Trump Prevails Again
The people have spoken resoundingly: red over blue, Trump over Harris. As Van Jones said on CNN about the Democrats: “We got outflanked, outplayed, beat.” I had indications about Trump’s appeal even before 2016, but I couldn’t read the writing on the wall. During my teens and 20s, I was a student of self-help books. So, in the late 80s, I read Trump: The Art of the Deal.
When Jewel and I moved to New Rochelle in 2008, Trump’s The Apprentice was popular. I watched several seasons of that show because of the challenges of leadership and teamwork it displayed, as well as the drama of who’d be fired and who would ultimately win. Around that time, I got my first inkling of Trump’s appeal to Hispanics.
I took a Lincoln Town Car to the airport. The driver was a dignified Latino man, an elder, who had suffered a horrible tragedy. A decade before, his wife and children had been killed in a car accident. He told the story twice, on an agonized loop of painful memory, tears welling up in his eyes each time. Near the end of the drive, he told me that he was one of Donald Trump’s drivers. After one ride, he asked: “Mr. Trump, why do you need to make so much money?” Trump’s answer displayed how he could meet the psychology of his audience, in this case, an audience of one.
“So when times are tough, I have enough to survive.” Saving for a rainy day is a common refrain for those who grow up lacking in money and is generally wise advice. A billionaire using it to communicate with one of his workers made me think of him as a sales and marketing guy with keen audience insight.
But I also thought it was cynical. A billionaire has much more than enough for a rainy day. Cynical insight likely drove him to take out a full-page ad in NYC newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in the case of the Central Park 5, four “black” and one Hispanic teen who in 1989 were accused of being a wolf pack “wilding” in Central Park and beating a raping a “white” woman, an investment banker. They were exonerated in 2002 after a sick serial rapist, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime. Trump didn’t let the criminal justice system take its course; he waded into a racially charged scenario, declaring hatred for these young boys who, it turned out, were falsely accused and railroaded.
That put me on notice about Trump as more than a rich real estate mogul who knew how to play bankers and the media to his own benefit. What sealed my distrust and suspicions about Trump was his questioning then-President Barack Obama’s legitimacy as an American and as President, the infamous birther controversy resulting in Obama’s administration producing a birth certificate to tamp down the nonsense Trump prompted. But that wasn’t all: Trump also said that Obama played basketball too much and doubted he had the smarts to get good grades in law school, let alone serve as the editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Trump’s playing into racial stereotypes (blacks as not “real” Americans, being good at sports but not intelligent) was what tipped me into becoming a “never Trumper” even before he decided to run for President. After Obama publicly mocked him at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s dinner, the night before announcing that Osama bin Laden had been killed, Trump was red-faced and humiliated.
But clearly, he is having the last laugh.
Will Democrats Miss the Boat Again?
I think it’s a mistake for Democrats to double down on Harris’ (so-called) race and gender as the primary factors in her loss. Sure, those factors played a subliminal role for some, maybe even many. But clearly, pocketbook issues were predominant in the minds of most, with high inflation causing millions to look back fondly at the first three years of Trump’s first presidency—after he inherited an economy brought back from the brink of disaster by Obama after the 2008 financial crisis. Ten million emigrants flooding the southern border during the Biden administration was another black eye for the Democrats. My own mother spoke to me with resentment about the benefits illegal immigrants were receiving in NYC.
If race were the predominant factor, then how could Barack Obama be elected to two terms? If gender was the main reason Hillary Clinton lost, how could she have won the popular vote in 2016? Even Bill O’Reilly admits that if Michelle Obama had run, she would’ve had a much better chance of overtaking Trump than Harris. The intersectional “because she’s black, Asian, and a woman in a multiethnic marriage” falls flat and relieves the Democrats from looking in the mirror to take responsibility and accountability for becoming a party run by coastal elites looking down on those less educated than themselves, that hectors people into using “Latinx” to de-gender the Spanish language when Latinos and Latinas themselves aren’t down with that re-frame, that won’t challenge the unfairness of men who become women dominating women’s sports, and the idiots who counter millions of years of evolution into male and female.
Further, Democrats haven’t reckoned with the social and cultural damage in 2020 and beyond after George Floyd’s murder. Riots in cities were called “peaceful” as video images of burning stores and police stations played in the background. BLM morphed from a movement declaring that black lives indeed matter to a golden egg for its leaders to buy expensive homes while not providing adequate assistance to victims of police brutality. DEI became all the rage in corporate America while college faculty and scientists were compelled to sign diversity statements before being hired.
Biden’s administration not only bungled the exit from Afghanistan, over-heated the economy during the pandemic, resulting in inflation, and sat by idly as millions streamed in from other countries, they had the nerve to gaslight the nation regarding Biden’s capacity to run for a second term. Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes? they seemed to say to U.S. citizens, most of whom thought Biden was too old to run again. They hid Biden from public scrutiny for as long as possible and then refused to have Harris face interviews until the second month of her run.
When Harris finally began doing interviews, her unwillingness to separate herself from Biden and explain why exactly she had changed from her far-left positions in 2019 and 2020 was telling. Not being forthcoming on these matters allowed some to presume, not without basis, that she would continue in the same status quo Democrats’ party approach that the majority of Americans felt is ineffectual and out of touch with working-class concerns.
This is why my second anecdote, from 2016, should have made me see more clearly. Jewel and I still lived in New Rochelle back then. I called a taxi. An older Caucasian man picked me up and began discussing the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He said he felt that Trump cared for struggling working people like himself. I couldn’t believe my ears. “Do you really think he cares about you? He doesn’t; he cares about himself,” I declared. The gentleman got quiet for the rest of the trip and likely went on to vote for Trump.
What I failed to grasp is that the other side of “Trump cares for me” is “the other side doesn’t care for me.” Until the Democrats recalibrate their messaging and policies to reach people like the two men who drove me to insights about Trump’s appeal, the longer they will remain in the wilderness of discontent and election failure.