By Kenneth Tiven
Polling in the final months of the campaign suggested it was a very close election. Because of Number ID most people will not answer a call from an unknown number. So, pollsters talk mostly to lonely people. Donald Trump’s edge over his opponent Vice-President Kamala Harris didn’t fully surface. As the Democrat’s candidate, she had just four months to make her case for why she and the man she replaced, President Joe Biden, have brought the nation forward after the insurrection and turmoil Trump had initiated in the 60 days between losing the vote and leaving office. This broke the tradition and long history of peaceful transfers of power.
Trump’s 2024 campaign emphasized turmoil. Positive attitudes about inspiration and diversity lost out. His election puts males and patriarchy back in the homes and behaviour of America on a multitude of issues. All seven so-called battleground states were won by Trump, despite intense efforts in people and money spent there by Democrats. Trump won both the popular vote and electoral college vote. Only 15 states went for Harris, mostly New England and California and the West Coast. The map is very red across the middle and southern United States. A conservative US Supreme Court which eliminated a national right to abortion and gave a president immunity from prosecution for anything done in office is now poised to go further, faster, to dismantle the federal government regulations which attempt to protect American health and safety and establish business fair play.
The vulgarity and viciousness of the past few months of campaign rally rage was absent as Trump gave his victory speech, vowing he will lead the “golden age of America” after launching the “greatest political movement of all time”. “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’ve made history for a reason tonight. We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible,” he added to cheers from the crowd.
In her concession speech the day after the election, Harris said: “I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it, but we must accept the results of this election. Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. At the same time, in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God. My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign—the fight: the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.”
The nation’s chance to elect a smart and well-organized woman as president fell short. But this daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, both of them immigrants to the USA, has inspired a generation of young Americans about the possibilities that are ahead. Fact and fiction have merged into a hardened set of beliefs and slogans which Trump reiterates consistently. However, he often changes his mind, either from forgetting what he believed or from a new round of advisor pressure. Election results giving Trump the presidency, the Senate and probably the House bury an understanding of America nurtured by both political parties. Peter Baker’s analysis in The New York Times stated: “The assumption that Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states.”
He gained the White House in 2015 on a quirky, one-off Electoral College win. This magazine questioned his sense of consensus management skill as a component of leadership in a diverse nation. His disdain for security briefings and work before lunch reflected his often fake-it-until-you make-it approach to a situation. He may not have changed, but the nation has, with further reshaping guaranteed by another four years. Transformation will play out globally, leading to realignments, especially given Trump’s regard for authoritarian leaders in Russia, China, Hungary and India. Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites, education and diversity proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign descended into truly vulgar attacks on Harris and women. His audience seemed to enjoy that mean streak, perhaps because for men it reflected their own thinking. But Trump did take advice to abandon his earlier willingness to fight for a nationwide abortion ban, recognizing that having appointed a Supreme Court majority to overturn Roe vs Wade would keep women supporters on side.
While tens of millions of voters still cast ballots against Trump, he once again tapped into a sense among many others that the country they imagined once existed was slipping away, under siege economically, culturally and demographically. To counter that, his voters ratified the return of a brash 78-year-old champion willing to upend convention and take radical action even if it offends sensibilities or violates old standards. Any misgivings about their chosen leader were shoved aside, even knowing a sense of loyalty is measured by convenience. For the first time in US history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to “be a dictator on Day 1” and vowed to exact “retribution” against his adversaries.
Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do. Will he use military force against his political opponents? Will he fire thousands of career public servants and deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups? Will he crush the independence of the Department of Justice and use the government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad? Will he turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters? Knowing he said he would do these things, the voters said yes. This election is a permission slip for Trump and his Vice-President, JD Vance to do things without respect to good judgment, tradition or law. Leaders in Ukraine, China, Russia, North Korea, India and the European Union now must recalibrate how they deal with the USA.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said, “Trump has to understand that problems we face in the USA, are now so big and hard they can only be fixed together, not by adversarial negotiations. Without a change in his behaviour, the joke won’t just be on the rest of us, but on his supporters as well. With this amazing comeback, we can now accept that the “Law of Unintended Consequences’ has been had at work for the republicans. Consider that after a bullet came within an inch or two of killing him at a July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, his favourability ratings jumped to a level higher than they ever were during the 2016 and 2020 elections.”
In the end, it was literally a case of fear trumping hope.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels