Trump Mark II’s shock and awe mandate

Donald Trump points to supporters with former first lady Melania Trump during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump has a mandate to re-make America and shock the world.

This is Trump’s greatest victory. It is an astonishing personal triumph, a historic turning point that testifies to a changing, yet bitterly divided, America. It is a devastating repudiation of the Democratic Party establishment and progressive politics.

The judgment cannot be sharper: a majority of Americans were more alarmed about the direction of their country than they were about Trump’s character. Kamala Harris could never conquer that bedrock reality. This is where she lost.

On current trends, Trump is probably winning the popular vote, something he didn’t achieve in 2016 or 2020. Trump Mark II will be a more assertive president than before, battle-hardened, unpredictable, vindicated, and surely vindictive.

This was a contest between two deeply flawed candidates. But the American public knew Trump. He was loathed and loved, but perceived as formidable while dangerous and unscrupulous. Harris, by contrast, was largely unknown until the last 100 days. She lacked political authority, relied excessively on the women’s vote, banked on anti-Trump sentiment and never distanced herself from an unpopular Biden Administration.

The wide swathes of Middle America knew Trump wasn’t any saint, but they turned the electoral map red because they endorsed his bedrock positions: that living standards were in retreat, inflation was too high, borders were not secure and elites were too arrogant.

Trump won on two trends – the blunders of the Democrats that opened the door to him and the legions of Republicans voters who insisted on having Trump as their candidate. That story has no precedent, given Trump insisted the 2020 election was stolen from him, encouraged the January 6 storming of the Capitol, became a convicted felon and was ready to claim another fraud if he lost in 2024.

America’s progressive march has been halted in its tracks. The Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves. This is a defeat for their economic priorities, climate-change action and identity politics. When Biden won in 2020 he pledged to govern for all Americans. He didn’t. He ran a radical progressive agenda consumed by hubris. Biden assumed Trump was finished, then assumed he could beat candidate Trump, only to be forced to stand down leaving Harris as the stopgap with little time to prove herself.

This election will provoke a reckoning in America. The country is deeply broken. For every Trump champion there is a Trump opponent. Much will depend upon how Trump conducts himself. The irony of this election is that the Democrats, having warned that Trump was a threat to democracy, now find that the operation of that democracy has returned him to office.

The lesson: democracy is hard. The Democrats must accept the people’s verdict that Trump, four years ago, refused to accept. Another lesson: democracy is not always fair.

Being fair to Harris, she polled better than Biden would have polled. But the fundamentals were against Harris. Polls showed that 70 per cent of Americans felt their nation was heading in the wrong direction. The public wanted to vote out the Biden-Harris Administration.

And Harris, fatally, couldn’t say where she disagreed with Biden. She was tied to an unpopular economy and a failed president.

Her campaign, probably inevitably, focused on the “never Trump” vote-getting strategy but Harris could never grasp that while people mightn’t like Trump, they agreed with the grievances he articulated.

Harris and the Democrats lost much of the working class vote they once owned. The party has been defeated by the candidate they loathed and much of the reason lies within their own priorities and values.
J D Vance called Trump’s win the “greatest political comeback in American history” – and nobody could disagree.

Many questions remain. Might Trump and Vance lay the foundations for a new US centre-right majority? Will Trump trigger a global trade war? Will he sell out Ukraine and Taiwan? How will Trump resolve the conflict between his free-market and government interventionist advisers? And finally, how will Anthony Albanese manage President Trump?