- Heather Cox Richardson summarizes;
- Frank Bruni on the running theme that most voters don’t pay attention to the big picture;
- RFK Jr and the role of disinformation, perhaps the worst plague of the 21st century;
- More about who we are and the illiberal trend around the world;
- And how Trump believers feel validated: God is on their side! Keep smart people out of Daddy’s cabinet! Impose “rough justice” on anchors and outlets that criticized Trump; how prosecutors deserve execution; how women are property; how Jack Smith should be imprisoned.
To cut through the opinionated commentaries about what happened in this week’s election, here’s historian Heather Cox Richard’s very matter-of-fact account.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, 6 Nov 2024: November 6, 2024
Yesterday, November 5, 2024, Americans reelected former president Donald Trump, a Republican, to the presidency over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. As of Wednesday night, Trump is projected to get at least 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with two Republican-leaning states still not called. The popular vote count is still underway.
Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear.
These results were a surprise to everyone. Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.
Pollsters thought the race would be very close but showed increasing momentum for Harris, and Harris’s team expressed confidence during the day. By posting on social media—with no evidence—that the voting in Pennsylvania was rigged, Trump himself suggested he expected he would lose the popular vote, at least, as he did in 2016 and 2020.
But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office.
With background about Hungary, Biden, the current economy, Fox News, Project 2025…
For policies, Trump’s campaign embraced the Project 2025 agenda led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Orbán. That plan calls for getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service the U.S. has had since 1883 and for making both the Department of Justice and the military partisan instruments of a strong president, much as Orbán did in Hungary. It also calls for instituting religious rule, including an end to abortion rights, across the U.S. Part of the idea of “purifying” the country is the deportation of undocumented immigrants: Trump promised to deport 20 million people at an estimated cost of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
That is what voters chose.
Of course, a running theme in my commentary and commentary from others is that voters didn’t *consciously* choose all those things. Most voters don’t pay close attention. They have selective memories. They dimly recall that somehow things were better under Trump — things were always better in the past, remember — and so voted to bring him back.
Then about sexism and racism, disinformation…
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
And this is telling.
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.
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The running theme:
NY Times, Frank Bruni, 7 Nov 2024: Democrats, Let’s Get Real About Why Harris Lost [gift link]
Many expected that “there was a limit to the cruelness and craziness” of Trump, and so that Harris would win.
That judgment, of course, was terribly wrong. And I want to name and dwell on a few of the reasons for its wrongness, because they’re stubborn misapprehensions, enduring blind spots. They’re costing Democrats — no, they’re costing America — dearly.
For starters, many voters don’t know about or didn’t really pay attention to all of Trump’s florid ugliness in the final hours. Many voters aren’t plugged in like that. Politics, even presidential campaigns, aren’t in the center of their vision but in its periphery — and irregularly, at that. Those of us who get hourly updates, have nightly freak-outs and can hold forth on Trump and the shark, Trump and Hannibal Lecter, Trump and windmills aren’t normal, but we’re arrogant: We assume our experience is everyone’s and our knowledge ambient.
No. People are busy. People are distracted. People are cynical. They tune out much if not most of this political drama because they regard it, indeed, as theater, as performance, whether it’s Trump’s conniptions or Harris’s “Kumbaya.”
So what, then, forms their impressions and drives their decisions? They’re responding in significant measure to the state of the world around them, whether it’s to their liking and whom they hold responsible for it. That was Harris’s affliction — the price of food, the elusiveness of homeownership and the fact that she’d been the No. 2 figure in the administration in charge of the country for the past four years. The obvious, boring nature of the diagnosis didn’t make it any less fatal.
And this is a permanent blind spot in human nature — our inability to see long-term consequences and focus only on the immediate, even at the expense of the long-term. Thus, “drill, baby, drill!” This will likely never go away.
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It’s also about making things up. Disinformation. The worst plague of the 21st century, arguably. That depends on the gullibility of most people, which won’t go away either.
Slate, Molly Olmstead, 7 Nov 2024: The True Danger of RFK Jr.’s Role in the Next Trump Administration Is Already Clear, subtitled “It’s not about the fluoride in the water—or even, really, vaccines.”
Kellyanne Conway pushed the idea of “alternative facts” in an interview almost eight years ago as then-President Trump’s senior counselor. Since then, the nation’s sense of a shared reality has only degraded further. Certain Trump lies stick out for their absurdity (the Sharpie-drawn addition to a hurricane map in 2019) or vilification (“eating the dogs”). Others, like the lies he told to try to overturn the 2020 election, stick out for how they were used for a brazen assault on American democracy. But, arguably, the single most destructive set of falsehoods perpetuated by Donald Trump, in terms of the toll on American citizens, had to do with the COVID pandemic.
It’s impossible to calculate the damage that Trump’s pandemic lies did. They unquestionably led to greater numbers of American deaths. They seeded suspicion and harebrained ideas of alternative cures, some toxic. One study out of Cornell that analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media found that Trump was, in fact, the single biggest driver of COVID misinformation, conspiracy theories, and falsehoods. Fortunately, we still had people operating within the federal health agencies who relied on good science and public health measures. The dispassionate expertise from the medical community provided some kind of solid ground in a frightening time, despite Trump’s politicization of the disaster—even as the figureheads were assaulted by misinformation powerful enough that Anthony Fauci, years later, would still face heated conspiracy theory–based accusations from members of Congress.
Now we may have RFK Jr imposing his non-scientific, non-medically-based, superstitions on the American population. Details in the article. Concluding:
Established medical science should be one of the easiest places for Americans to find, if perhaps not complete agreement, anchors for a shared reality. Where medical experts find mountains of studies and years of data to be conclusive, Kennedy goes zooming against the grain, for little apparent reason. Trump’s decision to give a man so committed to dashing that shared reality a place of prominence is a warning. The threats of a second Trump administration may not always come in the form of practical policy changes: They can come, just as potently, in casting doubt and sowing confusion.
It’s like promoters of fake conspiracy theories on the internet: some people just get their jollies by being contrarians, and doing anything to getting attention. It gives them some kind of power, or validation. What’s real or true is of no interest to them.
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Another running theme: is this who we are? I would say no: it’s about how a large part of the population is, and the few percent in the middle who voted from Trump instead of Harris waffled, didn’t think things through, and swung the election. It’s about who *they* are.
NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 6 Nov 2024: This Is Who We Are Now
As with problems like inflation, which many voters blamed Biden/Harris for, this illiberal trend is happening all over the world.
In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right. Trump, after all, is a particularly ghastly manifestation of historical forces that are reshaping politics all over the Western world, elevating nationalist leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and powering the growth of parties like the right-wing Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally. You can blame Kamala Harris for spending too much time courting moderate Republican women, or for the vagueness of her “opportunity economy” rhetoric. But few politicians anywhere have figured out how to hold together a coalition that includes both affluent, educated, cosmopolitan elites and blue-collar voters who prize tradition and social stability. Maybe doing so is no longer possible, but at the very least, it will require a plausible vision of what a thriving progressive society looks like.
And Goldberg echoes Tom Nichols, quoted yesterday. And his promises will come home to roost.
Ultimately, Trump’s one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure “some temporary hardship.” We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it.
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And then we come to the folks who feel vindicated, and empowered, by Trump’s win, in the worst possible way.
NY Times, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, 7 Nov 2024: Trump’s Believers See a Presidency With God on Their Side, subtitled “Many Christian conservatives saw the battle for the White House as a holy war. Now, with Donald Trump’s victory, their vision goes beyond politics.”
My initial take: Never, ever, give any intellectual credit to someone who thinks God is on their side. This is self-serving motivated reasoning at its most pure. Everyone, on both sides of every religious conflict throughout history, has thought God was on their side. My second take: it astonishes me that Christians claim the most despicable person on the planet as evidence for their divine favor. That’s the best they can do? Spare me the Biblical analogies to ancient kings; I don’t give any intellectual credit to anyone who relies on ancient texts written thousands of years ago, before most people knew much of anything at all about the reality or history of the world.
Eight years ago, conservative Christians wondered if Donald J. Trump, who had just been elected president, would truly be their champion. They were weary, and angry, after wandering in the wilderness of the Obama years when liberal values seemed ascendant and they felt powerless.
Mr. Trump delivered. A promise to “my beautiful Christians” came true even after he left office, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion.
Now, as Mr. Trump’s sweeping re-election victory brings them to new heights of power, they believe his return is more than an electoral mandate: they believe it is a divine one.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly invoked a religious anointing since he survived an assassination attempt in July. And when he claimed victory on Tuesday night, he did so again.
“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Mr. Trump told supporters. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”
It is a remarkable claim for a president who claimed to be a “dictator” — if only on Day 1.
And ending:
On the eve of the election, Rob McCoy, pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Southern California, described Mr. Trump’s opponents as the “enemy” who “attempted so many divisive and evil deeds.”
“Lord, please do a great and mighty thing we know not of,” he prayed.
And when the results came in, Mr. Trump’s followers believe God did.
OK, Christians, if God did it this time, why didn’t he do it last time? Why did God let Biden win? I realize these are intemperate questions, but that’s only because the religious take offense at anyone pointing how their logic and rationalizations are vacuous. Thus dim. (The intelligentsia of the world simply ignore the religious, and work in a world based on reality from evidence.)
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Perhaps we can start an “I told you so” or “We predicted this” segment of this blog. Without becoming too obsessed by it. Here are several items from my favorite aggregate site, all today.
- Junior: I’ll Keep Smart People Out Of Daddy’s Cabinet
- Bannon Vows “Rough Justice” For Anchors And Outlets
- Fox Hosts: Trump’s Prosecutors Deserve Execution
- Loving Christians Celebrate Trump On Texas Campus: “Types Of Property: Women, Slaves, Animals, Land”
- Trump AG Candidate Calls For Imprisoning Jack Smith
This is 21st-century civilized behavior? Oh, but Trump and his tribalist supporters are… sort of the opposite of civilized.
