Why Trump Won

And what it means for the US, and the world.

1. We just witnessed one of the greatest political comebacks ever. In 2020, and even as late as the 2022 midterms, Trump looked like he could be down and out. Two years on, he’s won the popular vote, swept to victory in all seven battleground states, delivered Republicans the Senate, and appears likely to have secured the House as well. And he achieved all this despite non-stop ‘lawfare’, possibly the most hostile media coverage ever faced by any candidate (or president), a couple of assassination attempts, and one bullet slicing through his ear. Astonishing stuff.

2. The liberal establishment is about to take a well-deserved kicking. The Donald is vocally opposed to almost all key articles of faith underpinning metropolitan groupthink. On identity politics, climate, foreign policy, globalism, immigration, the economy, and even in his brash, unscripted, loose-cannon style, he inverts and rejects the received wisdom of the chattering classes. He hasn’t taken office yet and it’s already clear that sleazy and unaccountable international organisations, the censorship industrial complex, deeply suspect UN initiatives, and leaky federal agencies - all of which have been propped up and lavished with vast sums of money by previous administrations - are about to face a long overdue reckoning. (This clearly requires more than one bullet point — I’ll write a piece on it at a later date).

3. ‘Wokeness’ has been dealt a mighty blow. This election has proven that many millions of people are rightly sick of being told they’re ‘fascist’, ‘white supremacist’, some form of ‘phobic’, and all the rest merely for holding entirely reasonable views that ten years ago would have been considered totally mainstream (e.g. there’s nothing inherently sinful about being a straight white male; judging people on the colour of their skin is wrong even if you claim to be an ‘anti-racist’ while doing it; Western history is complex but there are large parts of it we can and should be proud of; the education system should not be force-feeding kids progressive dogma; unfettered, open-border style mass migration might not be a good thing; censorship is wrong; criminals deserve to be locked up and are not the victims; Islamic extremism is bad and it’s hideous to see university students and lecturers chanting jihadist slogans following a genocidal pogrom…etc.). Voters wanted to strike back against this, and Trump is a blunt instrument with which to do so.

4. Trump is hilarious. Whatever you may think of him, there’s no doubt that he’s a funny dude. There were at least three points during his Joe Rogan interview at which I burst out laughing on a packed commuter train. If your politics blinds you to the innate hilarity of Big Orange telling Kim Jong Un to ‘go to the beach, relax’, or tweeting ‘I have never seen a thin person drinking diet coke’…then I don’t know what to say to you. Voters are drawn to this not just because it’s a breath of fresh air but because it’s indicative that he isn’t a stage-managed, puppet-like creature of the system.

5. Elon Musk single-handedly proves the Great Man Theory of history has validity. He correctly diagnosed the threat of the ‘woke mind virus’, entered the political sphere, and in so doing had a profound impact on the election result. And this was all in his free time. His ‘more important’ work includes (but is not limited to) spearheading the drive to make humanity multi-planetary, launching the largest objects ever flown into space and re-landing them, revolutionising electric and autonomous vehicles, creating humanoid robots, melding mankind and machines, providing internet connectivity to the remotest corners of the planet, and being the richest person in the world. No other living person has come close to playing such a major role in expanding the frontiers of human endeavour. He’s now likely to shape the priorities of the new administration, which is good news. Obviously.

6. Elon buying twitter has changed the game. Cast your mind back to 2020/2021. Big Tech was actively involved in suppressing, shadow-banning, unpersoning and de-boosting posts and individuals that were deemed verboten by our midwit elites. Trump himself had been banned from social media despite being the president at the time. All this in turn incentivised and emboldened the media to ramp up Trump Derangement Syndrome to the max, guaranteed as they were of a receptive audience for it online (because the rest of us kept getting kicked off and muted).

   Zoom forwards. Elon has removed their ideological finger from the scales, and because Trump’s been elected there’s nothing they can do about it. Liberals, who previously enjoyed an artificially dominant presence in the virtual public sphere, now find themselves being routinely mocked online for their fanaticism. It’s hard to predict the exact impact of this, but I have a feeling the backlash against Trump this time might be slightly* more measured as a result — after all, why fake-cry and scream Nazi at everyone if you get 6 likes for it instead of 7 million? *Emphasis on the word ‘slightly’ here.