Supporters of Donald Trump are understandably jubilant in the afterglow of his remarkable victory over Kamala Harris and the culture of wokeism. They rightly feel vindication, having demonstrated that they do in fact represent the majority of the country.
Mild mannered, nominally non-MAGA Republicans, who supported Trump despite full knowledge of his glaring flaws, have observed that Democrats earned their resounding defeat by ignoring the concerns of ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans, we are told, resent being talked down to and disparaged by cultural elites. They’ve had enough of public health officials bossing them around despite being wrong about everything. Ordinary Americans never forgave Joe Biden for forcing them to inject a dangerous, experimental vaccine into their bodies. They are outraged by an open border, through which, on a daily basis, thousands of gang members, human traffickers, drug dealers, murderers, rapists, and insane people, stream into the country, poisoning its blood. For nearly four years, ordinary Americans have looked on in terror as our cities were consumed in crime and violence and as American universities called for the destruction of Israel. They’ve had enough of the terrible economy with its never-ending inflation and soaring unemployment, presided over by a feeble, senile president. They said, “No more!” to dwindling domestic oil production and dependence on foreign oil. They’re sick of pronouns and DEI personnel mandates. They are fed up with men pretending to be women and taking over women’s sports, forcing little girls to see penises in locker rooms and bathrooms.
This long nightmare had to be ended, and there was clearly one man for the job. And so the American people lifted Donald Trump up and placed mighty powers in his hands.
Given this narrative, how could they have done otherwise? Who could blame them? I’m not sure how to evaluate the wisdom of the American people. What I can evaluate, however, is the truthfulness of this narrative. (Evidence for what I say below can generally be tracked here.)
The high rates of inflation between 2020 and 2023 were the result of Covid lockdowns, relief funds, and global supply chain disruptions as the pandemic basically shut down commerce all over the planet in 2020, Donald Trump’s last year in office. To be sure, lockdowns and relief funds continued into the first year of the Biden administration, no doubt contributing to the rise in inflation. And, after Russia invaded Ukraine, food and energy disruptions exacerbated global inflation.
America fared better than every other industrialized nation in the post-Covid inflationary period. The Biden administration’s policies during the last three years have brought domestic inflation down to just under 2.5 percent, a healthy target. The Federal Reserve, whose remit is to hold inflation to roughly 2 percent, is now lowering interest rates to ensure inflation doesn’t get too low.
Also, after the Covid bounce-back, America is now at basically full employment. Wages are also consistently rising and within two years should achieve parity with the effects of the period of high inflation, effects that don’t immediately go away just because inflation has been brought down. GDP continues to rise, and the stock market continues to hit new highs. In January Joe Biden will hand over an extremely healthy economy to Donald Trump. (We can easily predict that by the spring of 2025, the health of the economy will be widely acknowledged by Republicans, and Trump will take a deep bow.)
Crime, while it did spike in the last year of the first Trump administration and again slightly in 2022, has returned to a generally low rate by historical standards.
On the advice of the Center for Disease Control, state and local health departments chose to impose shelter-in-place measures during the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to slow the spread, attenuate death spikes, and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
No one was forced to take vaccines, although many public and private institutions required vaccines for in-person contact at work. One has the right to refuse vaccines, but one does not have the right to risk the health of others. This is a long-standing American approach to public health policy, which we all know from getting our shots before entering elementary school. This is normal stuff.
Domestic oil production under Biden is higher than it was under Trump. Sorry, it’s just a fact.
The transgender population is tiny, and the number of cases of trans women playing in women’s sports is approximately 50 nationwide. The number of controversial cases over this issue is less than a dozen. In a nation of over 360,000,000 citizens, this is a microscopic problem.
Thoughtful people on the right understand these things, but they reply by pointing out that Americans nevertheless feel that the nightmare narrative is correct. Americans really do feel that the economy is terrible; they really do feel that crime is out of control; they really do feel that “transgenderism” poses a grave threat to women’s sports. They really do feel that the Covid vaccines were dangerous and that the lockdowns were Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ doing, that they were unnecessary, or worse, that they were implemented for nefarious purposes. (These dark purposes have never been articulated, so far as I know.)
We must acknowledge that the southern border is indeed a very real problem that the Democrats were slow to acknowledge. That was bad. In fairness, they worked very hard to advance bipartisan border legislation last year that would have made great strides towards addressing border problems, but by now we all know what happened with that. Even so, despite the terrible problems at the southern border, there is no factual basis for associating illegal immigration with violent crime. Still, ordinary Americans feel that illegal immigration is driving violent crime.
Why do ordinary Americans feel these ways? One explanation is that they watch Fox News, Newsmax, or OAN, or they get their news from niche aggregators (such as Ben “Facts-Don’t-Care-About-Your-Feelings” Shapiro), streamers, and podcasters. Or they just mainline newsfeeds from Twitter/X, TikTok, or Instagram. If one consumes such media, one can easily find oneself enclosed in an epistemic bubble, into which no dissenting opinion ever penetrates. If you primarily get your news from Fox, for example, it’s likely you enjoy seeing and hearing how stupid and evil Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are, and how gross and ridiculous Nancy Pelosi is, and how terrible the economy has been for the past four years, and how just beyond the paths you routinely tread lies a crime-ridden hellscape.
Trump himself constantly says these sorts of things, and the primetime lineup on Fox dutifully repeats them, filling them out with novel anecdotes and lurid video footage.
I do not blame Donald Trump’s supporters for voting for him. I blame those who lie to them on a daily basis, both those who intentionally and cynically lie about these things as well as those who merely repeat the lies, having already been bamboozled themselves. As Trump has taught us, if you tell the lie often enough, you begin to believe it yourself.
The normalization of horseshit is one of the key features of the Trump era. Democrats and professional journalists have failed to reckon with this effectively, and have allowed themselves to be portrayed the way Trump and Fox want to portray them.
This failure on the part of Democrats is made worse by their hapless tendency to play into the lampoon, pandering to the party’s left flank stragglers unnecessarily. The great irony here is that the Democrats are perceived as woke, hard-left kooks, despite their policy and their leadership being centrist, while the Republican leadership has been entirely taken over by clownish extremists, even as the party and its media organs somehow persuade the electorate that they’re normal, sober, fiscally conservative, law and order grownups. For the past four years Democrats have pursued and achieved modest, center-left policy. Trump, by contrast, has called for radical policies and has promised an agenda unlike anything in living memory.
Until Democrats find a way to make the truth more compelling than lies, until they find a way to make their actual center-left policies recognizable to ordinary Americans, they will not be able to overcome Trumpian propaganda. The rise of reality TV candidates, cable entertainment “news,” and internet info bubbles have all made this situation totalizing and perhaps permanent.
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