US Election 2024 - How did it happen; again, and whither America now?

I don’t usually write political articles but a few people asked me to say something about Donald Trump’s victory in this week’s US Presidential Election, so here goes: I’m trying to approach this issue from an objective and neutral viewpoint, and the first thing that must be said is that Trump was re-elected in a fair and democratic contest because he was adjudged by the majority of voters as the better candidate. As much as many people may not like it, that’s democracy.

There have been millions of words written and said about this week’s result but I think the late night US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel summed it up perfectly and succinctly. He said, ‘well, they gave us a choice between a prosecutor and a convicted felon and we chose the convict.’ Obviously that got him a huge laugh but the irony is that it’s true. What it says about American’s views on the rule of law is a question for another day. Kimmel also said that it was a terrible night for decency, for women, for children, for old people, for poor people, for immigrants, for disadvantaged people but it was a great night for Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. He said it was even a bad night for those who voted for Trump but that they don’t know it yet. Another talk show host said it was the greatest example in history of turkeys voting for Christmas. Nonetheless, it was a fair contest and he won both the electoral college and the popular vote.

In order to analyze why it happened, let’s first put the vote into perspective. The population of the USA, as per the 2023 census is 335 million. Let’s be generous and exclude eighty million as too young to vote; this gives us 255 million. Trump won the popular vote by 72 million to 67. That’s 139 million. So, where’s the other 120 million? They didn’t bother to vote. There’s nothing new about this as the US rarely exceeds a 50% poll in elections. The greatest democracy on earth? The figures don’t justify the claim.

But let us concentrate on who did vote. Some people say Americans are crazy anyway; they’re not; they’re just a bit different to us Europeans. Maybe it’s because their country is much younger and founded on different principles. But if you look at the candidates, you had a relatively young, energetic, polite woman and an old, rude man with multiple convictions who lied openly every time he opened his mouth. America elected the old man.

So why? How do you make sense of that? Well, there’s a couple of things immediately spring to mind which people may not have factored in. One is good old fashioned racism, misogyny and white supremacy. They’re alive and well and living, not just in the US, but all over the place. There’s been a significant shift to the right in many countries. I know people who are racist I know people who are misogynist, and there’s no point in saying that it’s been eradicated; it hasn’t, it’s still there. Just because we, generally speaking, are enlightened and accepting of people regardless of race, creed or colour, we shouldn’t assume everyone else is. There’s a lot of racism and misogny just under the radar and it surfaces at times like this. America is obviously not ready for a woman President, never mind a black woman.

What’s the key to eliminating racism? What’s the key to progress; what’s the key to understanding; what’s the key to knowledge? What’s the key to enlightenment and inclusivity? It’s education. And which country is probably the most expensive in the world for third level education? The USA. A typical third level degree in the US will cost on average, $250k. As they say over there, go figure.

Now that’s not to say that everyone in America who voted for Trump is uneducated or stupid. It’s not but it certainly goes a hell of a long way to explaining it. It’s not just that lack of education limits choices and leads people to think one dimensionally. It makes people more susceptible to fake news, to manipulation, and apparently the amount of manipulation that went on in this election was on an industrial scale. We knew before that the Russian cyber bots interfered in the election back in 2016 and 2020, planting fake news and false stories. Apparently in this election, the Chinese joined in, and even the Indians and the Iranians. All of these messages were sent via the internet and social media, which nowadays tends to dominate a huge part of people’s lives. And Trump is the master of social media. Regardless of what you may think of the man, he knows his audience and he’s a genius at getting his message across to his followers. He will say anything to appease anyone. Despite the fact that the evidence is there in print or in video, he can deny it later and say he was misunderstood. His followers will ignore the parts they don’t like and focus on the ones they do. He knows this and plays to it relentlessly.

I’m not going to say that I’m not susceptible but when I hear someone expressing a view or I see something on line, I always ask myself, where did they hear this? It may be an original thought but in my experience there’s very little of that about. So, where did it come from? Who did they hear it from and most importantly, is it true? There’s so much disinformation on the internet and people just scroll through things. Maybe they’re busy but I find that the vast majority do not validate what they read or hear. I’m probably guilty of doing it myself at times. So how did this influence voters? Just one example:

I heard a woman, who was asked how she had voted, complaining that New York was being overrun with immigrants, that they were everywhere and they were getting state benefits. This is complete nonsense. America is not a welfare state. It’s every man or woman for themselves. You don’t get state benefits in the USA, even if you’re a resident, and the place is not overrun with immigrants. I’ve travelled extensively in the USA and the only immigrants I’ve seen are working hard and keeping the country functioning. The US is at full employment. It needs all the immigrants it can get to fill jobs or do the work that Americans don’t want to do. But if you say there are too many immigrants and you keep saying it and you spread disinformation, people begin to believe it. Trump then latches on to it, and he pushes it and pushes it. I’m not saying that everything Trump said was was wrong, but a great deal of it was baseless rhetoric.

I remember in 2016, people kept telling me how awful Hillary Clinton was, and I kept asking, but what did she do? And nobody could tell me. There was some issue about emails, but the woman hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Yet the narrative took hold and Trump kept calling her a criminal. As a result, people seemed to be anti Hillary and that was just on this side of the Atlantic. Who knows how many voters were misled on the other side.

Speaking about this side of the Atlantic, Irish people have always tended to lean towards the Democratic side. Possibly because John F Kennedy was as a Democrat. There has also been a tradition of Irish people being involved in politics in the US, and nearly always on the Democratic side. Perhaps we tend to be more liberal in Ireland and Democrats have always had a reputation of being liberal. I’m not saying that all the fake news stories favoured Trump. I saw a lot of stuff over here which would have led you to believe that Kamala Harris was certain of victory.

So why did she lose and lose so badly? Many say the Democrats have gone too far to the left. Now we have to put that in an American context. The Democrats are far more right wing than most conservative European political parties. But if you give any benefits to the under privileged in the US, someone is bound to shout socialist or even communist. Where they may well have erred is in the whole area of political correctness, woke culture and rights for people like trans-genders. In Ireland we have probably gotten over most of this and accepted we all have the same rights and can live in harmony. They’re not there yet in the US. I can also cite the case of an American woman I met earlier this year who had voted Democrat all her life but was voting Trump because transgenders were allowed use female toilets in some states and the privilege was being abused by perverts.

My own view is that the Democrats strategy was wrong. I said throughout the election that they just kept responding to Trump’s rhetoric. Trump’s main message was MAGA. Why didn’t the Democrats say, This guy has had four years already to make America great again and he didn’t do it. In fact, he was given a strong economy by Obama and proceeded to wreck it. Biden has had to spend the last four years building it up again. This is not entirely true but it’s close enough and is certainly more truthful than a lot of what Trump was saying.

Then there is the view of Dominic Sandbrook, an eminent English historian. His take was that a huge swathe of middle America actively dislikes women, blacks and, as he describes it, east and west coast ‘liberal metropolitan elites.’ He said that if you wanted to design the perfect candidate to piss them off you would come up with Kamala Harris. Biden for all his faults was a working man from Scranton Pennsylvania and was able to cut through to these voters. There’s more than an element of truth in what he says. Add in the fact that Trump was campaigning for four years whereas Harris only had 150 days and you can see the poor woman never stood a chance. In retrospect, the Democratic liberals, on both sides of the Atlantic, were hoping against hope and fooling themselves. Larry Donnelly, the American law lecturer and life long Democrat called it thus from way back.

There is one final point and it is arguably the biggest reason why Trump won. A lot of people interviewed said they were working class and that the Democrats had ignored them and weren’t listening to them. Now, how much of that was true, or how much of it was Trump saying to them that they were being ignored, or fake news coming out on their phones and computers is debatable. The bottom line though is that the economy and rising prices were a major factor in people’s discontent. In 1996, when Bill Clinton got re-elected, people said, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. The economy was flying. So Bill got re-elected. He may have been re-elected for other reasons as well, but in this instance, the state of the economy was a big factor.

Prices have risen very much in the US in Biden’s term. I was alarmed when I went there this year to see how much prices had gone up even compared to the previous year. I think the Democrats ignored this instead of facing it head on and blaming Trump’s legacy for it. He gave tax breaks to the big corporations, neglecting the the little man and no doubt he will do so again. But why didn’t this message come across? Also, inflation is down to 2% and there’s full employment. Gas prices have fallen significantly. This is the message the Democrats should have been flogging, not some vague concept of utopia and a new dawn. The average person in the street, educated or not, can see through that and it goes a long way to explaining why people voted for Trump right across the spectrum — women, Latinos, African Americans, even Islamic Americans.

Had Biden kept his word about being a one-term President and allowed a contest for the nomination instead of a last minute panicked change, the result might have been different but that’s pointless speculation. What we have to look forward to is four more years of Trump chaos. Now, in his previous term, the sky didn’t fall down and while he did make some disastrous mistakes, they were, arguably, recoverable. But because he now controls both houses of Congress, not to mention the Supreme Court, it may not augur well for the ordinary American or the wider World.

The Republican party will press ahead with the consolidation of power at every level across the United States, with the implementation of Project 2025 and the potential dismantling of the hard fought constitutional rights which millions of Americans have fought and died for. On foreign policy, Trump is even more allied with Netanyahu than his predecessor so anything we’ve seen in Gaza or Lebanon is likely to only get worse in the short term. Trump has said he wants to end the war but it’ll probably be on Israel’s terms. Europe, potentially, could be the biggest loser of the lot as Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on imports. Even more significantly, he’s a supporter of Putin and while he promises to end the war in Ukraine, it won’t be to Ukraine’s benefit. Where that leaves NATO in the longer term is alarming. If Trump pulls out, that leaves Europe exposed to whatever Putin dreams up next. It’s a frightening prospect, particularly for eastern Europe On the domestic front, I doubt we will see mass deportations of immigrants as these people hold the economy together and the ‘crisis’ was just so much rhetoric. However, should he pursue isolationism, I believe it will do untold damage to the American economy and ultimately hurt those lowest down on the pyramid — yes, most of the people who voted for him.