A series of processes in US politics that had long been in motion clicked finally, solidly into place in 2024. First and most obvious: any argument that Donald Trump, the instincts he panders to, and the forces that animate him, were mere aberrations that could be weathered and outlasted before the resumption of normality was conclusively repudiated. His ringing victory in November confirms our era as his era.
It was already clear by then that the Republican Party has contorted itself in his image, shedding any vestige of the party it was in June 2015 when he first descended that golden escalator at Trump Tower and started accusing Mexico of exporting their rapists to the US. The question follows: to what extent has that process of mutation afflicted the Democrats? And how much of what happened in 2024 was simply the continuation of a process the party was undergoing regardless?
In response to Trump’s gelatinous and dreamily fascistic musings, it is understandable that the Democrats pitched themselves as the smooth party of the establishment. What is baffling is the way they went about that, proudly claiming the endorsement of war mongers like former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, and former Reagan staffers.
This move, aimed at picking off those few disenchanted Republicans who hadn’t already submitted to Trump’s reality, achieved nothing except to make the left wingers voting for Harris through gritted teeth over issues like Gaza feel even more stupid than they already did. It was part of the same burrowing spiral, the half-smart self-contradictions that afflicted the Harris campaign throughout; reminding people what a fascist threat to democracy Trump and his allies were and promising the other side a “seat at the table” in the same breath. Meanwhile every Trump voter I spoke to, while in the US covering the election for Crikey, mentioned “getting out of these foreign wars” as a motivation.
To understand anything at all of American politics — and I don’t claim to understand a lot — you have to start with a few points. First, depending on their media consumption (and by extension, their voting intention), people in the US occupy realities that are unrecognisable to one another. Sure everyone in the world is subject to that siloing of reality to one extent or another, but America’s explicitly partisan major networks achieve something else entirely.
In August, MSNBC ran a piece headed “Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion are on Kamala Harris’ side — that’s bad news for Trump”, insisting that “to say Harris isn’t struggling is an understatement. She is thriving.” The network (and others) also ran with the news that six former contestants of Trump’s show The Apprentice had written an open letter endorsing Harris. This magical thinking, this comfort as substantial and nourishing as candy floss.
Then, on election night, MSNBC contributor Joy Reid argued that Harris’ campaign was “flawless” because “she had Queen Latifah … she had every prominent celebrity voice, she had the Taylor Swifties, she had the Beyhive.” If the Democrats are to learn from 2024 what they failed to learn from 2016 (and it seems that they are determined not to, again) the transcript of Reid’s commentary should be printed out and hung on the wall with a giant cross through it.
Because the other point, the place you have to depart from, in understanding anything that happens in US politics — from the election of Trump to the folk hero status accorded to alleged UnitedHealth CEO assassin Luigi Mangione — is to realise that, to vast swathes of the country’s population, the richest and most powerful nation in human history is a failed state.
The Trump voters I spoke to never expressed any real warmth towards Trump and no pleasure as his rhetoric — they just hoped that, out of spite as much as anything, Trump might pull them from the desert of possibility they felt they’d been abandoned in. That they are almost certainly mistaken in this hope doesn’t make it any less sincere — and Katy Perry’s flat take on “The Greatest Love of All” was not going to change it.
The critique of where the Democrats — who are deeply flawed and misguided, but essentially rational — went wrong is the easy part. Fighting through the miasma of Trump’s chaotic, exhausting rhetoric and style to get to what his second term looks like is difficult. Given his temperamental inability to stay civil with his colleagues long enough to actually govern, there is an argument that it won’t be as bad as he promises — will his frat-boy road movie pairing of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s succeed in stripping US$2 trillion from America’s already groaning public services? Will Kash Patel truly close down the FBI and reopen it as “a museum of the deep state”? It seems unlikely.
The real terror is the irrevocable stuff that could happen very quickly — the “dictator for day” stuff, the “One rough hour, and I mean real rough” for “criminals” that Trump promises. We know from experience that these are promises on which, directly or indirectly, he can deliver.
Can America survive four more years of Trump? How do the Democrats turn themselves around? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
