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Case Study: Why did Trump win in 2024?

Why did Trump win? (again)

Historians and political scientists attempted to answer this in 2016 and many of their hypotheses still apply. Still, this time it seems even more baffling since in 2016 Trump was a relatively unknown quantity, at least in the sense of how he might turn out as president. He had no executive or legislative experience in the traditional fields of vice presidential office, governorship, army command, or Congress. In another sense, of course, he was very well known, as a celebrity and the presiding star of the hit TV show The Apprentice. In most election cycles the candidate and potential candidates struggle to make much impression on popular consciousness until well into the election year and generally after the party conventions. In June of 2008 most Americans could not identify a picture of Barack Obama four months before he won the election, with Trump this has always been very different. Trump was the first media-made celebrity to run for the presidency- notwithstanding Reagan’s B movies and role as frontman for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Reagan’s principal qualification was still his two terms as governor of California. Trump was in another league of celebrity one which had been projected into the minds of most Americans by television and magnified to a level of celebrity and familiarity way beyond the reach of all the members of Congress, four-star generals, and residents of governor’s mansions. In 2016 and in 2024 his celebrity status outshone his Republican rivals and placed him front and centre in the mind of any American who had not been off planet for the last decade.

In 2016, while his celebrity status was clear, whether he could manifest the character he played on The Apprentice in the role of president, was uncertain. Would he wield the same decisive energy and display the same managerial acumen? Looking back at his first tenure as president no objective observer could say that he exhibited any of the commanding features which were so apparent in the fictional world of reality television. The Apprentice was a fiction, as was his ghost-written best seller the Art of the Deal where Trump described his mastery of deal making.

Trump’s career is a catalogue of failed businesses, tax avoidance, and downright illegality and Trump’s first four years displayed his incompetence for all to see. Trump’s pettiness, vanity, misogyny, racism, inconsistency, spitefulness, and limited grasp of world affairs were witnessed, attested to, and documented by the multiple sacked appointees, journalists, and writers[1] who had a front-row view of Trump’s presidency in action. Trump’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson openly referred to President Donald Trump as “a moron”[2].

While the pandemic, which as the great crisis of his first term, offered an opportunity, as all great crises do, for the chief executive to wield decisive power, instead it exposed his failure on a broad and tragic stage. Not only did Trump not rise to the challenge of the pandemic, he mishandled, bungled and delayed the response, which resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands—the intervening years allowed for these failings to be reflected on, and fully exposed with no redeeming interpretations gaining serious traction. According to an extensive list of historians and experts in American political history, Trump was undoubtedly the worst president America had ever had.[3] If anything more was needed to cast Trump into the political wilderness the slowly turning wheels of justice produced accusations, prosecutions, and convictions for crimes from sexual assault, defamation, election interference, larceny of state secrets, and insurrection. Trump was a convicted felon facing multiple charges. So again you might ask, how on earth has he been re-elected?

Elected again he has been, and with a more substantial victory than in 2016. This explanation will begin with a long view of the Trump phenomenon. So let’s start with democracy and why we shouldn’t be surprised.

1.Why Trump won (again) Democracy and why we shouldn’t be surprised.

2. Why Trump Won (again) Trump is the result of a constitutional Crisis.

3. Why Trump won (again) Trump is the result of a loss of confidence in democracy

4. Why Trump won (again) Trump and the rise of populism

5. Why Trump won (again) Inequality of opportunity:The decline in social mobility

6. Why Trump won (again) Income inequality

7.Why Trump won (again) The Culture War

8. Why Trump won (again) The impact of social media.

9. Why Trump won (again) Joe Rogan

10. Why Trump won (again) The MAGA Cult

11. Why Trump won (again) Take Trump seriously but not literally.

12. Why Trump won (again) 'It's the economy, stupid!'

13. Why Trump won (again) Immigration

14. Why Trump won (again) Minorities moved toward Trump

15. Why Trump won (again) Trump appealed to men.

16. Why Trump won (again) Women did not rescue Kamala's campaign

17 Why Trump won ( again) Let's not forget misogyny and racism.

18. Why Trump won (again) Vice Presidents don't do well in elections for the Presidency.

19. Why Trump won (again) Kamala was the wrong candidate to beat Trump.

Overall then why did Trump win in 2024?

In the late 1970s I attended a lecture in London given by the historian A J P Taylor, his topic was the causes of World War One. After an hour or so of outlining, without notes, al the contextual causes; an arms race, imperial rivals, alliances etc.. he concluded with the observation that in the end the war might have been avoided in Gavrilo Princip had not shot the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand. So it might be with Trump. The polarising of American politics, the shifting demographics and the rise of Trumpian populism might have stalled but for the price of eggs. With no inflation spike in the Biden years, the outcome might have been different and indeed the explanation is simply ‘the economy, stupid’.

Historians might also point to the prosaic explanation of 'luck'. When Trump launched this campaign it did not look like a forgone conclusion he had experienced three straight rebukes in national elections. In the primaries, his opponents seemed intimidated from the start and no Republican dared take him head-on. The courts might have spelled disaster but a combination of friendly judges and legal postponements pushed his criminal trials until after the election. Finally, a kinder throw of the dice might have granted Joe Biden the vigor he possessed in earlier battles.

While this might be true, the larger changes and shifting tectonics of US and world politics have provided the fertile ground for Trumpism and it is highly likely that when time claims Trump, as it must in the not-too-distant future, much of Trumpism and the changes he represents will remain.

The constitutional experiment in the US is about to get another stress test which even if it survives the next four years intact, the Republican and Democrat Parties have already undergone a profound change. They are no longer the broad amorphous movements whose crosscutting nature made American politics uniquely consensual and without this unifying pragmatism, the long-term future of the American experiment remains uncertain.

[1] Fire and Fury - Wikipedia

[2] Rex Tillerson kind of admitted he called Trump a ‘moron’ | CNN Politics

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/20/presidents-ranking-trump-biden-list

[4] James Madison and the Dilemmas of Democracy | Freedom of Thought

[5] 'What is the EU?' trends on Google hours after Brexit result announced | London Evening Standard | The Standard

[6] Are We Living In James Madison’s Nightmare? https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/blog/2022/07/26/are-we-living-in-james-madisons-nightmare/

[7] I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

— Greta Thunberg, January 2019

[8] Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? (London: Verso, 2016

[9] The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

by Martin Wolf.

Post capitalism by Paul Mason

Capitalism in Crisis

by Charles Hampden-Turner

How Democracy Ends

by David Runciman…..( just a few recent books)

[10] America’s Anxiety Crisis Affecting 1 in Every 7 Adults

[11] Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order

John J. Mearsheimer

[12] The ‘super year’ of elections has been super bad for incumbents as voters punish them in droves

[13] Democracy Versus Democracy: The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy

Authors

Michael Ignatieff

[14] The people is sublime: the long history of populism, from Robespierre to Trump

[15] Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024 | Pew Research Center

[16] Gallup has found the presidential honeymoon period is getting shorter and shorter. By the last few decades of the 20th century, the typical honeymoon period had shrunk to seven months, down from an average of 26 months earlier in American history:

[17] Trust in U.S. Supreme Court Continues to Sink | The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania

[18] Populists in Power Around the World

[19] Mercantilism: The theory that explains Trump’s trade war

[20] Battle cries such as ‘build the wall!’ or ‘no more mosques!’ set boundaries in place to keep the sacred people safe from outside threats.

[21] Half of Americans’ top-ten priorities for success are about a meaningful life, including being able to do work that has a positive impact on other people, enjoying their work, being enjoyable to be around, having a purpose in life, and being actively involved in their community. In contrast, being rich is ranked in the bottom third of all priorities (45 of 61) https://populace.org/research

[22] Americans don’t fault people for pursuing great wealth. More than 8 in 10 (84%) agree “there is nothing wrong with a person trying to make as much money as they honestly can.” https://www.cato.org/publications/survey-reports/what-americans-think-about-poverty-wealth-work#overview

[23] People are more tolerant of inequality when it is expressed in terms of individuals rather than groups at the top Jesse Walker, Stephanie J. Tepper

[24] 70% say government should try to eliminate causes of poverty rather than increase welfare benefits https://www.cato.org/publications/survey-reports/what-americans-think-about-poverty-wealth-work#overview

[25] Changing the narrative on wealth inequality .Joseph Rowntree Foundation

[26] Actual mobility patterns, however, suggest that non-meritocratic factors may actually be more important in the U.S. than in other countries. A person's educational and economic outcomes, for instance, are more closely tied to one's family of origin in the U.S. than in many other industrialized countries (Beller and Hout, 2006, Ermisch et al., 2012, Jäntti et al., 2006).

[27] https://www.stlouisfed.org/institute-for-economic-equity/the-state-of-us-wealth-inequality

[28] Low Wage Americans Lose Faith in Social Mobility -Brookings

[29] Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Putnam, Robert D.

[30] McCann, P. (2020). Perceptions of regional inequality and the geography of discontent: Insights from the UK. Regional Studies, 54: 256–267.

[31]Cramer, K.J. (2016). The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[32] Golfing with Trump. Social capital, decline, inequality, and the rise of populism in the US

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Neil Lee, Cornelius Lipp

[33] More than half of American renters who want to buy a home worry they may never afford it

Survey shows 86% of renters want to buy a home but cannot afford it, and 54% of those renters believe homeownership will remain unattainable. This concern is more pronounced among older adults.

[34] Global Land Alliance and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI)

[35] Ontological security and psychosocial benefits from the home: qualitative evidence on issues of tenure

[36]Trends in income and wealth inequality

By Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik and Rakesh Kochhar Pew Research

[37] The Distribution of Household Income, 2018

[38] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-inequality-debate

[39] Ekins, E. (October, 2019). Young Americans are more likely to resent the rich.

[40] Pew Research

[41] https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/trumps-win-ordinary-americans-declared-independence-the-elites

[42] “Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.” Maxims for revolutionaries

[43] "A slave dreams not of his freedom, but of his slaves." Author: Mark Tullius Cicero.

[44]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/shattered-democrats-grapple-kamala-harris-loss-rcna178967

[45] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kamala-s-agenda-is-they-them-not-you-trump-campaign-video/vi-AA1rEKBS

[46] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/archival-video-pat-buchanan-speaks-1992-republican-national-40578648

[47] An analysis of the capture of the Republican party and the national agenda from the late 1970s into the 1990s by a coalition of political and religious conservatives. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8274866/

[48] The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart: by Bill Bishop

[49]Spatial Polarization of Presidential Voting in the United States, 1992–2012: The “Big Sort” Revisited

[50] Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America. A History of the Culture Wars

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015

[51] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/03/05/few-americans-express-positive-views-of-trumps-conduct-in-office/

[52] Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics R. Marie Griffith

[53] Trump doubles down on male victimhood Washington Post October 3, 2018

[54] https://religionnews.com/2016/05/05/mark-demoes-liberty-board-trump-evangelicals/

[55] Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

[56] According to NBC’s exit poll, as in the 2020 and 2016 elections, he kept a steady hold on the support of white Evangelical Christians, taking 81 per cent of their vote. He also extended his lead among Roman Catholic voters to 15 per cent: 56 to 41.

[57] Social media echo chambers gifted Donald Trump the presidency

[58] https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/echo-chambers-filter-bubbles-and-polarisation-literature-review

[59] How Scandal Derailed Gary Hart’s Presidential Bid

[60] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwkNnMrsx7Q

[61] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyMosJdIfdo

[62] Donald Trump Says He Could 'Shoot Somebody' Without Losing Votes

[63] Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review

[64] (Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets

[65] Breaking the Social Media Prism by Chris Bail

[66] Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology

[67] Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 U.S. election

[68] https://www.howwegottonow.com/post/desensitization