Mr. Trump's Second Term: Brief Reflections on a Successful Campaign by or Around the President Elect

 

Pix credit New York Times

It appears that Mr. Trump will serve a second term in office. Mrs. Harris, the current Vice President will address her supporters, and the nation, later on Wednesday. There will be much by way of analysis, and even more by way of prognostication. There will be plenty of time for both. I offer neither. 

Instead I suggest, in preliminary form, some fo the factors that may have played a part in returning Mr. Trump to office.

1. The demonification of Mr. Trump. Almost from the moment of Mr. Trump's electoral defeat in 2020, and certainly after January 2021, Mr. Trump's enemies and opponents engaged in a vigorous campaign of demonification. The object was to transform Mr. Trump into the antithesis of the patriotic American.  He was, in the language of some an enemy of the Republic, and of the people, or at least those that mattered. That demonification intensified through the end of the campaign with the usual comparisons to the hierarchy of narrative trope figures that are most opposed to the American ideal. The problem was that the campaign appears to have had a positive effect on those inclined to despise Mr. Trump; on everyone else the effect was less pronounced and might well have produced the opposite of its intended effect.

2. The dangers of the juridification of politics.  The enemies of Mr. Trump might have been satisfied with engaging in the sort of demonification that worked so well on Mr. Nixon.  The idea ight have then been that Mr. Trump would have slowly descended back into obscurity, a historical object, reduced to writing irate letters t the editors of local news media and appearing on television and on the conference circuit.  But Mr. Trump's enemies chose a different path.  They began to apply the law as often and as broadly as possible. What to many appeared to be the application of the principle that no one was above the law, the application of that principle over and over and over again, and by people and institutions who could barely hide their antipathy nor their politically tinged objectives, began to produce the sense in some that the law and legal process might have been instrumentalized in ways that might appear to be objectionable., and threatening to a vision of the relationship between law and politics in an idealized version of the US. This tendency was augmented by what appeared to be the uneven application of prosecutorial discretion.

3. The narratives of populist revolution. The enemies of Mr. Trump sough to transform the hooliganism and violence of January 6th into something more profoundly threatening to the Republic.  That was a reasonable strategy. At the same time the risk was that on the one hand it suggested a fragility in the Republic that might bear unfortunate consequences, and it tended to equate the strength of the Republic with its buildings. Yet a Republic is not the monuments it builds to reflect its greater glory. The narrative did have an unintended consequence: it significantly strengthened the narratives of popular democracy exercised through voting, and thus to a heightened sense of the need to vote, and of the greater need to protect the integrity of the franchise.  But, it appears, that narrative was as successfully embraced among Mr. Trump's supporters as it was among those who despised Mr. Trump and everything they insisted he stood for. 

4. Garbage in/Garbage Out. Mr. Trump's enemies committed the same error that produced the shock results of the 2016 election. They were so focused on their ability to extract knowledge from the ata they collected that they failed to see that the environment they produced in which data was to be extracted created substantial incentives to either ignore data sources, or for data sources to lie.  Here one sees the consequences of the 4 year effort to demonize and deploy the judicial power of the State against Mr. Trump.  Many people would have been disinclined (in now appears, again, in retrospect) be be truthful or forthcoming to pollsters or even with friends and employers in an environment in which the consequences of that openness might be quite negative.  On the other hand, Mr. Trump's enemies appeared to be so desperate to have their own views vindicated that they might have, again in retrospect, skewed their data collection and analytics to "tell" them what they wanted to hear. That is always fatal.  And in this case decisively so. It is also a warning to those who seek to rely on data and data based analytics about the dangers of ego or desire in analytics. 

5. The Jewish problem. This one is likely to be debated for decades.  The choice of Mr. Walz (Minnesota) as Mrs. Harris' running mate was not a bad one.  And in the end he might have been a better choice than Mr. Shapiro (Pennsylvania). The decision to make that choice in the context of a debate within the Democratic Party about its approach to the Israel-Hamas War turned both into avatars of the politics around which some supposed the decision revolved.  The costs of that decision will be hard to gauge. I suspect it is a number reater than zero. And it appeared not to have produced the positive effects intended--at least not as great a positive effect as hoped.

6. The Versailles effect.  In an essay of 200 I noted the disastrous consequences of the "Versailles effect"(Forbidden Cities). Elites that wall themselves off (physically or virtually) within structures of their own creation, where they exist in a world far removed from others run the risk that they will be strangers in their own land. In democratic Republics where the masses still count for something--whatever the power of guidance may be among techno-bureaucracies, social and media elites, and academics who believe themselves invited guests in these palaces--these palaces, these forbidden cities may either be ignored or displaced.  That was a great error of the 2016 campaign for the Democrats (the "despicables"); it appears to have repeated itself in the 2024 campaign ("garbage").  One would have thought they might have learned to mask the hierarchies and leadership power. They did not.  On the other hand, the election appears to nudge that elite power back, at least marginally, from the public to the private techno-bureaucracies.

 7. The Issues that weren't. Mr. Trump's enemies overestimated the power of certain key social issues (among them abortion rights), and, more importantly, Mr. Trump's effective counter.  Mr. Trump's wrapping himself in state's rights--the federalism and localism principle--as a counter to the Democratic Party efforts to paint him as an anti-abortion zealot at the federal level did not get far off the ground.  More interesting was the failure of the Project 2025 to capture the imagination. In the end, that was effectively an elite issue (see the Versailles effect above) and it proved difficult to use it effectively in the campaign--sort of like Party Platforms, the half life of which is short indeed.

8. Borders matter now. Mr. Trump's opponents underestimated the power of the border issue for the election. And they were singularly unable to detach Mrs. Harris from what was effectively portrayed as the Biden administration failures with respect to the border. That issue did not cut in ways that were anticipated; especially among voters from the Latino community. Related to that was the remarkable inability of the Democratic Party to retain the level of support among minority communities they thought they had.  A large part of the problem was the product of success.  The successful (there is still a lot of work to be done certainly) of minority communities into the larger economic and social mainstream at least at the margins also changed the basket of issue sof importance to them.  Minority communities of small and medium sized firms, of families seeking to educate their kids, etc, have the same basket of concerns as other middle class people though in contextually different ways.  That was not exploited by Mr. Trump's opponents.

9. The enigmatic Mrs. Harris. To some extent Mrs. Harris began the campaign already at a disadvantage.  The way she was selected as the Democratic Party candidate and relations with the current office holder created negatives that were never fully overcome.  Mrs. Harris came late to the issues and her careful relationship with the press organs made it easier to paint her as remote, ineffective, and unprepared. Certainly one could argue that these tropes were more easily deployed given gender prejudices. But that would not have been unknown to Democratic Party leaders and their retinues of consultants. On top of everything else, what proved to be an ineffective campaign and an inability to show their candidate in the best possible light proved significant. 

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