Five reasons Trump won America

The most interesting ideas I've heard so far

Continuing in my attempts to bring you ideas you won’t find elsewhere, I spent last weekend trying to write an interesting column about the hikoi. I ran it past so many people before publishing it that I eventually got bored and abandoned it. Then Tuesday came and literally every person was talking and opining about it and many of them knew much more than me and I thought thank God I didn’t publish. I’m sure I would have regretted offering a take, no matter how considered.

Sometimes it’s easier to write about something far away. A frustrated friend messaged me this week and said “everything I see on mainstream American TV - SNL, Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Stewart, Oliver says Trump is a dangerous maniac and every fibre of me thinks Trump is a dangerous maniac but then “America” has decided, unequivocally, that he should lead the country having already had a 4 year trial period of him makes me realise I'm genuinely not sure what America is anymore. Those TV shows are not a self-selecting, echo chamber bubble - they’re the most watched comedy shows in the country”.

I follow various people online who I’d roughly characterise as “liberals who no longer tend to agree with the Democratic party”. Having spent a couple of weeks reading their election autopsies I thought it might be useful to share some of their most interesting ideas about why Trump won, supplemented by some of my own analysis.

This should be obvious but out of caution I will point out these are not reasons Trump deserved to win, or reasons I would have voted for Trump. 

My friend continued “I can already notice myself starting to question whether, if the majority of America think this is right, does it actually mean it’s worth considering their wilder opinions more seriously?”. What I said to them and the message of this column really, is that I don’t believe in the phrase Vox Populi, Vox Dei - the voice of the people is the voice of God. I don’t think we need to take the president elect or his ideas seriously because people voted for him, but I think we need to take those voters seriously, and that we might all benefit from understanding what they saw in Trump.

So why did Trump win?

The working class voted for their families

An argument I often have, even among friends, is whether you should vote for your own interests or the interest of the country. I wonder if this US election was about a third, even more motivating option: voting to protect your family. Much was made of the way a Trump-supporting comedian made fun of Puerto Rico and I saw opinion pieces suggesting it would make all the difference given the number of Puerto Ricans in the swing state of Pennsylvania. In fact PRs and other Hispanics swung towards Trump. Many of these voters are in low wage jobs that are particularly vulnerable to uncontrolled immigration - if you were in the voting booth and choosing between the side who gets offended on your behalf and the side who say they’ll go to any lengths to kick out the hundred guys lining up for your job, it’s easier to imagine why you might have ticked Trump. 

People pushed back against “woke” culture

I know, woke is a horribly loaded word that usually says a lot about the person using it, but I can’t think of another shorthand for the world view and systemic changes that have changed American life in all areas from education to sport to the workplace. Most reasonable people think these changes are well intentioned and are designed to address inequities everybody would like to see go away, but I think it’s fair to say Americans are fearful about publicly questioning any aspect of this new life - where the boundaries or balance might lie, whether any of the ideas created to help disadvantaged groups might in fact be making life worse for them. I interviewed an American psychologist today who believes “cancel culture has reached the therapy couch - patients and clinicians need to feel free from social and political litmus tests to engage in a productive therapeutic process”. If Americans are afraid to have these conversations even in a confidential, one-on-one therapy session, is it possible that a private vote might feel like a rare chance to express your doubts? 

The Economy is different now

Ahead of the election it became popular to point out that the US economy was actually doing very well - but Americans were unwilling to admit it, or to credit Biden for it. I wonder if there’s a decoupling (sorry couldn’t think of a less pretentious word) going on where a strong economy no longer translates to the lives of ordinary people. We gave up on trickle down theory a long time ago but I do think we’ve generally felt like when the sharemarket is booming we’re all doing pretty well. These days the markets are enjoying sustained, multi-year highs and yet people can’t afford their rent or groceries. Unemployment is low but nobody can make ends meet. The ongoing concentration of wealth and power is arguably responsible for much of this - Dems aren’t solely to blame for that but them telling people they should be grateful for the current economy must have felt pretty alienating. Hearing Kamala say she’d do nothing different to Biden may have been terrifying.

I’m not an economist so if you are, feel free to feed back on my above analysis which is based largely on vibes.

Trump went to where the young men were

Twenty years ago that list of comedians my friend sent me would have been a pretty blanket way of reaching young men, but now they are in different places: watching MMA and related content, playing games and watching related content, listening to podcasts where dudes hang out. None of these places are overtly political but they sometimes lapse into it and when they do, it’s Trumpy. Trump’s decision to sit down with Joe Rogan, the biggest male media phenomenon of our time, on Rogan’s own terms for three hours is typical of the strategy (can you ever call Trump’s chaotic moves a strategy?) he took. Kamal got invited on Rogan too and said she’d only do it for one hour, if he flew to her - it didn’t happen. Reportedly her reluctance were because her people thought a full show was too risky. Hard to imagine what could have been more risky than giving up the chance to speak to that audience.

Mainstream media can seem unfair to Trump

There is plenty to criticise him on - refusing to concede an election, modeling himself on the worst leaders in the world, being self-absorbed to a point where it’s a national security threat - but I think much of the coverage takes anything he does, decontextualises it and encourages people to be outraged by it. Remember in the debate when he said Kamala wanted to fund sex change operations for illegal aliens in prison? How everyone laughed at him on that one. But it quickly became clear that this was in fact true (I’m making no judgment on the rightness or wrongness of this, just observing that it was actually her policy). This stuff happens quite often, I think. For the soft Trump voter or the undecided, it’s possible that the justifiable criticism of his behaviour and character had less impact because they felt the media were out to get him.

A footnote to this, lots of people think Trump is legitimately funny. “They’re eating the cats and dogs” was mostly held up as a sign of his racist derangement, but many people would I think have interpreted it as a funny line and not worried too much if it was true or not. Sometimes, especially in a world that is clipped up for consumption, the facts and context are beside the point if the soundbite has its own entertainment value when it travels.

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So now we have him, and the world is hoping for the best. As Tim Miller said on Bill Maher’s show recently - even if there was only a two percent chance that Trump would cancel future elections and become a dictator as he has seemed to suggest he wants to do, that was too much of a chance to consider voting for him.

Are we thinking about another country’s politics too much? I don’t feel guilty about the time I spend going deep, because I think so much of our own world is being played out on that stage, but safely enough away that we’re less likely to get emotional talking about it. If you think Trump getting elected is a bad thing, it might be interesting to look at how some of the above patterns are playing out here. It’ll be interesting to see if the Democrats learn any lessons about why they lost so badly, and how they might change in four years to make sure it doesn’t happen next time.