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Presidential elections resemble ritual mysteries into which we are initiated. Once the votes are counted, we are imparted a message: a revelation.
Often enough, the voice of the people gets garbled in transmission. Did Donald Trump really win in 2016? Did Joe Biden do so in 2020? In both cases, the losing side felt cheated of the correct meaning of the message.
But on occasion, the people speak with a voice like thunder. The political landscape, obscured by gaseous special pleading, false narratives, and outdated concepts, is suddenly swept clean.
Everything is clarified. We know where we stand.
Donald Trump’s big electoral win over Kamala Harris last Tuesday was a clarifier for the ages.
Until the surprising results came in, large chunks of reality were up for debate — true not only of our politics and politicians but also of the very nature of our times.
Was Trump the moral equivalent of Hitler? Was censorship necessary to protect democracy in the digital age? Is our country a land of freedom or of monstrous racial and sexual oppression? Arguments raged back and forth.
The American voters have rendered a decisive verdict on many of these questions. Let’s consider some of the most momentous.
Censorship campaign
We are living through a moment of revolt, not reaction. That was not at all apparent before the election.
In the last four years, the progressive establishment, centered around the Biden administration and the federal bureaucracy but including the news media, academia, Hollywood and most of our dominant institutions, erected structures of control without precedent in American history.
The intent was to cage an unruly public that, in 2016, had propelled Trump to the White House.
On the pretext of representing science during the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government mandated school closings, lockdowns and vaccinations, with shamings and firings meted out to those who dissented.
Government censorship was imposed over digital media, first on those who disagreed with the official doctrines about COVID-19, then on Trump and his allies and supporters, finally on any opinion — for example, on the Ukraine war — that the ruling elites found offensive.
Some individuals, like Trump, were entirely silenced on social media, even as millions of posts by ordinary Americans were taken down on the orders of the Biden White House and the FBI.
Wielding the law-enforcement power of government, political opposition was criminalized.
Trump was indicted 116 times, convicted once, and fined $454 million, all in Democratic-friendly jurisdictions. The desire to annihilate the former president before the 2024 election lacked even the pretense of subtlety.
Several Trump-adjacent persons, like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, ended up in prison for their troubles. The Jan. 6 rioters, supposed foot soldiers of Trump’s “insurgency,” were punished with extraordinarily long sentences.
Tulsi Gabbard, who humiliated Harris in a 2019 Democratic nomination debate, was placed without notice on the travel watch list reserved for potential terrorists.
‘Regaining control’
At the height of the period of control, the Biden administration was seized with a sort of inebriation about the weird and wonderful things it could cram down our culture’s throat.
Men were ushered into women’s sports and women’s bathrooms. That tracked with the Supreme Court nominee, now a justice, who was unable to describe what a woman was because she lacked a medical degree.
“Equity,” or numerically perfect outcomes for protected minorities, was ordained for anyone who did business with the federal government.
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For no particular reason, millions of undocumented foreigners were invited to pour into the country, to be distributed among our urban centers at the whim of the administration.
Anything was possible. An enfeebled President Biden, who could scarcely join three words together without sounding dotty, was made out to be a zesty, energetic senior totally in command of the nation’s business. When that story fell apart after the disastrous debate with Trump, Biden was simply swapped out for Harris, who hadn’t earned a single vote in the Democratic primaries.
To many intelligent observers, it appeared that a reactionary establishment had snuffed out the embers of revolt. “The institutions are regaining control,” wrote media scholar Andrey Mir.
“The Restoration has begun.”
Reality check
The election suggested a different interpretation of events.
Between the generalized panic of the pandemic, the madness of the 2020 Black Lives Matter disorders and the hysteria surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol building, American politics entered a carnival fun house full of crazy mirrors, where reality was thoroughly distorted.
Establishment elites looked on this as a magical transformation. They have never left the wild visions and intoxicating atmosphere of the fun house.
But the public has moved on. Once fear of the virus abated, the old old anger at the people in charge returned, compounded by a sense of betrayal. The fun house, for most Americans, turned out to be a temporary place of exile: a parenthesis, not a permanent way of life.
Electing Trump was the public’s way of inviting the institutions to resume contact with reality.
The election also vastly clarified our understanding of the information sphere. Despite the administration’s attempts to control it, digital media set the agenda. That is to say, government censorship failed completely: the public was still in command of the strategic heights above the information landscape.
Probably the most decisive step toward Trump’s triumph took place on April 14, 2022, when tech billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
Until that time, progressives had imposed a remarkable degree of conformity on the content churned out by the prestige news media and the digital platforms alike. Two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, for example, the New York Post published an explosive story on Hunter Biden’s lost laptop that provided many details of the Biden family’s questionable dealings with foreign governments.
But the laptop story was effectively killed online. Facebook and Twitter banned it. Google buried it alive. For many Americans, the election took place as if it had never existed.
Twitter’s defection opened a breach in that monolithic wall large enough to allow the dissemination of forbidden facts and opinions. Unlike 2020, the 2024 election was fought over a wide open media battleground.
Joe Rogan emerged as the improbable kingmaker of American politics. His podcasts last for hours, much too long for any politician to stick to a script: the real person is revealed.
Trump breezed through three hours without as much as a bathroom break. His chat with Rogan racked up nearly 40 million views within days.
As a precondition to participate in the podcast, Harris asked that it be restricted to one hour and edited. That, too, revealed who she was: a creature of the analog world, rehearsed and prepackaged and afraid of spontaneity.
Rogan, the kingmaker, turned down her request. He would eventually endorse Trump.
An unexpected avatar
The rise of the digital was assisted by the moral collapse of the old giants of traditional media.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, CBS News — all staggered willfully into the fever swamp where every statement of Trump’s evoked Hitler, every criticism of Liz Cheney became an assassination attempt, and every dumb joke about Puerto Rico became a racial slur.
All along, the public’s trust in the news media kept crashing to record lows.
The Times, Rachel Maddow and a handful of other media brands will make a profitable business model out of anti-Trump propaganda. The rest of the dinosaurs will go extinct to no one’s regret.
I have one last item of electoral clarification. In the United States, and maybe globally, Donald Trump is the definitive avatar of revolt.
That frankly surprises me. I first saw Trump as a loudmouth who had accidentally connected with the public’s mood in 2016, lost his cool in a big way in 2020 and was destined to be overtaken by a more articulate anti-establishment figure like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
I was wrong on all counts. The man is a political mutant, destiny’s comb-over stepchild, able to forge out of his eccentric utterances a movement that is now historic in its dimensions.
There’s something epic in the story of Trump’s defeat, retreat to the marshes of Mar-a-Lago and triumphant return to claim his lost crown.
There’s something cinematic about his courageous response to the attempt on his life in Butler, Pa. — the bloodied face, the clenched fist, the flags flying in the background.
But the key to Trump’s stature is the company he now keeps. In 2016, and for long thereafter, he was a solo act. It could not be otherwise: he was unwilling to share the stage with anyone who wasn’t a family member.
That is no longer the case. Gathered around Trump at the moment is a cluster of individuals who are bright, energetic, invariably interesting, but who have significant differences with him and among themselves — people like Musk, Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert Kennedy Jr., even his vice president,choice, J.D. Vance.
Their one common trait is that they are fiercely independent minds, born to dissidence. By bringing them into his movement, Trump has taken in hand many of the disparate threads of revolt in this country.
Learning a lesson
Of course, for every riddle solved by the results of November 5, a fresh set of questions has arisen. That is the way of the world.
For example, will the Democrats learn anything from the magnitude of their defeat? In 2016, it took less than two weeks for them to swivel from shocked disorientation to blaming fake news and Vladimir Putin for Trump’s victory.
This absolved them from the need to think, and led them to embark on a series of desperate maneuvers to crush and destroy the hated Orange Man. Such schemes, they should know by now, are emotionally satisfying but self-defeating if not suicidal.
The progressives who run the Democratic Party are too fond of inquisitions and excommunications. They love to punish sinners and seem to think most Americans belong in that category.
Unless the Democrats can somehow erase the impression that they detest the voters, they shouldn’t be surprised when voters return the favor.
Will Trump be able to convert his movement, with all its conflicting obsessions and factions, into real political change? That, for me, is the most significant question hovering like mist over the historical horizon.
Trump’s personality is volatile, to put it generously. The forces arrayed against him are still formidable. However, when a democratic election concludes with a decisive verdict, something fundamental must change — or else what was the point of the exercise?
That is a story for another time.