Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during an election night event at the West Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Nov. 6.JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
“Some rise by sin,” wrote Shakespeare in Measure for Measure. “And some by virtue fall.”
In her devastating loss to Donald Trump, Kamala Harris might take some solace from the thought. Noble by comparison, she watched as American voters defiantly turned to their sinner and made him a spectacular winner.
Democrats and their elites thought it would be an election about character. It wasn’t. They thought voters would realize what a threat to democracy and decency and morality the convicted felon Mr. Trump was and recoil. They didn’t.
Instead, they embraced him and his depravities. They gave him the keys to the kingdom, a mandate to do what he wants, to exercise, as he termed it, “extreme power.”
What a commentary on the values of 21st century Americans this election became. What a commentary on how those values have been corrupted. And what a commentary it was on the political wizardry of Donald Trump. He showed he could read the American id better than anyone, detect the prejudices of the people, and manipulate them.
Mr. Trump didn’t just win. He conquered. He battered the Democrats in the swing states and won the popular vote. His Republicans won the Senate and maintained control of the House.
His achievement is stunning. First he took over the Republican Party, swallowed it whole and changed it completely – changed it to a working class populist party; changed it to a party opposed to free trade; changed it to a party that dealt with dictators.
Now with his sweeping victory, he has so much unchecked power that he has the country at his whims.
He was thought to be so vulnerable. And how could it be otherwise, given Jan. 6, given his criminal charges and conviction, given his being found liable for sexual abuse, given how so many fellow Republicans who worked at his side denounced him as ignorant, as a fascist replica?
But rather than vulnerable, Mr. Trump proved himself once again to be indestructible. After losing in 2020 he only got stronger. With his transgressions his favourability ratings rose.
The election was won on his terms and his terms alone.
Political strategists thought he was making a big mistake by not broadening his appeal beyond his base, by not reaching out, by promising to take revenge against the enemies within, by vowing mass deportations, by catering to bigotry, by ignoring calls to appeal to women voters, by proposing to erect a giant tariff wall.
Hardly anyone thought he ran a good campaign, only Mr. Trump himself. As noted by Senator Marco Rubio, what he did was crush identity politics.
Kamala Harris’s version of identity politics didn’t work. She didn’t run a bad campaign. She was a forceful presence on the hustings who took down Mr. Trump in the one debate they had. He chickened out of facing her in another.
But she faced a population rife with discontent, with three-quarters saying in early polls that the country was on the wrong track. Those headwinds would have made it daunting for any Democratic candidate.
Moreover, there was the obvious handicap that few talked about openly; her being a woman and a woman of colour. It ran up against Mr. Trump’s white male nationalism and anti-immigrant hysteria.
It was thought that, given the abortion issue, given the insults directed at childless women from J.D. Vance, that an enormous women’s turnout would make the gender gap work to Ms. Harris’s advantage. It didn’t materialize.
She ran up against what everybody does against Mr. Trump.
His shamelessness. There was no use going after him as a bald-faced liar because he had normalized lying so much that it was no longer news. She couldn’t benefit from his vulgarity and obscenities because he was speaking the language of many in the working class.
She was on the defensive on the southern border crisis, on the economy, on transgender issues. The climate crisis offered potential for the Democrats given Mr. Trump’s denialism, but she didn’t take advantage. By and large, the Democrats’ advertising was not as effective as the Republicans who benefitted from Elon Musk turning X into a Trump propaganda machine.
The big club that Ms. Harris wielded was the charge that her opponent was an authoritarian bully with a disdain for American democratic norms.
What the voting showed is that Americans don’t really care about that as they once did. They’re so down on the status quo, on what democracy has served up, that they decided to risk putting someone in power who would tear it down.
They handed Donald Trump a wrecking hammer and a mandate to use it.