I’m the worst kind of pessimist: a learned one. Take it from me: demons are prowling everywhere nowadays. Let’s send ‘em howling.
We are now officially in the silly season where people who are 50,000 degrees removed from Donald John Trump are giving him advice about how to proceed and whom to choose for his cabinets and staff positions.
You can pay attention to the grudge-matches on Xitter or read more careful analyses, such as Musa Al-Gharbi’s Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives.
IMO Prof. Al-Gharbi overeggs the pudding, especially about shallow black support for Kamala, but so what, some people like eggy puddings, so dive right in and come back here.
I think all you have to do to understand the election is to look at this graphic from CNN which Prof. Al-Gharbi uses:
Goddammit, if your eyes don’t pop out at the Latino men numbers, as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy would say, “What is wrong with you?”
Trump actually lost market share among white men and women since 2016, although of course they’re his core voters and because of the sheer weight of the white electorate, even winning with a lower white percentage put him over the top.
I think too much attention has been paid to this NY Times graphic. Very flashy but misleading. The red arrows represent shifts from Democrat to Republican. Obviously many of these states in which there were shifts from D to R voted Democrat. Look at the graphic above for black men. There was a shift to Trump — 13 points, from +69D to +56D. Still a thumping.
Trump should be very proud of putting together this winning coalition of white folks plus Latino men. The next step will be winning Hispanic women. If he does that, he will have ushered in a generation of Republican rule.
Howsomever…
This was still an electorally narrow victory. The difference is currently down to 2,666,501. That’s not huge in an electorate as big as the US. For a ticket as awful as Harris/Walz to get that many votes is noteworthy.
Moreover, I must repeat that in the three Blue Wall States swung for Trump (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan), only Pennsylvania was a convincing victory: 145,000 votes. Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan by 30,000 and 77,000 roughly.
With a better Democratic ticket, it might have gone the other way.
Victory is sweet. I just don’t think one should choke on it.
Here’s another reason for gloom.
Richard Nixon won the 1972 election by the largest popular vote margin in history. On August 8, 1974 he resigned in disgrace.
What drove him out? His Watergate crimes? Nah, he was driven out by the revelations of a bitter man with a grudge to a couple of court stenographers whose stories grist for a mill that had always hated Nixon. They hated him for Alger Hiss. They hated his style. He wasn’t one of them.
They destroyed him, the electorate be damned.
So, watch out.
I’ve been following Donald Trump’s surprising cabinet picks with interest. Although I wasn’t planning to say anything, recent events warrant a comment.
In 2019, Bari Weiss called Tulsi Gabbard “the mother lode of bad ideas” on Joe Rogan. Yesterday (Nov. 15), Glenn Greenwald criticized Weiss on YouTube, likely because Gabbard, now Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, is back in the news — and the pro-Palestinian Greenwald dislikes Weiss.
Understanding this fully, requires distinguishing Weiss’s Rogan interview and Greenwald’s response. In the interview, Weiss labeled Gabbard an “Assad toady.” When Rogan asked her to elaborate, she spent several minutes fumbling over the definition of “toady” and misspelled the word. Once clarified, Weiss still failed to substantiate her claim about Gabbard.
Greenwald mocks Weiss’s ineptitude, then oddly supplies in his own defense of Gabbard an example of her recklessness: her 2017 trip to Syria. While well-intentioned, Gabbard’s visit was unwise, and Greenwald’s defense of her — that “good people can talk to bad dictators” misses the point. Presidents routinely engage with adversaries — that’s their job — but congressmembers like Gabbard or Pelosi shouldn’t.
Ultimately, Greenwald and Weiss are both propagandists, though Greenwald is the sharper of the two. Gabbard, flawed but earnest, bears scars from the Iraq War. She embodies the Powell Doctrine’s caution, though her actions in Syria were misguided. Trump may rein in her free spirit, but her nationalist values align with his.
Weiss mistrusts Gabbard because their priorities differ: Gabbard’s America-first nationalism contrasts with Weiss’s pro-Israel focus. As Trump’s coalition evolves, expect clashes between its pro-Israel and nationalist factions.