Disconcerting States #4

Day 3, USA: November 6, 2024 — Elected Day.

By John Dean

Someone woke me up this morning and said:

“You want to hear some good news?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled.

“I don’t have any.”

Shocked, I jumped out of bed, scrambled to the living room. I saw the news splashed all red, white and blue across the TV screen. Specially red.

Trump won.

Before I try to digest the indigestible here, hear perhaps the best initial response to this 2020 election outcome. The reaction and statement of the courageous, staunch Republican Liz Cheney. Who had the guts to champion Kamala Harris during the race.

Cheney posted on X today — the Elected Day — 6 Nov 2024 — at 2:04 p.m.:

Our nation’s democratic system functioned last night and we have a new President-elect. All Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections. We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years. Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.

Meaning: those of us who have lost today, now live on and rejoice to fight another day. A new struggle now begins.

We have all the reason in the world to feel shocked. But this is politics. Like soccer, football, basketball, business. There are winners and losers. The civic order fluctuates. It may even be warfare by another name. But the struggles continues.

Those of us who care about the political and cultural life of the nation should be prepared to see President Trump do as he said he would do. Take him at his word. (Repeat: take him at his word.) He has promised deep-rooted reforms. By ripping out the old mainsprings. He has promised to try to create the most thorough and serious restructuring of the US federal government since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On very different terms, in a very different direction.

Is the nation ready? Do The People know what they have done by re-electing this man? Who is not “a blip of history” as Biden said. Will the new Trumpian administration be capable of achieving its envisioned, serrated-edge changes? Can Liz Cheney’s “guardrails” hold?

Please reflect why his opponent lost. Kamala Harris fought the good fight. Sharp as the edge of a Damascus blade. But it was not enough. The majority of Americans think and feel differently than the Democratic Party expected. Ms. Harris was policy specific but hazy-dazy with all her noble talk about “democracy”. Great stuff, but did it help her win?

What the American people mostly care about, as New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia once said, is whether or not the politician can fix the hole in the street. That’s the promise Trump repeatedly made. Not the philosophical nature of Democracy from the daughter of two academics. But that darn god-awful hole.

Biden’s switch to Harris as candidate was a strong gesture. As was the Democrat’s idea of country over party. But ideas alone don’t win the presidency in America. Her schtick did not convince most voters that she’s the right choice. Harris’ progressive position went too far for most Americans. She did not even win as many women as Joe Biden did in 2020.

Isn’t that astonishing? The female vote for her declined? Trump won a quarter of the women who said they were pro-choice. Why?

Biden and Harris had shepherded two problems for the last four years — the inflated economy, the extraordinary immigration influx — and did not do a good job in kitchen table reality and popular opinion here. Voter’s reaction overwhelming judged their failure. You live here, you see that.

Those two conditions were the thorns that got under most people’s skins. Plus, Ms. Harris did not distance herself enough from the incumbent president Joe Biden. She stood by her man. And at the end of the day, most of the voters decide she promised more of the same old same old. Trump may not be the savior. But he’s sure a change agent.

Dear reader, how and why the improbable comeback of Donald Trump? You partly heard it: economy and inflation woes. Add to this his personality cult built up over a decades long career in American popular culture. A TV star who’s part soap opera, part trailer park, part wrestling match, part casino owner, and part Elmer Gantry. All things to all men and women. Among America’s pantheon of heroes, he’s the hero of the salesman-businessman. Sure, who’s sometimes a flim-flam artist too.

Add to this how well he hugs the flag. Kissed the babies. Chased the girls. Loves God. Performed every kind of patriotic kitsch you could possibly imagine. And “took a bullet for America” in a failed assassination attempt brilliantly and suspiciously executed with theatrical gusto and great photo ops.

You can’t make this stiff up, as house speaker Paul Ryan, who served as the 54th speaker of the United States House of Representatives, once said about Trump’s antics. Trump has been outrageous, over the top. And it’s worked.  Even if it did, as John McCain warned, bring the crazies out of the woodwork.

Add now at the end of the electoral race how he won the four key battleground, electoral college votes of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Add in more of the gender issue and race.  Men favored Trump about fifty-four percent versus forty-four percent who favored Harris. Add in the fact that Trump won the support of thirty percent of voters of color. And won white voters by an average higher than Harris — fifty-five percent to Harris’ forty-three percent. Add in first-time voters who decided for Trump, 54% vs. 45% for Harris.

Add in, add in. Statistics are not enough. Have you followed this shock so far? Because the after shocks have just begun.

Statistics will be measured and re-calibrated over the next few weeks, months and years with rocket-science minutiae of details. Statistics, statistics, there’s more than numbers to Trump’s success and this profound America shift.  Statistics are the temporary wash of the windshield wiper. They are never enough. Life on the ground makes the final calls.

Watch the dollar signs, people. The stock market loves the way he works. Today — Trump’s Elected Day — it went bananas in delirious promotion of his success.

What does this mix and mass and mess say about the violence inherent in so many of Trump’s messages about America? Will they be activated? Will the people he plans to get at or to pardon be dealt with as he has promised? Is it pay back time for Donald Trump?

Will we see the insurrection of January 6, 2021, officially deemed an heroic action — even if it tried to break the spine of the US Constitution? Is there any limit to what this man might do?

Calm down. Wait and see. Trump talks a big talk, but he doesn’t always walk the walk. Part of his adroit political game is now you see him, now you don’t. He’s nothing if not a shadowy figure.

Our new forty-seventh president’s plans cannot succeed without the cooperation of Congress, Senate, the Supreme Court, and Public Opinion. “Public sentiment is everything,” said Lincoln. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.

Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” Some of these parts in the vast US mechanism he has managed brilliantly up until now. He made impeachment into a billboard advertisement.

But for how long and how well can Trump maintain his frenetic pace?  What will his tired brain cells do? Will J. D. Vance have to take over? Does Trump have the physical and mental resilience to carry out his strange new vision of America and the world?

He played the long game remarkably well, with startling surprises for his opponents and doubting Thomases — and he has won. But can he carry through?

Think about plans. How Trump is not as policy empty-headed as some people claim he is. Perhaps it was part of his process of running for president to not state his policy clearly. But that doesn’t mean that his policy wasn’t there.

Enter Project 2025. Potentially Trump’s master plan — to radically downsize the federal government, revamp the tax system, enforce immigration restrictions with a vigor not seen since America’s Red Scare of 1919-1920, seriously downsize social welfare programs and energy policy, dig deep into the roots of the USA’s culture war tangles and uproot all liberal tendencies. Can his Project 2025 be realized coast to coast in today’s diverse America?

Last but not least, the global, earth-huge repercussions of his election.

See Donald Trump the world leader who has been charged with thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree in violation of New York laws. The outlaw president who will lead an increasingly divided, nuclear, war-torn world. You cannot make these things up. This is beyond a narrative even the novelist Kurt Vonnegut could have dreamed up.

Will his election change the world internationally as we now know it? It’s more than likely. Not tomorrow, but gradually.

Just consider, could Germany and Japan soon demand nuclear weapons to protect themselves from Russian threats once America’s protective shield is withdrawn because of Trumps new defense policies? Say the explosive names. Ukraine, Israel, Gaza. What will happen there now?

A new history begins as President Forty Seven installs himself, his administration and his America. Here’s a road the world has never taken before.  Thus begins the Twenty-First American Century with a vengeance. With international repercussions enormous. With vigorous, revisionary promises and the pioneering of strange new ways.

Our struggle has just begun. We’re all in this together. As Bette Davis once said in the movie All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts; we’re in for a bumpy night.”