David Pratt: What I learned from the US election result

On one level it’s entirely predictable, such was the concerted belief in so many quarters that America was sick and tired of Donald Trump’s antics and toxicity. 

These past weeks Kamala Harris herself repeatedly made that very point, insisting that the election was not just about turning the page, “but closing the page and the chapter on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.”

For so long now the prevailing view has been that Trump’s 2016 election victory was little more than a blip on the radar, albeit an embarrassing and often ugly one. 

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Put it down to a moment of collective accidental aberration, many pundits and politicians alike both in the US and abroad kept insisting. It will pass, America will get over it and win through for better, safer times, went the perceived wisdom. 

By the time of Joe Biden’s ousting of Trump in 2020, things seemed to be getting back on track, again albeit after an unsettling start.

But looking back now, 2016 was clearly anything but an accident. On the contrary, it was then what the American people wanted and it’s unequivocally what they voted for again this week. 

It mattered not that Trump was castigated for his misdemeanours or a convicted felon, it mattered even less that he was characterised as a political snake oil salesman in it for what he could get and damn the people of America. 

For the simple inescapable fact is that those same American people in sufficient numbers, far from turning their backs on what Trump was selling, queued up for more. 

Amidst all the warnings of him being a threat to democracy they liked what he was offering. They warmed to this denunciation of illegal immigrants, they accepted his disdain for efforts to tackle climate change, they bought into his less-than-reassuring take on not supporting an abortion ban, they went along with his threat to impose tariffs on all imports to the United States and they fell in behind Trump’s criticism of the liberal elite’s approach to identity.

Above all, as Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review, observed in The New York Times, they agreed with Trump’s take that the time has come to “evict a failed leadership class from power ... Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago”.

And much as it might pain me personally to admit it, he’s right. For Trump in his campaign tapped into the frustrations that so many Americans feel with the institutions and orthodoxies private as well as public, that have dominated the corridors of power in the US for so long. Those orthodoxies are now vulnerable like never before, and in bringing that about, Trump carried with him not just the predominately white voters that first brought him to office in 2016, but a now diverse assembly of America’s citizens. 

He was able for example to draw support from both urban and rural voters at levels notably higher than in his contest against Biden in 2020. And according to the American magazine Politico, network exit polls showed nearly one in five Trump voters on Tuesday were people of colour, quite a shift from his first election in 2016, when about 13% of Trump voters were people of colour.

Among Hispanic voters too, Trump made striking inroads, improving his margin by 10 percentage points compared with 2020, according to CNN’s exit poll. And for the second time in three election cycles, the American public voted against a female Democratic nominee in favour of  a man whose misogynism is one of his chief character traits.

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The bottom line here is that ultimately this election tells us as much about the American people as it does about the man they have returned to office. In other words it stands as a real insight into the collective political psyche of so many Americans and what's on view is not a pretty sight. 

It was left to US comedian and Trump impersonator JL Cauvin to give a blistering response on social media that summed up the concerns and frustration of those other many Americans who decided not to vote for the former president.  

“America is about to re-elect the worst person who has ever held the office of the presidency and one of the worst people we've ever produced ... Americans decided it was hateful enough, and let’s be honest, stupid enough to put Trump back in office,” Cauvin said in an online video interview. 

That Trump’s campaign characteristically capitalised on the cultural schisms and tribal politics that have bedevilled America for so long now, and were in great part of Trump’s own making, bodes ill now for the country’s future. As his track proves, only the most naive or foolish would imagine that he will now rein in his worst and most noxious political instincts – far from it. 

There will be few, if any, constraints on Trump now in his pursuit of vengeance against rivals and critics. Come January 20 and his inauguration Trump’s America will double down on the worst political polarisation that has characterised the country at any point since the Civil War. 

This too before the impact of his presidency in places as far apart as Ukraine and Gaza. Trump made no secret of what he intended to do were he re-elected.

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He might have left office in 2021 a pariah, but three years later he has an unprecedented political comeback. That by any standards is extraordinary, or as he himself put it in the early hours of yesterday morning, “a political victory that our country has never seen before”.

Yes, it is a political victory the likes of which has rarely been seen before in the US, and yes, a page and chapter has been closed, not as promised by Kamala Harris, but by Trump himself.

Let’s be just be clear here. this didn’t happen at random, Americans put Trump back in office and that tells us a lot about the country.

All the post-mortem analysis of what the Democrats did wrong is a moot point now. This needs to be framed accurately, not as a defeat for the Democrats but as a swift, conclusive Trump victory made possible because the American people made it happen. 

That they might well rue the day they did so remains to be seen. But the world and America’s allies especially, would be smart to keep a much more wary and discerning eye on the land of the “free” from now on.