republicans were thrilled and made it a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it is not clear whether Harris could have made a more radical change. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbents in recent elections. Her coalition meant that she could not wage an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign even if she had been inclined to do so. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters made a very far left move on the economy impossible, although past campaigns also provide no clear evidence that this would have been a winner either. Moreover, the Democrats had good empirical evidence that what they had done to manage the economy was very successful. They just said no politics case.

In a bitter twist for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes. If he really tries, or succeeds, to quickly deport millions of people or impose 60 percent tariffs, he will drive up inflation and destroy the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may well be. temper that. Having clearly promised to solve the problem and overcome his enemies, he can now declare a quick victory.