From The Times today
Face it, liberals, this is what millions wanted
The left have run out of things to explain away Trump’s success and must accept the hard truth
Hugo Rifkind
Wednesday November 06 2024, 9.00pm, The Times
This time, it’s different. This time, there can be no excuses. No Russian disinformation to blame, no fake news scandal to hide behind, no murkily funded social media advertising that you can tell yourself made all the difference. No bogeyman of Cambridge Analytica, nor even a popular vote that went the other way, betrayed by the electoral college. Nor even a hand-wringing, horrified, “these fools don’t know what they’re getting!” By now, how could they not? America saw Donald Trump, heard him, and knew him. Just like you did. More so, even. And voted for him anyway. And really, that’s it. That’s all there is.
In 2016, you could tell yourself that some or all of these things were the real reason Trump won and Hillary Clinton didn’t. Was it ever true? Maybe. Partially. And all these things were still worth worrying about even if it wasn’t. Back then, Russia did, indeed, hack away — there were indictments, arrests, convictions. Social media was a whirlwind of lucrative, divisive falsehood, far beyond anything Elon Musk would enable in 2024.
What you cannot believe this time around, though, is that anything like this made all the difference. Much as it might be comforting if you could.
Trump’s critics are largely not wrong. Even if you’re on the right yourself, this you simply must concede. Whether or not he will govern like a fascist, he certainly campaigned like one. He is, indeed, a convicted felon, declared liable by a court for sexual abuse, and accused of rape in a court deposition by his late first wife. He did, indisputably, accuse immigrants of eating cats and dogs. He fomented an uprising at the Capitol by refusing to concede an election he had clearly lost. He has routinely demanded the jailing of his opponents. Sometimes, as last week when he said Liz Cheney should face down a bunch of rifles, he has joked about seeing them killed.
He fails to comprehend the difference between his country’s interests and his own. He’s transparently in awe of dictators, and he did say: “In many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies.” He will imperil Nato. Less gravely, but perhaps no less frighteningly, he has promised a job to RFK Jnr, who once had a worm in his brain and doesn’t believe in vaccines. And he did, absolutely, spend a long part of a long speech talking about the size of a golfer’s penis. All of this, indisputably, is true.
What if, though, 72 million Americans simply didn’t care? What if, in making these things the focus of their fightback, the Democrats were actively setting up store in a part of the political shopping mall that the voters they needed weren’t particularly minded to even visit? Among Trump’s voters, no doubt, there will be a decent number of misogynistic, authoritarian Bitcoin fans who thrill to hear an orange old man ramble about sharks. But 72 million of them? I doubt it.
America’s anti-Trumpers — and those of us elsewhere — are not unique in their refusal to accept hard truths that stare them in the face. Trump’s biggest fans have been doing exactly that since 2020, with their insistence that Joe Biden stole his victory. (Although why, you wonder, do they imagine Kamala opted not to steal this one too? Just lazy?) For liberals today, though, the hardest truth of all is that America saw not nearly enough in Trump to put them off.
Liberal denial wears many cloaks. Today, Democrats are wracked with angst about what they got wrong. Perhaps the candidate shouldn’t have been a woman, perhaps she shouldn’t have been black. Perhaps, if she was going to be both of those things she shouldn’t have been so annoying. Perhaps she should have been less woke, or at least differently woke, or more aggressive, or perhaps less so.
Masquerading as humility, all this stuff is actually the exact opposite. This — politics through the liberal prism — recognises absolutely no autonomy behind the votes they didn’t win. Such liberals will never understand Trump’s success because they literally don’t see it. All they see is the ways in which they, themselves, have failed. Because it must, really, be about them. Because everything is. Because it can’t possibly just be about people thinking him to be a better bet for a bit less immigration, and a decent job, and perhaps slightly cheaper eggs.
From an international perspective, understanding the sheer retail mundanity of the Trump vote is even harder. “But Ukraine!” we think. “But Nato! But global security and the Middle East and the special relationship!” As if it were unimaginable that a commuter in, say, Nevada, would not have these thoughts at the top of their minds, too. It makes me think of that bit in Mad Men when the sacked copywriter tries to patronise Don Draper by saying he feels sorry for him. “I don’t think of you at all,” says that other Don.
To truly understand why they failed, in other words, the real thing America’s left needs to understand is something they’re apt to struggle with far more, which is why Trump didn’t fail. Because, if you don’t believe that an American majority truly wants all the ugliness, sexism, oligarchy and dysfunction that his candidacy gleefully embodied, then what’s the thing, that germ of popular neglected truth, that made so many millions of utterly normal people cheerfully look past it all? No longer can any of us tell ourselves they were all fooled, or deluded, or just plain ignorant. They knew what they were doing, and they did it. Time to swallow that bitter pill. Good luck in keeping it down.
