America Did This to Itself

 

America Did This to Itself

And now we all must suffer through it.

By George T. Conway III

 

November 6, 2024, 4:14 PM ET

 

This time, the nation was on notice. Back in 2016, those of us who supported Donald Trump at least had the excuse of not knowing how sociopathy can present itself, and we at least had the conceit of believing that the presidency was not just a man, but an institution greater than the man, with legal and traditional mechanisms to make sure he’d never go off the rails.

By 2020, after the chaos, the derangement, and the incompetence, we knew a lot better. And most other Americans did too, voting him out of office that fall. And when his criminal attempt to steal the election culminated in the violence of January 6, their judgment was vindicated.

So there was no excuse this year. We knew all we needed to know, even without the mendacious raging about Ohioans eating pets, the fantasizing about shooting journalists and arresting political opponents as “enemies of the people,” even apart from the evidence presented in courts and the convictions in one that demonstrated his abject criminality.

We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.

Tyler Austin Harper: Blame Biden

I say all of this not in anger, but in deep and profound sorrow. For centuries, the United States has been a beacon of democracy and reasoned self-government, in part because the Framers understood the dangers of demagogues and saw fit to construct a system with safeguards to keep such men from undermining it, and because our people and their leaders, out of respect for the common good and the people of this country, adhered to its rules and norms. The system was never perfect, but it inched toward its own betterment, albeit in fits and starts. But in the end, the system the Framers set up—and indeed, all constitutional regimes, however well designed—cannot protect a free people from themselves.

My own hope and belief about what would transpire last night was sadly and profoundly wrong—like many, I have the emotional and intellectual flaw, if that’s what it is, of assuming that people are wiser and more decent than they actually turn out to be. I feel chastened—distraught—about my apparently naive view of human nature.

I dare not predict the future again, particularly as it comes to elections and other forms of mass behavior. But I daresay I fear we shall see a profound degradation in the ability of this nation to govern itself rationally and fairly, with freedom and political equality under the rule of law. Because that is not actually a prediction. It’s a logical deduction based on the words and deeds of the president-elect, his enablers, and his supporters—and a long and often sorry record of human history. Let us brace ourselves.

Tom Nichols

 

The Promise of Revenge Tom Nichols

 

 

Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat. Almost everywhere, Donald Trump expanded his coalition, and this time, unlike in 2016, he didn’t have to thread the needle of the Electoral College to win: He can claim the legitimacy of winning the popular vote. Trump’s opponents are now muttering about the choice of Tim Walz, the influence of the Russians, the role of the right-wing media, and whether President Joe Biden should not have stepped aside in favor of Harris. Even the old saw about “economic anxiety” is making a comeback. These explanations all have some merit, but mostly, they miss the point. Yes, some voters still stubbornly believe that presidents magically control the price of basic goods. Others have genuine concerns about immigration and gave in to Trump’s booming call of fascism and nativism. And some of them were just never going to vote for a woman, much less a Black woman. But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa. Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries. And so it came to pass: Last night, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires grinned and applauded for Trump. They were part of an alliance with the very people another Trump term would hurt—the young, minorities, and working families among them. Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power. Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania. Biden, too old and tired to mount a proper campaign, likely would have lost worse than Harris; more to the point, there was nothing even a more invigorated Biden or a less, you know, female alternative could have offered. Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts. No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic “I will fix it” solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs. (I knew Harris was in trouble when I was in Pennsylvania last week for an event and a fairly well-off business owner, who was an ardent Trump supporter, told me that Michelle Obama had conspired with the Canadians to change the state’s vote tally in 2020. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part of the conversation.) As Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, put it in a social-media post last night: The election went the way it did “because America wanted Trump. That’s it. People reaching to construct [policy] alibis for the public because they don’t want to grapple with this are whistling past the graveyard.” Last worries that we might now be in a transition to authoritarianism of the kind Russia went through in the 1990s, but I visited Russia often in those days, and much of the Russian democratic implosion was driven by genuinely brutal economic conditions and the rapid collapse of basic public services. Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions. The bright spot in all this is that Trump and his coterie must now govern. The last time around, Trump was surrounded by a small group of moderately competent people, and these adults basically put baby bumpers and pool noodles on all the sharp edges of government. This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create. Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air. Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

Frank Bruni - North Carolina

 

North Carolina Breaks Democrats’ Hearts

Nov. 5, 2024

 

By Frank Bruni

Frank Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

This article has been updated to reflect new developments.

I can’t overstate how much Democrats wanted to win North Carolina. How much hope they invested in my state. How many reasons they found to argue that Vice President Kamala Harris could emerge victorious, succeeding where every Democratic presidential candidate this century — with the sole exception of Barack Obama in 2008 — had failed.

By all indications and reports, the Democratic turnout effort here was not only better staffed and better organized, by far, than the Republican one, but it was also, according to prominent North Carolina Democrats and seasoned political analysts, superior to anything that any Democratic presidential nominee put together in North Carolina in the past. And the state’s brisk population growth since 2020, when Joe Biden lost the state to Donald Trump by only about 1.3 percentage points, favored Harris, making the state’s metropolitan areas bigger and turning them bluer.

But in this fiercely contested and potentially prophetic battleground, that wasn’t enough. After several furious months of nonstop television commercials, countless yard signs, door knocking galore, cold calling ad nauseam and incessant, traffic-snarling visits from the candidates themselves, Harris came up short. Donald Trump came out on top.

And that will be examined as closely as the outcomes in any of the other major battleground states, because for the entirety of this agonizing election season, North Carolina functioned as a national mood ring and mirror, vividly reflecting all the relevant 2024 dynamics and every major plotline.

For those of us who live here, Trump’s victory didn’t simply answer the question of who’d get our state’s juicy trove of 16 electoral votes and, with them, draw closer to winning the presidency. It concluded a political melodrama of the highest and tensest order.

“I’ve never seen people as anxious,” former Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat who spent more than a quarter-century in the House, told me. He said that while North Carolinians are used to swing state intensity, “this time has been different. This is no holds barred.”

Although Harris and her supporters had ample cause for optimism about North Carolina, Trump and his supporters arguably had more. It has more rural voters than any of the other six major battleground states, meaning that Harris’s fortunes hinged on chipping away at Republicans’ enormous advantage in what is undeniably Trump country.

“We have a lot of people who are just baked in for Trump,” Representative Kathy Manning, a North Carolina Democrat who decided not to run for re-election after the state’s Republican lawmakers redrew her district, told me when we spoke late Tuesday morning. She called herself “cautiously optimistic” about a Harris victory in the state, but she also noted what a stiff challenge Harris faced, especially with the third of the state’s voters who aren’t registered as either Republican or Democratic. They’d have been more likely to choose Harris, Manning said, “if we’d had more time to get out there and let those unaffiliated voters know who she is and what motivates her and what her plans are.” As it was, Harris’s entire presidential campaign spanned just 15 weeks.

She came to North Carolina in many of them. She and Trump didn’t so much sweet-talk as stalk us, all the way to the finish. She dropped in on Saturday, as did he — twice. He came back on Sunday. And again on Monday, on the off chance we’d forgotten him.

Did that make the difference? Impossible to know.

But some dimensions of the presidential race in North Carolina are clearer than before. There are, it turns out, limits to what a turnout operation can do. The formidability of Harris’s was described in a recent column in The Washington Post by Dana Milbank, who counted 360 paid staff members, 29 field offices, 40,000 volunteers and, in one week, more than 100,000 door knocks and more than 1.8 million phone calls.

Milbank wasn’t the only one impressed with it. Representative Deborah Ross, a North Carolina Democrat who coasted to re-election Tuesday on predominantly Democratic turf, told me during a conversation late Tuesday afternoon that when she visited polling stations in the red patches of her district earlier in the day, there were many more Democratic volunteers making Harris pitches than there were Republican ones trumpeting Trump. “It’s astounding to me,” she said.

And it was heartening, she said, as was her acquaintance with many North Carolina Republicans who publicly repudiated Trump and announced their intentions to vote for Harris as a way of preventing his return to the White House.

But, she added, Trump was assiduously promoting “messages of fear” that might well resonate “with people who have not fully recovered from the pandemic, who have economic insecurity.” I lost count of the number of times I saw a Trump ad that used an apocalyptic tone and sinister images to emphasize Harris’s support for transgender inmates. He consistently and constantly cast Harris as some lefty lunatic, a portrayal crafted for a Southern state like North Carolina.

Many Democrats had predicted that Harris would benefit significantly in North Carolina from the votes of women angry about the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, especially given the state’s high-profile governor’s race, in which the Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, faced a withering ad campaign spotlighting his past support for an abortion ban with no exceptions. Several of the commercials run by Robinson’s Democratic opponent, North Carolina’s attorney general, Josh Stein, used portions of a past statement of Robinson’s in which he insisted that abortion was “about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down or your pants up — and not get pregnant by your own choice — because you felt like getting your groove thing on.”

Robinson’s history of extremist positions and viciously bigoted comments made him the apotheosis of MAGA fury and a test case for a swing state’s tolerance for that even before a CNN report in mid-September that he had frequented a porn site where he identified himself as a “black NAZI!” and celebrated slavery. Although he denied that and later filed a lawsuit against CNN, many of the people working on his campaign quit, and many Republicans outside North Carolina effectively gave up on him.

Would that hobble Trump, who early this year called Robinson “better than Martin Luther King” but over the past month and a half pretended that Robinson never existed? That question occupied the thoughts of many political analysts, because even if a sizable group of North Carolina Republicans or Republican-leaning independents were comfortable with a Trump-Stein ticket split, a percentage of them might be so demoralized and disgusted by the Robinson fiasco that they just didn’t bother to vote — or so the thinking went.

Though Stein handily defeated Robinson — by what looked to be a margin of more than 15 percentage points — Robinson didn’t drag down Trump. North Carolina voters, known for splitting their tickets in the past, did so to an even greater extent this time around.

“North Carolina, like this country, is a complex place.” Damon Circosta, who served as the chair of the North Carolina State Board of Elections from 2019 to 2023, told me in a text message shortly after Trump was declared the victor here. “Next year, North Carolinians will have to do what we have always done — find a way to live among one another, work alongside of each other and make sense of the fact that none of us are as easily categorized as it may seem.”

Was Trump actually helped by the lies that he told and the distrust that he sowed after Hurricane Helene ripped through western North Carolina, causing catastrophic damage? That will — and should — be a focus of post-mortems on the presidential race here. He and many other prominent Republicans made all sorts of charges and promoted all manner of conspiracy theories about government officials targeting or ignoring Helene’s victims, and those grievances had so much traction — which any quick perusal of social media scarily demonstrated — that even a few Republican politicians in North Carolina spoke up and spoke out to tell people to disregard that nonsense. It was a noble attempt at cleanup, but the mess had already been made.

Harris was up against that and against a general dissatisfaction among Americans — North Carolinians included — with the direction of the country and the state of the economy. While she tried at times and in ways to present herself as the candidate of change, her past four years as Biden’s governing partner made that a difficult sell.

When I spoke with Price, the former congressman, over the weekend, he said that he thought Harris had a good shot. But he also recognized how often Democrats had branded North Carolina the “New South,” only to have it cling to its old ways, and how frequently their pronouncements of its dawning progressivism had been contradicted.

“Ever since forever, we’ve thought that one of these days, things are going to tip around here,” Price said. “But we’re always falling short.”

He also wondered if Trump’s onstage meltdowns over the final week of his campaign would matter as much to voters in North Carolina and elsewhere as they did to the media. ”I see this endgame stuff going on — the Madison Square Garden thing, the fantasizing about Liz Cheney, this craziness, a lot of it related to women — and I honestly don’t know if it penetrates,” he said. “So many things have happened that didn’t penetrate.”

That’s the story of a national race that often seemed strangely impervious to developments that promised to have greater effect than they ultimately did. And of a state — my state — reverting to type when there were so many reasons it shouldn’t.

Bret Stephens

 

A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat

 

By Bret Stephens

• Nov. 6, 2024

A story in chess lore involves the great Danish-Jewish player Aron Nimzowitsch, who, at a tournament in the mid-1920s, found himself struggling against the German master Friedrich Sämisch. Infuriated at the thought of losing to an opponent he considered inferior, Nimzowitsch jumped on the table and shouted, “To this idiot I must lose?”

It’s a thought that must have crossed the minds of more than a few liberal pundits and Democratic eminences late Tuesday night, as Kamala Harris’s hopes for winning the presidency began suddenly to fade.

How, indeed, did Democrats lose so badly, considering how they saw Donald Trump — a twice-impeached former president, a felon, a fascist, a bigot, a buffoon, a demented old man, an object of nonstop late-night mockery and incessant moral condemnation? The theory that many Democrats will be tempted to adopt is that a nation prone to racism, sexism, xenophobia and rank stupidity fell prey to the type of demagoguery that once beguiled Germany into electing Adolf Hitler.

It’s a theory that has a lot of explanatory power — though only of an unwitting sort. The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

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There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition — an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.

Donald Trump’s Revenge

 

Donald Trump’s Revenge

The former President will return to the White House older, less inhibited, and far more dangerous than ever before.

By Susan B. Glasser

November 6, 2024

 

 

Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.

Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was no upset, nor was it as unimaginable as when he beat Hillary Clinton, in 2016. But it was no less shocking. For much of the country, Trump’s past offenses were simply disqualifying. Just a week ago, Harris gave her closing argument to the nation in advance of the vote. Trump “has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other—that’s who he is,” she said. “But, America, I’m here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.” Millions of voters in the states that mattered most, however, chose him anyway. In the end, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy simply resonated more than all the lectures about his many deficiencies as a person and a would-be President.

Bottom of Form

Eight years ago, at the dawn of what historians will call the Age of Trump in American politics, the outgoing President, Barack Obama, famously insisted that “this is not the apocalypse.” Privately, he summed up what would become the conventional view in Washington. Four years of Trump would be bad but survivable—the nation, he told a group of journalists just a few days before Trump’s Inauguration, was like a leaky boat, taking on water but hopefully still sturdy enough to stay afloat. Two terms of Trump, he warned, would be another matter entirely.

Four years later, after Joe Biden defeated Trump, Democrats and the dwindling ranks of anti-Trump Republicans made the fatal miscalculation of thinking that it was Trump who had sunk. Too many of them were sure that the hubris and folly of his reluctant exit from the Presidency had destroyed him politically. They saw him as nothing more than a sideshow—a malevolent figure in his Mar-a-Lago exile, but nonetheless a disgraced loser with no prospect of returning to power.

They were wrong. Rule No. 1 in politics is never underestimate your enemy. Trump’s enemies hungered for a reckoning, for Trump to pay a price, legally and politically, for the damage that he had wreaked on American democracy. Instead, Trump has now achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Even his four criminal indictments have served only to revive and reinvigorate his hold on the Republican Party, which is now centered more than ever on the personality and the grievances of one man. Almost sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than seventy-four million cast their ballots for him in 2020. In 2024, it’s even possible, as votes are being counted overnight, that Trump might win the popular vote outright for the first time in his three races. With such backing, Trump, the first President since Grover Cleveland to be restored to the office that he lost, has vowed a second term of retribution and revenge. This time, shall we finally take him seriously?

President Biden will receive much of the blame for this catastrophic outcome—by refusing to step aside when he should have, the eighty-one-year-old President, who rationalized his entire candidacy four years ago on the existential need to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, will have contributed greatly to Trump’s return. Biden’s reckless insistence on running again despite the visible signs of his aging may well have been the 2024 campaign’s most consequential decision. When he finally bowed out, in late July, after a disastrous debate performance with Trump, was it already too late? This will be a hypothetical for the ages. Politicians from both parties make unfulfillable promises to the American electorate all the time. But the implicit premise of Biden’s candidacy might have been one of the most sadly impossible campaign pledges ever—as it turned out, there was to be no restoration of normalcy, no return to a pre-Trump America.

Harris moved swiftly and largely successfully to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. She ran a polished if late-starting campaign during the subsequent hundred and seven days—a brief dash to Election Day more customary for a parliamentary election in Britain than for the years-long slog of endless politicking which Americans require of their candidates. But Harris, despite four years as Vice-President, had little national identity or constituency to fall back on. She was embraced by her party, thrown a rollicking, celebrity-studded Convention in Chicago, and cheered after her trouncing of Trump in their one and only debate, in September, but the net effect of her rise was to return the race to where it was before Biden’s implosion: deadlock.

In the weeks before the election, poll after poll in the seven battleground states found a contest within the margin of error. Pennsylvania and Nevada were a dead heat in the final Five Thirty Eight polling averages; Michigan and Wisconsin finished with a single-point advantage for Harris; and Arizona and Georgia showed a slight edge for Trump. Even that, in retrospect, turned out to be overly optimistic for Harris, who was losing, narrowly but decisively, in all of the battleground states at the time that the election was called. Her defeat in Pennsylvania—long considered her must-win bulwark—will probably lead to years of second-guessing her decision to bypass the state’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, as her Vice-Presidential running mate, in favor of Tim Walz, the governor of safely Democratic Minnesota. But, given her across-the-board defeat, perhaps it would not have mattered.

Harris now becomes one of a long line of incumbent Vice-Presidents who tried and failed to secure a promotion; her difficulty in separating herself from the liabilities of Biden’s record has proved why only one sitting No. 2, George H. W. Bush, has been elected to the Presidency since Martin Van Buren did so, in 1836. Too many voters appeared to have seen Harris as effectively the incumbent President in the race—at a time when large majorities of Americans report dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. This, according to Doug Sosnik, the White House political director for President Bill Clinton, is why ten of the twelve elections leading up to this one have resulted in a change of control in the House, the Senate, and/or the White House.

Trump’s victory, in that sense, was a predictable outcome for a Republican nominee, perhaps even the expected one. And yet what a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for his party to embrace this twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted con man from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular G.O.P. candidate. He was an outlier in every possible way. In 2016, perhaps it was conceivable for voters upset with the status quo to see Trump, a celebrity businessman, as the outsider who would finally shake things up in Washington. But this is the post-2020 Trump—an older, angrier, more profane Trump, who demanded that his followers embrace his big lie about the last election and whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic in modern history. His slogan is now openly the stuff of strongmen—Trump alone can fix it—and he will return to office unconstrained by the establishment Republicans who challenged him on Capitol Hill and from inside his own Cabinet. Many of those figures refused to endorse Trump, including his own Vice-President, Mike Pence. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, the retired four-star marine general John Kelly, told the Times during the campaign that Trump met the literal definition of a “fascist,” and yet even that was not enough to deter the enablers and facilitators in the Republican Party who voted for Trump.

The new gang surrounding Trump will have few of Kelly’s qualms. He will make sure of that. One of the main lessons that Trump took from his Presidency was about the power of the staff surrounding him; his son-in-law Jared Kushner left the White House concluding that poor personnel decisions represented the biggest problem for their Administration. Soon after Trump left office, I interviewed a senior national-security official who spent extensive time with him in the Oval Office. The official warned me that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first term, specifically because he had learned how better to get his way—he was, the official said, like the velociraptors in the first “Jurassic Park” movie, who proved capable of learning while hunting their prey. Already, one of Trump’s transition chairs, the billionaire Howard Lutnick, has said publicly that jobs in a new Administration will go only to those who pledge loyalty to Trump himself. Having beaten off impeachment twice, this second-term Trump will have little to fear from Congress reining him in, either, especially now that Republicans have managed to retake control of the Senate. And the Supreme Court, with its far-right majority solidified thanks to three Trump-appointed Justices, has recently granted the Presidency near-total immunity in a case brought by Trump seeking to quash the post-January 6th cases against him.

Throughout this campaign, Trump has been deliberately coy about his extreme and radical agenda for a second term. He disavowed Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page governing blueprint spearheaded by an array of his former advisers, eschewing the specifics that might have turned off voters in swing states. Trump said, for example, that he was no longer in favor of a national abortion ban, despite pledging to sign a twenty-week ban when he was in office the first time. Project 2025, if Trump were to adopt its proposals as his own, includes an extensive menu of ways to further restrict women’s access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive-health services.

But the agenda that Trump has publicly committed himself to is cause enough for grave alarm. He has said that he will begin “mass deportations” of undocumented migrants as soon as his new term begins; that he will be a dictator for a day when he is sworn in, on January 20th; that he will pardon the thousands of January 6th “hostages” who stormed the U.S. Capitol, in 2021, on his behalf; and that he will go after his opponents, the political “enemy from within,” deploying the U.S. military to quell domestic disturbances and even suggesting that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who dared to challenge him while wearing America’s uniform, was guilty of treason and deserving of execution. It is not inconceivable that Trump will move quickly to follow through on earlier threats to fire independent officials, including two of his own appointees whom he later turned on—the F.B.I. director Christopher Wray and Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Even before his Inauguration, Trump’s victory will shake alliances and embolden autocrats around the world. What power will NATO’s Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense hold with an American President who has publicly said that, as far as he is concerned, Russia can do whatever it wants to NATO members who do not, in Trump’s view, pay their fair share? And what about embattled Ukraine, whose ability to fight on against Russia has been sustained by billions of dollars in U.S. military aid that Trump opposed? Trump has promised he can end the war in twenty-four hours—how will he do that, other than to pressure Ukraine to cede its stolen territory to Russia in exchange for peace on Vladimir Putin’s terms?

On the economy, many Trump voters seemed to have believed his promise to restore the greatest economy in the history of the world—though it never was. Independent experts believe that his vows to enact sweeping tariffs on goods from other countries and to deport immigrants will likely result not in a boom but in an inflationary, deficit-busting spiral that will make those same voters nostalgic for the Biden-era price hikes that contributed to Trump’s return to power. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, spent more than a hundred million dollars helping to elect Trump and promoting his lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories on his social-media site, X; what, now, can we expect as Musk, a major government contractor through his SpaceX venture, seeks to collect on his investment? Even before announcing that he planned to make Musk his unofficial “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” Trump already had plans to oust vast numbers of nonpartisan federal employees by executive order and replace them with political appointees—a move he attempted just before his defeat, in 2020, but which was swiftly overturned when Biden took office. All of it portends a deeply destabilizing period for the country and the world, which is still highly dependent on American power and leadership. And it is likely to happen with a swiftness that may stun Trump’s opponents.

At Harris’s rallies, her audiences during these past hundred and seven days would chant her slogan, “We’re not going back!” But, it turns out, we are. Harris fell short. Americans, at least enough of them to tilt the outcome, chose Trump’s retrograde appeal. The question now is a different one: not if we are going back but how far? ♦

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

3 Keys to Building a Corporate Culture in a Hybrid Work World 

Appearance equals attitude. What I learned from running a call center years ago and how that applies to today’s workplace. 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

NOV 5, 2024

Many years ago when they were still viable businesses because consumers still answered their landline phones, I ran an outbound call center for the major American automobile manufacturers. The center made millions of calls each year to collect and measure customer satisfaction with sales and service experiences at car dealerships. I realize that there’s an oxymoronic aspect to that very idea, but there were still plenty of people at the time who were interested in paying us to try to figure out why buying a car or having it serviced at a dealership was such a painful and unpleasant process.

After years of analyzing massive amounts of research and consumer feedback, I’m not sure that the manufacturers learned anything of real value or changed their approach in any meaningful way. Certainly, the dealers themselves were rarely interested in our suggestions and reports on how they could do a better job. This is why we now have firms like Carvana, which are intent upon disintermediating the dealership experience in its entirety.

But we still discovered a great deal about how to successfully run a call center that employed hundreds of people of all ages and from every different kind of background, education level, race, color and creed. This is not an easy business because attrition and employee burnout rates are massive which, in turn, makes it very hard to justify extensive investments in careful training. In addition, it’s a real-time service, which makes it difficult to manage and correct errors made by customer service agents. And finally, it’s almost impossible to assess team attitudes and emotional states because everyone is “a business of one,” locked into a cubicle, insulated with headphones, and basically all on their own.

I spent a fair amount of time every day walking the aisles and listening to one-sided bits and pieces of ongoing conversations my employees were having with pleased, pissed off, and – to a frightening large extent – utterly disinterested customers. As you might imagine, this was a fairly primitive way to monitor the discussions and, in the decades since then, new technologies and tools have emerged to make the task much easier and valuable to all concerned as well. But, to be honest, management by walking around will never work in the WFH world of today.

There are a couple of important lessons that we did learn that I think have immense value in the new post-pandemic work world, where so much happens in an environment that seems equally remote and closed off. Whether it’s a matter of phone contact, etiquette and attitude, or Zoom/Teams behaviors and protocols, so many of the same attributes and work conditions we dealt with are extremely relevant now given the persistence of WFH along with millions of gig employees working anywhere and everywhere.

Posture Matters

One of the most obvious and correctable actions we dealt with in the call centers was posture. That might seem strange in a room full of seated folks. But the fact is that if someone was slouching, hanging off their chair, staring around the room, or otherwise checked out, we knew for sure that they weren’t connecting effectively with the person on the other end of the line. You see this same issue in teleconferences all the time– where team members aren’t leaning in and focused, but instead are half asleep, snacking, texting, or simply not paying attention. It matters and it’s worth calling out if you’re running the session. Sit up straight, lean in, and smile.

Appearance Matters

I realize that the pandemic demonstrated to the world that you could party, pray or participate in virtually any remote activity in your pajamas. And as certain notable columnists and commentators learned – much to their embarrassment and chagrin – you could do a host of other questionable things as well. But it’s very clear that, if you care about your business and you want to send the right message, what you wear shows everyone just how much you care. This is just as true for an underdressed slob who’s driving an Uber, someone handling your groceries that you wouldn’t want near anything perishable, or any delivery moron who’s vaping on your front porch while waiting for you to answer the door. Paying attention to your appearance and how you are seen by others is part of being a professional.  Unfortunately, that’s a message that’s been lost on millions of inbound employees.

Time and Details Matter

The pros know a simple fact – the way you conduct any part of your life and business automatically bleeds into and informs the entire rest of your activities. If you’re an “on time” person who respects other people’s time, those people will respond in kind and appreciate your concern and courtesy. If you’re a slug who shows up late or whenever it suits your schedule, you’ll soon be looking for work elsewhere. If you’re a person who sweats the small stuff, pays attention to the details, prepares for calls and meetings, people quickly get that message as well. It’s important, it’s contagious, and it’s what all great leaders do. You want to be the one who’s everyone’s first choice for tasks, responsibilities, assistance and promotions – not the last resort.

Bottom line: all of these behaviors and attributes point in the same direction to a particular conclusion: that you are present, that you care about the work you do, and that you take pride in how and why you do that work. It’s not going to be easy to remotely build and maintain company cultures, but it starts in every case by paying attention to the small personal details that matter most in the long run.