So much noise, money, fury, punditry. No one knew anything. AGAIN.
It was. Not. Close. Donald Trump won 51 percent of the vote while indicted, guilty of felonies, promising to jail enemies, deport millions and, finally, fellating a microphone.
Voters did not care. They chose anger over joy. They chose chaos over competence. They chose the wildest wild card over the urgent warnings from the political, economic, cultural and media establishment not to put Trump back in power.
Understand: This is not a divide between Right and Left. It is a divide between those with power and those who feel insistently disempowered.
Pay attention while you sit in mourning and shock. Here is an incomplete list of those who warned against voting for Trump, and urged a vote for Kamala Harris. It is, broadly speaking, the power base of the country.
- John Kelly, former Trump chief of staff
- Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman
- Mark Milley, Trump’s former chairman of joint chiefs
- Mark Esper, former Trump Defense Secretary
- Mike Pence, former Trump Vice President
- Cassidy Hutchinson, former Trump aide
- The New York Times; The Economist; The New Yorker; The Atlantic
- 10 former generals who called Trump “a danger to our national security and democracy.”
- 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists who warned “Trump’s economic plans would reignite inflation” –
- Matt Drudge
- Taylor Swift
- Bad Bunny
- Lady Gaga
- LeBron James
- The cast of “The West Wing”
- Jennifer Lopez
- Beyonce
- Eminem
- Cardi B
All of them, at the end of the day, were rejected. The man won the popular vote. It means that to most people in this country, he’s popular.
“This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip,” wrote the New York Times’ Lisa Lerer in an incisive analysis. “Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.”
She reminded readers of Trump’s promises: “He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters.”
And indeed, Donald Trump appeared in Palm Beach last night and said this:
“I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”
Kamala Harris: 66,455,012 votes (47.5%)
Donald Trump: 71,391,150 votes (51%)
Today, my email inbox and phone have exploded with people, actually all women, asking the same thing: How is this possible?
It is an understandable reaction. The decisive choice of Trump leaves in its wake a feeling of abandonment. A bewilderment that this country could choose someone so resoundingly negative, angry and full of vitriol. Don’t we want someone hopeful? Positive? Able to see the good in our country?
Don’t the men of this country care about the women of this country?
“I’m scared,” my 24-year-old niece texted me from Ohio.
“Racism and misogyny are actually ok with a lot of Americans,” was the grim conclusion of a journalist friend.
I keep seeing references to “low information” voters – people who voted without knowing very much about the issues or the candidates – and that seems true. Otherwise we have to believe that those voting for Trump are actively choosing an authoritarian, giving up our hard-won agency to someone who has promised to be a dictator on “Day One.”
The mind reels. What is it that voters really want? An authoritarian regime to replace democracy? That is what Trump has promised. He keeps saying he wants to save America: but from what?
Another big factor we must assess this day after is the absolute mess our Fifth Estate has become. The polls, as I wrote a few days ago, were not to be believed. That was even more true as the pollsters clocked a Kamala Harris surge in the days before Nov. 5 that turned out to be totally wrong. Trump swept the swing states by two to three points, all while insulting Latinos and doubling down on his insults of everyone else.
For all the effort poured into Pennsylvania, that must be seen as an abysmal failure. The anger we identified after eight successful years of Obama in the White House is back, or it never went away, but once again was unseen in the vast reporting on this election.
After so many months of boosterism, I don’t even know how you can show up on MSNBC today.
Our information system is broken. Full stop. I am looking at you, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel.
And I look ahead, with trepidation, to a system increasingly run by the hyper-rich, by tech bros, instead of by the people, for the people.
