Deplorable no more

The politically unthinkable has happened. Again. Donald Trump has become only the second US presidential candidate ever to win a second term from exile. And how.

After much talk of a close race and weeks of recounts and litigation, the Trump campaign was able to declare victory over Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris in the early hours of this morning, after a strong showing in Pennsylvania put it within touching distance of an Electoral College majority. Republicans have also retaken the Senate and seem on track to prevail in the House. Trump is also odds on to win the popular vote, something else that was thought impossible.

Votes are still being counted, and yet already this election has been another crushing blow to midwit received wisdom. You do not have to be a Trump supporter to have taken an outsized pleasure in watching the realisation dawn on the ‘centrist sensibles’ – the most uninsightful and insufferable people in public life – that Trump was once again going to upend their smug prognostications.

No doubt, this is a political comeback for the ages – and a defiance of political gravity. Since his victory in 2016, Trump has been smeared as a fascist and a Russian asset. He was impeached twice. His own anti-democratic tantrum after his 2020 loss was supposed to cast him into the wilderness for good. As was his legal witch-hunting at the hands of Democratic prosecutors. If that weren’t enough, this election campaign brought him two assassination attempts. Now he is on the verge of receiving a historic democratic mandate, placing the Republicans in full political control.

It’s a remarkable achievement, and one that reflects a far more sophisticated and serious campaign team this time around than in previous years, where the wingnuts often took centre stage and Trump’s worst instincts were given free rein. At the same time, the fact this result has so flabbergasted those who are paid to follow and comment on politics speaks to how clueless they were to begin with.

First there’s the bread-and-butter issues. Kamala Harris was in essence asking for re-election after the administration in which she has served presided over a 25 per cent rise in food prices and chaos at the southern border, which is now making its presence felt not just in border states, but also in towns and cities across the US – as strained local services struggle to cope with a historically unprecedented influx.

Overcoming this would have taken a politician of remarkable instinct and skill. Instead, the Democrats put up Kamala Harris, who apparently has no idea what she thinks about anything, even less idea what she is doing, and talks like a malfunctioning Hallmark-card message generator. That the Democratic Party tried to pass off this empty pantsuit as a political giant, set to bring ‘joy’ to a weary nation, betrays a contempt for voters that is even deeper than we imagined.

When all else failed, the Democrats fell back on their favoured, sure-fire strategy: peddling hysterical fever dreams about Trump being the second coming of Adolf Hitler and blasting the electorate as scum for even thinking about voting for him. Hillary Clinton’s infamous 2016 ‘basket of deplorables’ jibe looks almost tame in comparison to outgoing president Joe Biden’s recent slur against Trump’s ‘garbage’ supporters. Apparently, this isn’t a great way to win over would-be voters. Go figure.

Since 2016, America has endured a top-down attempt to delegitimise half the country, particularly the working classes, for daring to disobey their ‘betters’. In the process, the Democrats have gone from being an inept, snobbish party of the ruling class to a vengeful and unhinged one – latching on to absurd conspiracy theories (à la Russiagate) and a reactionary identity politics (BLM, defund the police, gender ideology) to try to explain away their failings and burnish their crumbling moral authority. Then they enlisted Big Tech in a crusade against dissent under the guise of fighting ‘misinformation’. In the process, they have only shown how right voters were to reject them in 2016.

You do not need to buy into the Trumpists’ fear-mongering talk of this election being America’s last stand against Dem-led dictatorship to see why this emphatic victory matters. It shows that populism is going nowhere. That 2016 wasn’t a blip that can be quietly moved on from. That working-class voters are ‘not going back’, to pinch a slogan from the Harris campaign, to being ignored and having their concerns about deindustrialisation, immigration and the woke cultural revolution dismissed as the death rattle of old, white dinosaurs. (Trump’s gains among ethnic minorities have certainly put paid to that caricature.)

After all the smears and gaslighting and censorship and demonisation, the ‘deplorables’ have refused to get back in their basket. They have turned what was hitherto dismissed as a one-off emotional spasm into a sustained challenge to the complacency, neglect and cant of a rotten political establishment. The unthinkable has become the thinkable. And things will never be the same again.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater