Member-only story
Why Trump Won
Some real “post-truth”: maybe it’s all just theater!
Trump won. Judging from the newsfeeds I consult daily, including my Medium feeds, you’d think the world is coming to an end. Trump, they say, is an existential threat!
Wouldn’t it be more useful to ask, why Trump won? He won the popular vote, after all, not just the Electoral College vote.
Because more American voters think he’ll do better with the economy, with inflation, and with immigration, than Harris would have. Countless polls have said as much. Voters are indicating they don’t care about the “34 felony convictions” or other cases pending.
Trump ran on a “populist” view of the economy which puts aside (government) numbers and focuses on the average Americans’ day-to-day experience struggling to keep the lights on, food on their tables, and a roof over their heads during the worst inflation since the 1970s.
Harris ran on — Come to think of it, not much, besides opposition to Trump, women’s “reproductive rights” (i.e., the “right” to end the life of an unborn child) and “trans rights.” This last means abandoning everything we know, or used to know, biologically about why men are men and women are women — and if my saying that triggers you, that’s a sign of how lost in the weeds of “post-truth” you are, Ms. Progressive. So don’t talk about Trumpers.
Regale us about “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” all you want, a second Trump term was the aggregate judgment of the American electorate. The people spoke. Democracy, to the extent it actually exists (I have my doubts), sent its “defenders” packing.
This is admittedly superficial. Let’s take a deeper dive into what just happened.
Bernie Sanders and “Populism.”
Bernie Sanders’s scathing critique of how Democrats ran this campaign, and how they’ve been doing things for at least three decades now, is worth hearing.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he told us.
“First it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and black workers as well. While the…