Why Donald Trump Won the 2024 Election

In the previous part of this hopefully short series, I wrote that there were two sets of largely non-overlapping reasons why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election and Donald Trump won. In that post, the focus was mainly on how Democrats made a series of stunningly bad decisions and administrative choices over the past three years. These unfortunate decisions and choices basically doomed their chances for 2024. However, that is only half of the story because a different but equally interesting set of reasons made it almost inevitable that Trump would win in 2024. As you will soon see, there was an almost perfect complimentary between these two sets of reasons. With this out of the way, let us start by talking about the central but often overlooked reason why Trump and the Republicans won this election.

1] It has been eight years since Trump won for the first time in 2016 and almost four since he lost in 2020, and some might not want to remember how most people in this country perceived his first term. To put it very bluntly, the majority saw Trump as a mediocre and moderate Republican president- albeit with a highly colorful personality. Most importantly, nobody saw him as a wannabe dictator or some highly intelligent and scheming villain. This fact will become increasingly relevant as we go further into the reasons he won this election. Furthermore, until the COVID crisis and subsequent overreaction of 2020- his presidency was generally well regarded by most people who work real jobs. Only small groups who watch news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC or read NYT, WP saw him as some sort of uniquely bad president.

Reality and facts were however inadequate to stop Democrats from desperately trying to paint Trump as a unique danger to ‘democracy’. While this course of action might have satisfied their niche of hardcore voters, it did massive and likely irreversible harm to their credibility among rest of the population. This is the main reason why every manufactured scandal about Trump from “Russiagate” and his affairs with some porn star/s to questions about the business dealings of his family with Saudi royal family had no public traction outside a small minority of loud Democratic voters. It did not help that many of the “liberal” celebrities and politicians accusing him of impropriety, corruption and bad behavior were seen as dishonest hypocrites with equally sordid personal lives and business dealings. Many also remembered that these same celebrities and politicians were very friendly with Trump as late as 2015.

2] The second major mistake made by Democrats in regards to Trump was their laughably dumb decision to try and prosecute him for all sorts of made-up “crimes” after he lost in 2020. We are not going to go into any of these cases right now, suffice to say that the accusations were so poorly thought out and lacking in evidence that they were unable to actually put him behind bars. So why did the Democrats come up with the dumb idea that prosecuting Trump on a bunch of clearly inadequate charges by incompetent prosecutors was going to stop him from winning the presidency? The simple answer is that they were delusional enough to think that this sort of lawfare, usually funded by USA-based NGOs in poor countries, had a chance of succeeding against Trump in USA. As it turn out, this sort of stuff does not even work in poor countries.. But we are still left with the question- what was the worldview which drove them to even attempt something this ridiculous?

The answer requires us to first understand the real constituencies of the modern Democratic party. While it was once rightfully seen as a champion of the working class, this has not been the case since at least the early 1990s- if not earlier. For the last three decades, it is fair to say that the Democrats represent the interest of the very rich, corporations and upper-middle class. While they might give some lip service about how looking out for the working class and minorities-especially around election time, but nobody expect blacks are naïve enough believe them. More relevantly, the democratic party is now mostly staffed (at all levels) by what is best described as white women from upper-middle class backgrounds who went to certain coastal universities. Sure.. there are some men in that party’s structure too- but they don’t have any independent opinions or don’t express them.

My point is that the modern Democratic party apparatus has the worldview of liberal white (or wannabe white) women from the upper-middle class who went to “famous” universities that reward extreme ideological conformity. Once you comprehend this fact, it becomes very easy to see why they thought that dumb lawfare and continuous media coverage of these cases would work against Trump. But they did not realize, or want to accept, that almost everybody else in this country detests them. This is why Trump was able to make noticeably bigger vote gains among Asians, Hispanics and black men- in addition the white working class than in 2020 or 2016. And yes.. it is also one of reasons why Kamala Harris repelled so many voters. She reminded them of the ubiquitous (often ‘diverse’) office HR lady of dubious qualifications who gets paid to abuse and belittle other employees while pretending to be liberal and inclusive.

3] In addition to portraying Trump as some wannabe fascist, danger to ‘democracy’ and trying to get him disqualified through lawfare- the Democrats also tried very hard to downplay the almost fatal assassination attempt made on him in July. While they were able to succeed in the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media, they were unable to have any effect on its coverage on alternative media. The suspiciously poor security detail assigned to him on that day and a highly inadequate subsequent investigation performed by the FBI, made many voters who were partisan democrats perceive it as an attempt by the Democratic party and ‘deep-state’ to subvert the electoral process. This perception in combination with the previously mentioned attempts at lawfare against Trump caused a lot of people to tune whatever else democrats were saying about him. Many just started assuming the opposite of whatever ‘pundits’, ‘experts’ and ‘journalists’ were saying or writing about him.

4] Many voters also perceived that the first term of Trump was deliberately sabotaged by Democrats, the mainstream media and various institutions. Even the infamous January 6th riot is now widely seen as deliberate provocation engineered by FBI agents. Similarly the legal persecution of many of Trump’s allies after 2020 was interpreted by most voters as deliberate abuse of power by Democrats. Furthermore, the belief that 2020 election was stolen from Trump has become much stronger and widespread with every passing year. Subsequent revelations about how various mysterious NGOs and liberal billionaires “fortified” the elections by secretly spending hundreds of millions to influence the 2020 election in addition to censoring Trump and his supporters on social media platforms has not helped public trust in the system. There is also the now well-known scandal of how corrupt Democratic partisans such as Anthony Fauci and previous head of FDA (Scott Gottlieb) actively conspired with many Pharma companies to delay approval of COVID vaccines before the 2020 election. Such public deception in combination with prolonged school closures, vaccine mandates, mask mandates etc during the COVID pandemic have permanently damaged the public image of many liberal institutions, professions and the Democratic party in the minds of voters. Voting for Trump in 2024 became a form of revenge on the corrupt, parasitic and incompetent establishment- even more so than in previous elections, such as 2016 or 2020.

A further problem with the Democratic “strategy” for 2024 was their almost complete inability to address the issues raised by Trump and Republicans in a manner that was even vaguely acceptable to the median voter. As mentioned in the previous post, they had no real solutions to pressing issues such as rampant inflation and unprecedented levels of illegal immigration. Their positions on a multitude of economic and cultural issues also alienated them from the median voter. While such handicaps from the Democratic side would have helped any Republican candidate to some extent, they were especially helpful to Trump because many voters also saw him as the victim of political persecution by democrats- making him into some sort of truth teller. Notably, none of these problems were as bad when Trump was president the previous time. In summary, most voters just wanted a return to a slightly better era from the recent past and therefore chose Trump over Kamala. In a darkly comic twist, almost every single major policy decision made by democrats in past four years unintentionally drove voters to make that choice.

What do you think? Comments?