Why Trump won

Trump made divisiveness the calling card of his presidency – Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, authors of The Divider.
“Normal people are so tired of being lectured by these suffocating moral guardians, looking down on us and speaking down to us and shoving their viewpoints on everyone else.” – Hayden Duke, a teacher in Maryland quoted in The Guardian.
On November 5, 2024 Donald Trump was re-elected to be the 47th President of the United States. In the United States and indeed the rest of the world, this was a joyous dream for some and a nightmare for others.
This stark contrast of feelings about Trump is just one of many incidences of community polarisation across the world. Here in Australia we have our Voice divide which is between those who voted Yes and No for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. People who are normally very close are finding it very difficult to exchange views on this subject. In America so it is with Trump.
I write this essay in pursuit of understanding why we have reached this point of implacable difference within society. So, read on if you are curious about what I discovered or stop here if you can’t bear to think about what happened on November 5, 2024. I, kind of, understand either way!
To help me unravel what seems a chasm in attitude to Trump I have used two sources that are at opposite ends of the spectrum of observers of political directions.
The first source is a forensic, almost day-to-day examination of the first Trump presidency by two highly skilled and highly connected journalists and the second source is the participants in a newspaper conducted online “call out” and follow up interviews of ordinary voters in the November 2024 presidential election.
The Divider, Trump in the White House 2017 – 2021
This 650-page book was published in 2023. Peter Baker the Washington correspondent for The New York Times and Susan Glasser, a senior staff writer for The New Yorker are the authors of this work. They are a husband and wife team who have authored several books individually and jointly and were bureau chiefs for The Washington Post in Moscow during the rise of Putin.
For this book, the authors drew on over three hundred original interviews plus notes, diaries, memos and other documents of the various players in this saga. They have also drawn on the formidable volume of “real time journalism” and the “enormous range of excellent books” including “the flood of memoirs” covering this presidency. This is not to mention Trump’s around 25,000 tweets during these four years and two interviews Baker and Glasser had with Trump after he had left office and was in “exile” at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and resort.
The Divider has thirty-two chapters presented in five parts: Part I focuses on the Trump personality, his leadership qualities, his key relationships and how his administration generally functioned.
Part II focuses on the interactions between the President and those in his administration and Congress over foreign affairs, Supreme Court appointments and the Southern Border.
Part III covers the post-mid-term elections period when the Democrats had gained control of the House and the political battles moved to a broader public arena. It is also a period where the many administration firings and forced resignations occurred as Trump sought to find people of maximum loyalty and willingness to do his bidding.
Part IV covers the year 2020 where the dominant issues were the fallout from his first impeachment trial, the arrival and on-going threat of Covid-19 and the impending election in November.
Part V, appropriately titled Trumperdämmerung (Trump’s twilight) covers his reactions to the defeat of November 3, 2020.
The Divider provides many insights into how the next Trump presidency will operate and how it might respond to the challenges that emerge. What is missing from the very high quality analysis is how the people of America might be reacting to the “theatre” that was Trump and his dealings on the domestic and international stages. This “feeling” or mood of the people is much more the subject of the second reference.
In the introduction to the book Baker and Glasser are very clear what they think of Trump:
When we set out to write The Divider, we began with the simple premise, that Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election, and the insurrection at the Capitol he summoned to overturn his loss, were no violent outliers but the inexorable culmination of a sustained four-year war on the institutions and traditions of American democracy.
The authors pull no punches in their assessment of his first term:
This is a book about what happened in that presidency, about an unimaginable period in our history when the United State had a leader for the first time who neither knew nor subscribed to many of the fundamental tenets of the Constitution and even actively worked to undermine them. From the day he took office until the day he left, Trump sought to bend if not break many of the rules that constrained presidents in the American system, so that holding on to power despite the will of the voters was only the next logical step.
Baker and Glasser assert that to understand the shocking events of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 it is necessary to understand what happen during throughout the first Trump presidency. I would argue that whilst they are correct in this, it is also necessary to understand why Trump even managed to get to the White House in the first place and now to manage to get there a second time. I will get to this later.
They highlight the traditional media’s assessment of the Trump persona:
Eventually there would be piles of articles and commentary on Trump’s mental state, many of them dwelling on the extensive public evidence of Trump’s dishonesty, personal attacks on others, highly transactional relationships, over-the-top bragging, and absence of discernible conscience or empathy for others.
Over the course of his presidency he would have three chiefs of staff, four national security advisors and two secretaries of state plus many lesser comings and goings. The revolving door of the Trump administration would continue right up to the very end. Dismissal was communicated via a tweet sacking or a forced resignation. The principle issue for Trump was that loyalty must ‘trump’ sound and fearless advice. Baker and Glasser describe it as:
Throughout the Trump presidency, there were mass firings, aides were exiled and rehabilitated, courtiers appeared and disappeared and appeared again. In the opaque court politics of Trumpworld, advisers were often reported to be on the verge of quitting or being cashiered or both.
After the mid-term elections when the Democrats gained control of the House, Trump finally rid himself of most of “the adults in the room” replacing them with people whose chief quality was loyalty with duplicity thrown in as an added bonus. Still, he continued to fail in many of his signature projects in immigration and international relations. The wall on the Southern Border progressed hardly at all and his “bromance” with Kim Jong-un yielded nothing in terms of world security. His response was to fire more people.
Trump’s “fix it” man Michael Cohen went to jail for him and before he did he gave the world plenty of insights into the President’s character and inclinations; internal discord within the Trump administration continued and the military hierarchy were increasingly aware that upholding the Constitution must come before loyalty to the President. They had not confronted this conundrum with any prior president.
Trump’s priority was the Russian interference (during the lead up to the 2016 election) probe headed by Robert Mueller – the Russia probe. His constant twitter attacks on the probe were more successful as Mueller eventually pulled his punches, concluding there was insufficient evidence for a criminal conspiracy charge. However, the Russia probe report did not clear Trump of wrong doing either. Trump had yet another grievance and set of enemies to pursue.
In the summer of 2019, as Baker and Glasser describe it, Trump became a little weird. Firstly there was a chest-thumping contest between Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 in Osaka, Japan. The following is just a sample of what Baker and Glasser write about Trump’s mental state:
Throughout his presidency, the psychological state of the world’s most powerful man was a source of never-ending speculation, commentary, and concern in a way that simply had not parallel in American history.
Most of the public diagnoses posited that Trump had an extreme case of narcissistic personality disorder along with other problems that likely included a childhood learning disability which would explain his lifelong aversion to books and written briefings – all compounded by what appeared to be significant age-related decline in his cognitive faculties.
Yes, the authors stress this is “armchair” psychoanalysis but they also refer to a book titled, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a best selling book published in 2017 by twenty-seven mental health professionals who considered:
Trump a public health threat and believed they had a “duty to warn” that overrode their obligation to avoid practicing psychiatry from afar. “It’s not all in our heads,” they concluded. “It’s in his.”
The authors also drew from the observations of a number of senior officials in the Trump administration. An example was provided by John Kelly, his second Chief of Staff, who suggested Trump was:
A pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person
On the Trump personality, the authors conclude:
… that others in the Trump administration came to believe that Trump was mentally ill, unable or unwilling to process basic information necessary to do his job, and dangerously uninformed. “I think there is something wrong with him,” one of these senior officials said, “He doesn’t listen to anybody, and he feels like he shouldn’t. He just doesn’t care what other people say and think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
They add that some wondered whether Trump was “crazy-crazy” or “crazy-performance.” A major concern was the likely impact of the stresses of the presidency on his mental stability. Baker and Glasser suggest that the further into the presidency it was, the more mental instability appeared to be manifest.
Then there was the first impeachment trial precipitated by Trump withholding congressional-approved security assistance to Ukraine in order to gain political advantage over Joe Biden in the impending 2020 election. This ended with a vote on party lines and the predictable acquittal of the President. It was a victory of process and partisanship over principle. This was no matter to Trump – a victory is a victory.
In early 2020 with Trump continuing his seething over the first impeachment hearings, the Covid-19 virus arrived in an unprepared United States and with a president who doubt the veracity of the virus. Of course many world leaders were not prepared for this virus but there were very few who exercised such on-going denial of it as did President Trump. Baker and Glasser comment on Trump’s approach to Covid-19:
As for the coronavirus, Trump remained in denial mode. The president repeatedly told the public that the outbreak was “totally under control,” that it “will go away,” that it was comparable to the ordinary flu, that the number of cases would go “down, close to zero,” that a vaccine would be available soon, and that anyone who wanted to be tested could get a test. None of it was true.
They judged his response in terms of his character:
Trump had no idea how to handle it. The virus did not respond to his favourite instruments of power. It could not be cowed by Twitter posts, overpowered by campaign rally chants, or silenced by playground insults. For so long, Trump had believed he could overcome nearly any obstacle through sheer force of will, and in many cases he had been astonishingly successful.
Over the course of his seven decades, Trump had managed to bluster and bully his way past bankruptcies, failed business ventures, lenders demanding repayment, fraud and discrimination lawsuits, and, once he reached the White House, a special counsel and even congressional impeachment. But he could not will away a plague. So he tried denial, another favourite Trump tactic. That did not work either.
The emerging pandemic would expose all the weaknesses of his divisive presidency – his distrust of his own staff and the rest of government, his intense focus on loyalty and purges, his penchant for encouraging conflict between factions within his own circle, his personal isolation, his obsessive war with the media, his refusal, or inability, to take in new information, and his indecisiveness when forced to make tough decisions.
The White House never took the pandemic seriously. It was all about a form of calming communication rather than preparatory action for what was coming. The attention of Trump remained on vengeance in the post impeachment world. He fired his third chief of staff as the first American died of Covid-19.
For most of the developed world the arrival of Covid-19 was a challenge and leaders and infectious disease experts struggled to provide the right guidance. However, almost everywhere including in my country, the political leadership tool sound expert advice and learnt quickly what needed to be done. Everyone made mistakes but in the United States, the President and his by now loyal lackies were mainly into denial of what was happening and of the advice of the experts as to what needed to be done.
In February the first American died from Covid-19. On March 12, 2020, WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic. By March 17, St Patrick’s Day, the American death toll had reached 100, by early April it was 10,000, by early May it was 75,000, by late May it was 100,000 and by the end of 2020 it was approaching 500,000 deaths.
I remember those exponential curves of cases and deaths but at least in Australia they were arrested by strict quarantine and social isolation. No body liked it but it worked. Australia’s death rate was two orders of magnitude less than that of the United States on a per capita basis. Political leadership is accountable.
As if the Covid-19 pandemic was not enough, in late May, a black man named George Floyd was killed by a white police officer. This sparked demonstrations across the United States. Protests and police killings became as much a feature of 2020 as the virus. President Trump sought not to calm the nation but rather to divide it for the purpose of his re-election.
In December 2020, the first vaccines arrived. However, by then the American people had voted down Trump and Joe Biden would be the next president. However Trump had other ideas. He had already, with the election approaching tweeted it would be “the greatest Rigged Election in history”.
On election night after Fox News had called Arizona for Biden thus putting him over the Electoral College line. Baker and Glasser describe the Trump response:
By 12:44 am., Trump had chosen his course, the course he had spent months if not years preparing for. All fall, he had said quite clearly and openly that there was only one outcome for the election that he would accept: his own victory. Any other result would be fake, false, and rigged. Trump could not lose, therefore Trump would not lose.
“They are trying to STEAL the Election,” he tweeted. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the polls are closed!”
Then came the whole sordid process of attempting to delegitimise the election results. The claim that the election was stolen from him was actually an attempt to steal the election. This would culminate on January 6 2021 with the Trump’s incitement of his mob and the incredible storming of the Capital seeking to reverse the formal declaration of the Electoral College for Biden and the Democrats.
As the first Trump presidency was drawing to an end, the military command began to worry about what might happen without due adherence to Constitutional process. Baker and Glasser highlight the plan of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
It had four goals: First, make sure Trump did not start an unnecessary war overseas, Second, make sure that the military was not used in the streets against the American people for the purpose of keeping Trump in power. Third, maintain the military’s integrity. And fourth, maintain his own integrity. He would refer back to them often.
Baker and Glasser are at pains to present the risks and near misses of the first Trump presidency as more than a problem of one narcissistic person:
Trump was often just one yes-man away from getting what he wanted. One attorney general. One military commander. One vice-president. Many of those who blocked Trump were complicated figures who had spent years enabling him before finally deciding he had gone too far. Even then they often remained in his orbit or refused to speak out. Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, his four chiefs of staff, his lawyers, the Republican leaders on Capital Hill.
For them, every day was a moral challenge, a series of tradeoffs in which they weighed the benefits of accomplishing whatever agenda had brought them into Trump’s world in the first place – whether patriotism or personal ambition or policy goals or simply partisanship – against the need to stop the situation from spiralling out of control.
There was a not inconsiderable element of hubris to this; they believed they could manage him, and often succeeded for a while in doing so, only to claim they were shocked it had not worked out when it all ended badly, as it inevitably did. This book is their story too, because without them Donald Trump might have been just another angry old man shouting at the television between golf games.
I turn now to the events of January 6, 2021 and Trump’s words as he spoke to the mob. Baker and Glasser describe his speech as follows:
Trump was entirely unconcerned with the effect his rabble-rousing words had on an already seething mass of protesters. At one point, he referred to supporters “peacefully” marching to the Capitol, a word his defenders would later make much of. But the speech was in no other way peaceful, nor did the crowd take that message from him.
“We fight,” he declared. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight you’re not going to have a country anymore.” In the back of the crowd, some shouted, “storm the Capitol.” As he concluded, Trump urged them to “take back our country,” even suggesting he would go with them to confront Congress, before finally, at 1:10 pm, walking offstage to return to the White House.
The mob’s attack could have halted the confirming of the Electoral College vote but it didn’t. Eventually, after the National Guard had restored order, the Senators returned and late in the night managed to complete the confirming of the vote. Joe Biden was then inaugurated President on the 20th January 2021. The Constitutional imperatives that are the basis of American democracy had prevailed.
The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives reacted immediately to the January 6 incitement and consequent storming of Capital Hill by bringing on the second impeachment proceedings against Trump. The articles of this impeachment read as follows:
In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government. He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperilled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the 1people of the United States.
Liz Cheney, Republican representative and staunch Trump critic released a supporting statement:
The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this wold have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States and his oath to the Constitution.
However the near universal outrage of the storming of the Capital and Trump’s role in it did not last. One week after the attack on the Capital, the House of Representatives voted 232 to 197 to make Trump the only president impeached twice in American history.
Only ten Republicans, including Cheney, voted with all the Democrats for impeachment. Of the others what happened? Baker and Glasser explain it as follows:
Other Republicans who had been ready to impeach grew nervous and retreated back to the security of partisanship. Anti-anti-Trumpism had survived the insurrection at the Capitol as the party’s most powerful ideological force.
The Senate did not even convene to hear the case. The authors describe it as:
So in the end the president who had repeatedly skirted accountability – in the Mueller investigation and the Ukraine scheme and his tax returns and every other scandal – would avoid a final reckoning during his presidency.
Early in the morning of January 20, without attending Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump departed Washington. The death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic had just passed 400,000. As the authors expressed it:
While he had been waging a war of power, Covid had been ravaging the country worse than ever, with daily deaths shooting up to four or five times what they were on Election Day, the equivalent of another September 11 attack every twenty-four hours.
When the vote in the Senate finally began some two weeks after Biden’s inauguration, seven Republicans declared a ‘guilty’ verdict with the final vote being 57 to 43 against but this was not sufficient to convict. Mitch McConnell the minority leader voted against, essentially on a technicality that Trump was no longer a sitting president. He then gave a speech that condemned Trump every bit as much as Liz Cheney’s was in the House. Still, less than two weeks after the trial, McConnell was asked if he would support Trump for president again if he were the party’s nominee in 2024. The authors report that:
McConnell did not hesitate for a second. “Absolutely,” he said.
Now four years later, Trump continues to maintain the 2020 election was stolen and so do around 70% of Republican Party voters. It seems to be that justice for evil deeds is only allocated to those without power and privilege.
In the Epilogue to their book, Baker and Glasser reflect on the whole saga of Trump first time round:
When we sat down with Donald Trump a year after his defeat, the first thing he told us was a lie.
The lie related to what he did or rather didn’t do about Covid-19 vaccines. The detail of this whilst not immaterial, is less important than what Baker and Glasser write next:
Of his many falsehoods, this lie to us was hardly one of the most egregious. Trump, after all, finished his presidency with a total of 30,573 false and misleading claims, according to the Washington Post fact-checking project. It was not even the biggest fabrication in our three and a half hours of conversation over two interviews with him, which feature his usual cocktail of misinformation and falsehood about matters large and small. But it underscored an important reality about the forty-fifth president and the movement he continued to lead even in his gilded Florida exile: Trump today is both the avatar of Trumpism and its hostage.
In the very next paragraph they follow through with this observation:
As he plotted his next move at Mar-a-Lago, Trump seemed like a surreal cross between Napoleon at Elba and banquet hall greeter.
In this penultimate chapter, Baker and Glasser make a number of interesting observations:
…. policy was never what animated him, and his post-presidency, like his presidency was more about personal grievance than what he did or didn’t manage to get done in the job.
As always with Trump, he never stopped overstating even legitimately good news. The “best economy in history” was not really that.
More broadly, America grew even more polarized in the Trump years. It was already a divided country when he took over; the schisms of society did not start with him. But he profited from the divisions and widened them. After four years of Trump’s war on the truth – and on the independent media that challenged him – three quarters of Americans said that Republicans and Democratic voters could no longer agree even on basic facts, much less plans and policies.
Trump took no responsibility for any of that, nor for any of the setbacks of his time – ….
In the course of our two sessions, Trump freely dispensed insults about many of those who worked with and for him, ……
Donald Trump was, by any measure, the most politically unsuccessful occupant of the White House in generations. ….
Yet Trump still emerged from a seven-million-vote defeat, two impeachments, and the January 6 insurrection as the dominant force in the Republican Party.
Rather than disgrace and banishment, the normal fate for a president with such a record, Trump turned his big lie about the election into a post-presidential business model – and an unlikely formula for his own continued relevance.
…. Trump’s involuntary exit from office made him an object of almost religious faith to followers who continued to believe in his outlandish claims about the “stolen” 2020 election. A month after his second Senate impeachment trial, 65 percent of Republicans told pollsters they believed Joe Biden’s victory resulted solely from voter fraud; by the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack one poll found that 71 percent of Republicans though Biden’s victory was probably or definitely illegitimate.
His insistence on his alternative reality was relentless. “They cheated, they stole this election,” he would say again and again, as if sheer repetition would make it true. “It’s a fraud, Don’t forget.” Trump, as ever, was road-testing lines, test-marketing his next outrage, rewriting history.
It did not matter to Trump or his followers that not one independent authority-not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one election agency, not one official who was not a Trump partisan – ever found widespread fraud. None.
Baker and Glasser reference the numerous prominent Republicans who rejected Trump’s assertion including some of his own family. However they also suggest the Democrats were in a different kind of fairyland:
Democrats, meanwhile, continued to chase after the fantasy of a knockout punch, a transformative moment when a federal prosecutor’s indictment or an eviscerating judge’s decision or an embarrassing defeat of one of his protégés would finally shatter Trump’s armor and deliver the accountability he had managed to evade for so long.
This was not to be. Instead the American people have bestowed on Trump a second term as their president. Baker and Glasser envisaged this the closing pages of their book:
And yet Trump today might very well regain the office he lost.
They go on to highlight the dangers of this:
In a second term, many of the restraints that inhibited Trump in the first would be gone. He would have no worry about a future election, assuming he respected the two-term limit in the Constitution. The threat of a third impeachment would hardly serve as a check either, given his survival the first two times.
Trump would not make the same mistake of hiring advisers who stood up to him – he would choose matadors like Mark Meadows, not obstacles like John Kelly. He would pursue vengeance against his enemies. He would politicize the courts, the Justice Department, and the military. He would challenge allies and seek common cause with autocrats.
We know he would do these things because those are exactly the things that he did and said for all four years of his first term in the presidency.
This is on the path to accurate prediction.
In their penultimate paragraph, Baker and Glasser point to a danger beyond this single person, Trump. They highlight that the Republican Party is changed forever with many seeing only a future where it is better not to overtly challenge his lies but to channel the forces he mastered for their own benefit. There is nothing like ambition to diminish principle.
Intermission
Baker and Glasser have applied a forensic microscope to the Trump administration and concluded it was chaotic and dominated by the obsessions of a narcissist whose primary interest was in the continuation of his “regime”. They judged that Trump was prepared to do whatever was necessary to achieve that objective regardless of whether it violated the Constitution, American law or the health and safety of the American people.
It is now time to understand something of why the voters of America were prepared to grant Trump a second presidency in 2024.
Voters Reflect on Trump’s Second Victory
The Guardian newspaper undertook what it termed “a callout” of voters and non-voters in the 2024 election.
Firstly, it is worth noting that more Americans did not vote in the presidential election than voted for either Trump or Harris. Hence, only one in three Americans gets to choose the president. Some of these non-voters argue that because they don’t live in a “Swing State” their vote doesn’t count. Others had objections to the policies or other aspects of the candidate of the party they normally support but would also not vote for the candidate of the other party. There is logic in these positions if only of fatalistic form.
Secondly, the Democratic vote fell indicating many voters were less than enamoured with Kamala Harris. It might be argued that Biden’s late withdrawal hamstrung the choosing of an optimum Democratic Party candidate. One callout response from a carpenter from Idaho expressed it as:
“I didn’t find Harris compelling, just more of the same. Politicians from both parties seem unwilling to make the kind of fundamental economic and political changes that would make a meaningful difference for all people, namely a move towards a more democratic socialist system. That being said if we didn’t have the electoral college I probably would have voted for Harris.”
The Guardian reported a general lack of belief that either candidate would represent their interests:
A large number of people said they abstained because no candidate represented working- or middle-class interests and people such as themselves, including several people who voted in the previous two elections but did not vote this time.
The survey revealed a high level of disillusionment with the two-party political system that many considered was not delivering for ordinary people.
Whilst many Democrats abhorred Trump, they were not convinced about Harris either. One respondent expressed this in the following way:
“VP Harris failed to demonstrate she was ethically or intellectually capable of executing the office, repeatedly failing to detail out her policies and generally running her campaign like a popularity contest – ‘collect enough celebrity endorsements, by paying them, and the masses will elect you.”
The survey also indicated a reaction against identity politics that some voters felt was increasingly a preoccupation of the Democratic side of politics at the expense of improving living conditions of ordinary people. One disengaged voter expressed it as follows:
“I am not a fan of the Democrats, but I would have voted to keep Trump out of office if there was an economically literate, competent, law and order candidate who was willing to challenge the excesses of ‘woke’,. The Democrats are out of touch on social issues, and have tacked too far to the left to appease a minority of progressives.
I support some policies that would be considered right wing on immigration, but also investing in social housing, so I’m looking for candidates capable of taking difficult decisions based on rational analysis.”
A general disillusionment with the polarisation between the two parties was a common theme that caused many to not vote.
Even those who were strongly supportive of and voted for Kamala Harris felt that abhorrence of Trump was not enough given how worried people were about the economy and the cost of living.
Republicans were concerned about two issues – the economy and immigration. Any views about Trump’s questionable ethics and morality were mute as they considered Trump will be better at dealing with both the economy and immigration than would Harris.
Perhaps perversely, some voters, among them young first-time voters, women and immigrants, considered that the media were persecuting Trump because he was an unconventional billionaire. Some Trump supporters resented the accusation that Trump was anti-democratic.
There was also reaction to by some male respondents to Trump because they were tired of men being “vilified”, unfairly called “misogynist” and “blamed for everything”. Trump, for some, has become a symbol of resistance against identity and more broadly “woke” politics and a “biased” media.
Others, whilst conscious of Trump’s flaws, nevertheless considered his second term would hopefully lead to more peace globally, economic stability and an improvement to their financial situation, more secure borders, and a return to meritocracy and “family values”. It seems that the chaos of the first term has been forgotten or at least forgiven.
Clearly many voters are not as horrified by Trump’s challenges to the Constitution and to key tenets of American democracy as are the political commentariat.
Some disappointed Democrats considered Harris’ failure to win was in part due to a lack of education amongst Trump voters and the impact of social media platforms such as X and YouTube where the “manosphere” dominated. Some thought the Trump campaign successfully exploited fears of perceived threats to society such as racial violence and unauthorised immigration.
Some Democrats were also critical of the Harris campaign that they considered was too vague and did not connect with young men and ethnic minorities.
Some were not impressed with her running mate, Tim Walz.
Again, it seemed that the economy overwhelmed everything else. As one person put it:
“What I’m reading and watching suggests the Harris team and many others misjudged much of the electorate.
The population needed more attention on food prices, gas prices. Hearing how robust the economy is does not buy their groceries. The Hispanic and Black populations feared their job security would be threatened by allowing more immigrants into this country. These things mattered more than Trump’s reputation and criminal record. I get it, sadly.”
Another Democrat expressed it as:
“We lost it because we’re not speaking to the issues that Americans are so concerned about.
We’re not talking about, how do I not lose my house to medical bills? How do I afford to send my child to college? Joe Biden has attempted to correct that a little bit, especially with outreach to unions, but we became the party of the elites.
The Republicans and the extremists understand the angst of the American people, and they’re calling on that angst without any real plan. But then we presented no alternative.”
Yet another Democrat, whilst regarding the Harris campaign as “excellent” felt it was up against it because:
“Too many felt that ‘they were better off four years ago than now.”
One of the surprises of the vote is how little impact the bans on abortion had on the vote. Oddly, the destruction of Gaza played in Trump’s favour.
Others cited a general lack of appeal for Harris whilst others considered Americans are still not ready for a female president.
Some considered the assassination attempts played in Trump’s favour.
For many young people there was little on offer – no universal healthcare, no student loan waivers and no lowering of the cost of college.
For some improvement in financial stability, which they consider Trump offers, overcomes any reservation about the man.
Whilst some had strong pro-choice feelings the following was one view of other social issues:
“The DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] movement has completely radicalized itself, from initially wanting to push back against actual sexual and racial discrimination to pursuing an absurd, deeply unfair equality-of-outcome agenda. These extremists are alienating so many people with pretty liberal views.
I still identify as a liberal, but I’m a liberal with limits: society’s norms can’t be overhauled entirely just to suit tiny minorities and extreme political fringe movements. I hope Donald Trump will bring common sense and realism back into American political discourse.“
An elderly disabled person from Arizona fears what is to come:
“We’re talking about social security for the elderly, for disability, for veterans, death benefits for widows, food stamps. I live in a very poor area. People can’t feed their families without food stamps. People like me, my neighbors, this whole community, many people that voted for them, will have no way to survive.
Climate change affects everything, and if we don’t fix that, nothing else matters. He’s going to reverse everything that the Biden administration has set up to mitigate climate change and to make the transition to renewable energy.”
She also wonders about the inequity in American justice:
“If you’re a felon, you can’t get a good job, you have to put that on every job application, that label follows you around. But you can be president of the United States. It’s literally insane.”
A person from Pennsylvania sees Trump’s convictions differently:
“The people calling Trump ‘a convicted felon’ need to understand: many people like me voted for Trump not despite this kangaroo court conviction, but because of it. His trial was a shameful persecution of a political opponent by a Democratic prosecution. It fired me up.”
A person from Texas saw Trump as “the lesser evil”. He votes Republican because with them he sees better government, greater opportunity and less identity politics:
“Harris is from California, and I don’t want the USA to become like California. I’m a mixed-race person of colour and have never liked identity politics. I don’t care about race or gender or orientation; I want results.”
He also wants stronger borders and firmer action on “queue jumpers”. For him, the economy and immigration trump democracy and freedom to choose abortion. This Texan is frank about how he sees it:
“I have a ton of concerns about Trump, mostly about his personality and lack of morals, his weird tirades and personal attacks. He outright lies, a lot. But as long as he is able to improve the economy like in 2016 and improve on the immigration issue, I’ll consider it a win.”
The final comment from someone who voted for Harris and whose husband voted for Trump:
“The mistake of the Democrats has been to keep asking the question, ‘How could you?’ rather than, ‘What did we not understand about American voters?’
There are some Harris voters who are now saying they will have nothing to do with people who voted for Trump. I think this sort of behavior will be used by Trump voters to demonstrate how out of touch Harris voters are.
I don’t think Trump will provide the change that his voters were promised. But he is different than the status quo.”
A Conclusion of a Sort
The Divider is a measured tale – it reads like that of a barrister who is building a dispassionate but ironclad case of guilt. Baker and Glasser highlight significant flaws in Donald Trump personality and character. In the main, and they are not alone, they have focused on his attacks on the institutions and traditions of American democracy. They have highlighted Trump’s ignorance of the American Constitution and his desire to violate it.
Baker and Glasser have also alluded to another significant flaw in Trump. During his presidency he showed little leadership capability. In 2020, two crises confronted the United States – the covid-19 pandemic and the police violence against the black community. How did Donald Trump react to these crises? He denied them, blamed others for his failures to act and engendered fear of dismissal amongst his administration staff. This is what the authors say about this:
The people who were most fearful of his reign were those in the room with him, the ones he himself appointed, who behind his back compared him to a czar or a mob boss or even, in the case of his first White House counsel, a monster in a horror movie.
Leaders are not dispensers of fear but rather vitality, enthusiasm, energy and belief in the tasks at hand. Trump could only deny the truth, dispense fear to his staff and hatred to his enemies.
If he did lie awake at night it wasn’t because of some burden he felt about the hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen who were dying of the “Chinese” virus as he put it but that the virus would kill his re-election chances. Indeed it was all about him.
But it seems that the jury is not listening to the barrister’s powerful and overwhelmingly convincing argument of guilt. What is surprising about the “Trump message” is that so many have bought it. The majority of voters in November 2024 chose Trump over Harris and a record number of Americans chose not to vote. These two groups, in total, are two thirds of adult Americans. What is it in his message that is so alluring, so convincing?
I believe it is disillusionment with what conventional politics has delivered that is driving a desire for something else. Trump is seen as a kind of messiah. Yes, a flawed messiah perhaps but nevertheless a messiah.
This mood of despair and desperation is what I read into the Guardian survey responses. What is the reason for this despair?
Donald Trump, the obnoxious billionaire devoid of empathy, is an unlikely saviour of the downtrodden but this is a strange world. Certainly there is an obsession with the lives of the rich and famous but to think Trump is going to improve the lives of lower and middle class America seems a touch ridiculous. Isn’t it?
I consider a more complete answer to this conundrum lies in the way the wealth of the United States is being shared. The World Inequality Database (WID) group out of the Paris School of Economics undertakes continuous recording of income and wealth share for many countries. For United States and some other countries this database extends back to the 19th Century.
What the WID tells us about the United States that is relevant to the political circumstances of our time is that in 2023, the top 1% of the adult population took 20.7 % of the total income whilst the bottom 50% took 13.4% of the total income.
In 1975, this share of income was almost the reverse – the top 1% of the adult population took 10.4% of the total income whilst the bottom 50% took 20.4% of the total income. The top 1% share of national income has risen steadily over these seventy plus years.
The wealth inequality is even more extreme – in 2023 the top 1% of the adult population possessed 35% of the total wealth whilst the bottom 50% possessed just 1.5% of the total wealth. For the last seventy years the top 1% share has steadily increased but not at the expense of the bottom 50% which has remained mired at less than 2% share of national wealth. They are living day to day and have done so for a long time.
The middle class (middle 40%) share of wealth reached a maximum of 36% in 1985. Thereafter the middle classes’ share of wealth has declined to the current 28%. Over the same period the top 10% share of wealth has risen from 63% to 71%. This arise in the wealth share of the rich has been at the direct expense of the middle class.
What underwrites the feelings expressed in the Guardian survey is this extreme inequality. The American people have seen a continual decline in their financial circumstances over the last seventy years. They see “the system” as having failed them and they are becoming increasingly worried and, well, desperate.
No, they are not crazy. They are just people who are seeing their incomes stagnate, their job security decline, their access to health and education reduce and their opportunity to “the American Dream” fade into the fog of modern life. In fact the survey responses convey a high level of “normality” in the attitudes an aspirational middle class whose good sense is the benchmark of a large part of the bookshelf of contemporary American fiction.
These people are so pissed off, to use a technical term, that they will try anything. In this case “anything” is to vote for a billionaire narcissist who says he will make America great again by killing trade with tariffs, withdrawing from responsibility for Global security and by building a wall.
Donald Trump is not the first false prophet to hoodwink an entire society and almost certainly he won’t be the last. Similarly, this is not the first time that political leadership over decades has failed a society by not protecting their living standards. The greater failure is not the vote for Trump but the fact that those that could halt the decline in equality have not done so.
High quality political leadership is defined by strong vision for a better society and the courage and persistence to make it happen. Now, it has reached a point that malaise and despair have set in; fewer and fewer people believe in American Exceptionalism and more and more are desperate for change. As we know desperate people do desperate things.
This, I consider is the explanation for the seemingly bizarre occurrence of Donald Trump winning both the Electoral College and the popular votes in 2024.

Bernie O’Kane has a background in urban infrastructure investigation, planning, design and construction. He has worked in both the public and private sectors in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, and has a Masters in environmental planning and water resources from Stanford University.