What Happened on November 5th

I break down the factors, some well-known, others more obscure, as to why Donald Trump will be returning to the Oval Office next year

Our long national nightmare is over.  These were the words uttered on August 9, 1974, by Gerald Ford, a former congressman from Michigan whom only one year prior most Americans had never heard of.  On that day, Ford took the oath of office as President of the United States following his predecessor Richard Nixon’s Watergate-driven resignation.  Never mind that today’s political scandals make Watergate seem like a parking violation or my personal opinion that Nixon has been unfairly demonized by history, but back in 1974 Watergate was so catastrophic and traumatic on the American Psyche that Ford’s assurance was critical to restore our collective sanity.   

50 years later, the same phrase will be again published, this time by an obscure Iowa-born, Tennessee-based writer who can speak basic Polish.  Our long national nightmare, in this case our two-year, media-fueled election cycle that never fails to melt the brains of Americans on both sides of our deepening political divide, is indeed over.  At least, until the midterms in 2026.  And the ultimate winner of this election, as everyone knows, was Donald Trump, the trash-talking New York real estate developer and media personality, who pulled off the most epic of political comebacks.  Despite two impeachments, thousands of hours of negative legacy media coverage, four criminal indictments, 91 felony charges, $454 million in civil penalties, ten US Capitol Riot congressional hearings, and even two assassination attempts, Trump will duplicate Grover Cleveland’s feat and reclaim the powerful American presidency just four years after electoral defeat. 

For those of who voted for Kamala Harris, you may be asking, how did he do this?  After all, isn’t Trump supposedly a racist, a rapist, and a convicted felon?  The most common explanations one will hear from America’s all-powerful pundit class are inflation and immigration.  Inflation is somewhat of a misnomer, considering the overall decline in headline inflation since its June 2022 peak of 9.1%.  Still, the decline in headline inflation does not mean the decline of grocery prices, which will never return to what they were before the Covid pandemic.  Considering that American consumers had experienced stable prices since the 1980s, James Carville’s overused maxim, “It’s the economy, stupid” rings just as true in 2024 as it did when he uttered it in 1992.  And when voters aren’t happy with the economy, incumbents can kiss their positions goodbye.

Switching to immigration, there is no doubt that the humanitarian crisis and overall chaos at the US-Mexico border, a situation brilliantly exploited by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, was devastating to the Biden Administration’s reputation and the Vice President’s campaign.  Since assuming office, the Biden Administration’s border mismanagement has led to a jaw dropping 9 million border encounters, a surge only halted when they finally reversed course only a few months before the election.  This disgrace was enabled by a grave miscalculation.  To obtain some moral high ground to contrast with the first Trump Administration and under pressure from the Democratic Party’s far-left wing, the Biden Administration did nothing at all for more than three years and let the border explode.  The right to asylum has been legally untouchable in the United States since German Jews were notoriously denied entry in 1939.  With these election results, the American people have made clear their wish for a whole new paradigm on immigration.

Now for the fun part.

The pundit class, being the pundit class, has a manner of creating a narrative, known today as a news cycle, that can last for days or weeks, depending on how long their editors feel it necessary to maintain the narrative before the public loses interest.  This pundit, of course, doesn’t have worry about narratives.  Which is why I would like to expand upon three other angles for why Donald Trump won the election that you may not have read about.   The first of which I already touched upon- the decline of the legacy media.  If everyone watched or read traditional outlets like NBC News and The Washington Post, Kamala Harris would be the next president.  Likewise, without the legacy media, Donald Trump likely would have carried not only Pennsylvania and Arizona but Minnesota and New Mexico as well.  Joe Rogan’s three-hour sit-down with Donald Trump, culminating with his first-ever political endorsement of a Republican, drew 70 million viewers across various platforms.  As for the legacy media?  Not even close.

This pundit, like Rogan, likewise does not have to fear censorious editors.  That is why I will veer off into my favorite subject- international politics, which happens to be my second angle.  In summary, 2024 has been a catastrophic year for incumbents across the democratic world.  Remember my newsletter about the British Election?  Here’s an update: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval rating has now sunk to 26%.  Over in Japan, that mysterious land where extraordinary politeness and respect meets eccentric television programs, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party, who has ruled Japan almost uninterrupted since 1955, recently lost its parliamentary majority thanks to a deluge of corruption scandals.  In Germany, the long zombified and completely useless Traffic Light Coalition recently died its long overdue death after a budget dispute.  If you think Keir Starmer’s ratings are bad, just look German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.  Scholz, the man who has overseen Germany’s epic decline, has a dogs**t approval rating of 15%.

And when Vice President Harris made an appearance on the American left-liberal talk show The View and struggled to find one decision of the unpopular Biden Administration’s policies that she would have altered, her fate was sealed as the global trend of anti-incumbency was now guaranteed to wash upon our shores.

However, the third angle in Donald Trump’s victory that has not been emphasized enough by the legacy media men under 30.  While I recently departed this demographic, many of my friends remain in it.  According to exit polls, a highly reliable medium even for the legacy media, Donald Trump received the support of 49% of men aged 18-29, compared to only 37% of women in that demographic.  In recent years, this demographic has been hit hard.  And not only economically, but culturally.  On the economic front, it is no secret that young Americans, like their counterparts across the world, have struggled to attain that most fundamentally American privilege our parents generation used to take for granted- home ownership.  Meanwhile, that generation, who surfed the wave of the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, are accustomed to not only home ownership, but luxury home ownership.  As for young Americans, locked out by overdemand, undersupply, and foreign investment, finding any pillow anywhere to rest their heads is an achievement.

So why do I single out men?  This is where the cultural aspect kicks in.  You see, ever since that miserable year of 2020 when American culture descended into a full-blown psychosis, this author has been extremely concerned about the rise of identity politics, a phenomenon already implemented so successfully in the former Yugoslavia.  In case you are unaware of that term, identity politics is a phenomenon when politicians decide to focus not on matters of common interest, such as the economy and education, but instead decide to promote the narrow interests of a particular demographic.  Identity politics can apply to women (except in certain athletics), historically ostracized racial minorities (except when applying to college), or sexual minorities (except in the Middle East).  With all these jumbled and chaotic rules and exceptions for the phenomenon of identity politics, often derided as wokeness, it is little wonder that the Democratic Party has more than a small measure of soul-searching to do.

In the Great American septic tank of wokeness, there is one group guaranteed to lose every time- straight white young men.  While election exit polls did not measure results for this specific subgroup, based on my calculations from other related demographics, white men aged 18-29 gave somewhere between 55 and 60% of their support to Donald Trump.  When you have a group who has not only been left out of mainstream American culture thanks to wokeness and identity politics implemented at their direct expense, it is no wonder that America’s young white men, most of whom prefer listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast to the New York Times podcast have now shouted Enough!  And it’s not just white men.  As I said before, Trump defeated Harris among young men of all races by 2%- the exact difference in the nationwide popular vote.   Had the Harris campaign made serious efforts to listen to the concerns of America’s young men, we would likely be having a very different political conversation today.

Finally, I cannot ignore that, according to the exit polls, Donald Trump won the support of 46% of Latinos (including a majority of Latino men), 39% of Asians, and 21% of African American men.  While these statistics certainly poke holes in longtime legacy media accusations of Republican racism, they also could be final nail in the coffin of the nightmare of identity politics and wokeism.  Turns out that Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans have a lot of the same concerns as White Americans, regardless of age.  And wokeism no longer works for them.  To my relief, even some Democrats see the writing on the wall and are ready to bury wokeness forever.  So beyond our two-year election cycle, I must express my strong optimism that our long national nightmare of identity politics is indeed over as well.