Trump’s victory makes a troublesome statement about America

As of this writing, some 71.9 million Americans proved something quite disturbing as of the close of Election Day yesterday. They revealed themselves as ignorant of economics, heartless toward the desperate, tolerant of racism (if not racist), and disrespectful of basic morality and law.

Their vote for Donald J. Trump is enough to make one ashamed of being an American.

There are hard lessons in the election of a dictatorial demagogue whose personal immorality is well-established, whose venal self-interest has been all too obvious and whose ignorance and scorn of history, political norms and institutions such as the military is astonishing. Among other things, the vote reflects failures on the part of our educational, religious and civic institutions.

It suggests an America suffering from a deep rot that could be tough to root out. It suggests an America that is in dire need of a hard look at itself.

“We just elected a convicted felon who has normalized bullying, spread hate like an industrial sprinkler and shown us over and over and over again he sees laws as irrelevant and self-enrichment as sacrosanct. Faced with a billowing ocean of red flags – from indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 election to the coddling of dictators who rule enemy nations – a majority of Americans cast their vote for the man who is a totem of the worst in all of us,” USA Today columnist Rex Huppke writes. “So spare me the wails of ‘This isn’t who we are!’ I’ve got bad news for the sane and decent among us: This is exactly who we are.”

Check out the insight of Lisa Lerer of The New York Times:

“Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do.

“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. He would be a ‘dictator’ — if only on Day 1.

“And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes.

“This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.”

And consider what David A. Graham of The Atlantic had to say:

“Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that ‘America is for Americans and Americans only,’ Trump promised a way out.”

Indeed, Trump’s election represents a victory for the nativists in the long-established cyclical pattern of the U.S. to repel, welcome and then again repel outsiders. Though we are a nation of immigrants, we repeatedly have shut our doors to those who would join us. As far back as the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798, we’ve shown our suspicion of newcomers. In the 1800s, native Americans detested and demeaned Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. Then, the Immigration Act of 1924 set a quota on European immigrants and shut out Asians. And in World War II, as the Holocaust raged, thousands of Jews were barred from the U.S.

Oh, and we “interned” thousands of Japanese-Americans during that war for no other reason than the color of their skin.

Trump’s plans to deport millions of migrants to the U.S. are well in line with this entrenched American anti-immigrant and racist tradition. Even though his own grandfather Friedrich came to the U.S. from Germany and his wife, Melania (originally Melanija Knavs) hails from Slovenia, Trump has a deep-set revulsion to immigrants — at least non-white ones. Perhaps betraying his Germanic sympathies for eugenics, Trump in a radio interview linked immigration, violent crime, and genetics, saying, “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” 

Soon, we are likely to see American law enforcers rounding up migrants, putting them into internment camps and tossing them out of the U.S. Families will likely be uprooted and broken up, all because of a failure to establish a path to citizenship for them. The effect on our economy could be devastating, as people who do our roofing and carpentry, pick our vegetables and staff our grocery stores and restaurants are driven out.

Indeed, the economic effects in general of the Trump presidency could prove devastating. They could make the inflation of the Biden years pale. The economically ignorant may have voted for Trump in large part because of that inflation – unaware that the price spiral sprang mostly from post-Covid shortages and a robust employment picture – but they soon are likely to experience steep price hikes when Trump’s tariffs kick in and drive up the costs of American-made goods and imports alike.

The global trade war that his levies are likely to spawn will also hurt America’s standing in the world and substantially increase tensions with China and other countries. Of course, his likely abandonment of Ukraine, his coziness with Vladimir Putin and his distaste for NATO will have severe implications, as well.

At this political nadir, it’s difficult to find reasons for hope. Editorialists at The Wall Street Journal have argued that checks and balances in the U.S. system will contain some of Trump’s worst impulses, scaling down any aspirations toward dictatorship he may have. But will there be many such checks, given the toadies in what will be a Republican-dominated Senate (and perhaps House, though we don’t know yet)?

In fact, is it more likely that a second-term Trump will be far less bound than even the first-term Trump was?

“Those expecting his instincts to be tempered by advisers, as sometimes happened during his first term, will be disappointed,” The New York Times editorialized. “His inner circle has been purged of people who say no. In a second Trump term, the secretary of state would not come from Exxon, and the secretary of the Treasury would not come from Goldman Sachs. The smart — and courageous — people have left the room. What remains are loyalists and ideologues and a decision-making process that begins and ends with the question of what is most expedient for Mr. Trump.”

While it’s hard to strike an optimistic note, it is, nonetheless, heartening that some 66.9 million of our countrymen saw Trump for the loathsome and dangerous figure he is. Overall, the man won with a bare majority of 51 percent to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 47.5 percent, according to current tallies by the Associated Press.

Those Harris supporters apparently went to good schools or, at least, paid attention when they were there. This, in fact, is no small concern. According to early exit polls, some 54 percent of Trump voters nationwide lacked college degrees, perhaps explaining the ignorance that drives many of his backers. And that number could rise as more thorough surveys come in over time.

Pew in 2020 reported that voters who identify with the Democratic Party or lean toward it were much more likely than their Republican counterparts to have a college degree (41% vs. 30%). In 1996, the reverse was true: 27% of GOP voters had a college degree, compared with 22% of Democratic voters. But the problem is that, as of that year, about two-thirds of registered voters in the U.S. (65%) lacked a college degree.

The 2024 election, by and large, was a working-class election. That is the group that gave Trump the votes in the so-called Blue Wall, handing him Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. If Harris had carried those elector-rich states, she would occupy the White House for another four years. In other words, Trump’s success was a triumph for the undereducated who bought the promises of a demagogue who tailored his grievances to theirs.

Give Trump credit. He may be a business failure (see his bankruptcies), but he is a brilliant huckster.

Those to whom he pandered were gulled in 2016 and again in 2024, it seems. The lapse seems to prove an adage often attributed (perhaps incorrectly) to Mark Twain that “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”

Indeed, the number of people who paint a rosy picture on the first Trump term, at least economically, is extraordinary and flies in the face of objective evidence to the contrary (inflation notwithstanding). Consider our historically low jobless rates and the performance of the stock market in recent years, for instance.

No one knows for sure what the future holds for the economy. But Trump’s plans bode ill, whether regarding tariffs or the decimation of the federal budget because of his top-down tax cuts. It’s entirely possible that the people fooled by Trump again this time will rue the day they made their choice.

And, on the upside (the side occupied by those 66.9 million Harris voters), Trump will face an uphill fight for some of his other moves. Perhaps we can take heart from the encouragement of such resistance by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and a distinguished academic.

“We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth,” Reich writes.

“We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

“We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

“We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

“We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.”

Is Reich whistling in the wind? Well, it depends on who will do the resisting. Most women voters (54 percent) voted for Harris, as did most people 18-29 (55 percent), most Blacks (86 percent) and Latinos (53 percent). Will such people, along with white men who likely will find themselves disenchanted anew after a couple years, wield enough power in the midterms to neutralize Trump?

American history and politics, like much else, tend to move in cycles. If Hegel was right and if Trump’s mistakes loom large enough, things will come around again. Embarrassing, disturbing and troublesome as this election has been, coming ones could give sensible folks hope. We just have to survive the coming storms.