I didn’t vote for Donald Trump because my stance on abortion is radically inconsistent with the national Republican Party platform. Yet having spent several months in the crosshairs of relentless online defamation by the dogmatic acolytes of a liberal ideology with which I’ve been imbued since infancy, I’m uniquely postured to demystify last week’s inauguration for all those shellshocked and bewildered progressives.
But before we answer why Donald Trump was restored to the Presidency, we need to answer how. Like, literally how, by the numbers. Because the magnitude of his electoral triumph compels sober examination, and the objective of my concededly stale analysis is to ensure we’re all on the same page.
A Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Coalition
I won’t overstate it; as a share of the popular vote, Trump’s margin of victory was the smallest of any presidential election in the last quarter century. But I won’t overstate that, either, because Trump pretty much won everything everywhere, surprising no one except those who still place their trust in incessantly discredited pollsters.
Because he positioned himself squarely in the breach against a perceived onslaught of liberal orthodoxy, it’s fruitless to dissect whether people voted for Donald Trump or against Kamala Harris. The point is that the repudiation of the American left occurred on both sides of the political divide.
For example, in New York City, Trump won 30 percent of all votes cast — a higher vote share than that of any other Republican presidential candidate since 1988 — but more notable was the fact that Democrats lost half-a-million votes as compared with their performance just four years earlier. In broader New York state, the Democrats’ margin of victory was just 12 percent, i.e., the smallest margin in 36 years, while Trump’s share of the vote increased in every. single. New York. county.
Statewide exit polling revealed that Trump made gains among people with college degrees and without them, among Jews and Christians, among white and Black voters, among men and women, among the young and old. That’s right, folks: Donald Trump received a larger share of the “under 30” vote than any Republican since Reagan ’84. Gen Z might not show up for work, but it certainly showed up for Trump.
Moreover, the turning electoral tide wasn’t confined to New York; all 50 states and nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties “shifted red.” Trump won all seven swing states and performed better in the popular vote than in both 2020 and 2016 (he’s also the first Republican to win it outright in 20 years). But a more crucial factoid is that Kamala Harris — despite her campaign’s monumental cash advantage — received nearly seven million fewer votes than had Joseph Biden just four years earlier, which is a figure nearly equal to the population of New York City or that of the six least populated states combined.
My point is that there are a lot of disaffected Democrats out there, and you can’t blame the outcome of this past election solely on the melanin deficient. According to reporter Nate Cohn, “almost every traditional Democratic constituency swung to the right. In fact, Mr. Trump has made larger gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian American and young voters in his three campaigns since 2016 than he has among white voters without a college degree …. In each case, Mr. Trump fared better than any Republican in decades.”
A third of all persons of color voted for Trump (accounting for his largest gains in the electorate) and he recorded historic levels of turnout from the Amish. The Amish, bro. By any metric, that constitutes “unifying.”
I mean, for god’s sake the dude won 45 percent of the Hispanic vote — more than any other Republican presidential candidate ever. A million factors might account for this, but here’s one of them: Trump says [trigger warning] “Latino” instead of the academic fundamentalist’s preferred “Latinx,” which most Latinos see as a form of neocolonial linguistic imperialism by which “non-Hispanic progressives control what Latin people call themselves — in other words, a ‘white people thing’.”
This gets us to the “why.”
No, Stupid, It Wasn’t Just the Economy
In a mea culpa that violently writhed and thrashed to explain why his electoral prediction was wrong, veteran Cajun political strategist James Carville for the 60th time trotted out his notorious prescriptive political adage. The octogenarian was joined by the left-wing’s younger but no less energetic keyboard commentariat in rushing to absolve itself of any fault.
Claiming the election had been nothing more than a referendum on the economy — an economy the Economic Policy Institute depicts as “historically strong” across nearly all indicators — these apologists insisted that the country’s turn away from the Democratic incumbents was not, as Francis Fukuyama claimed, “a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism,” nor was it a rejection of the progressive stance on so many hot button social issues.
Except that it was. Just last week, a New York Times poll revealed that “[m]any Americans who otherwise dislike President-elect Donald J. Trump … support some of his most contentious [policies].” For example, “55 percent of Americans either strongly or somewhat support” mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, while 71 percent of Americans want to prohibit doctors from prescribing puberty-blockers to minors.
Relatedly, 60 percent of respondents to a recent Washington Post-KFF poll said that transgender women should not be allowed to compete in female sports, while the Times reported that lifelong Democrats were crossing party lines for the first time in opposition to the Biden Administration’s immigration policies.
This was brought into even starker relief by New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who was befuddled by data showing that many of her electoral supporters had also voted for Trump. She took to social media to genuinely study these split-ticket voters. Their reported reasons had little to do with the economy. (“Trump lets men have a voice. You’re brilliant and have amazing passion!”)
Now, I’m not suggesting that the 2024 election had nothing to do with the economy; Americans on the scary side of the socioeconomic spectrum were harrowingly battered by the worst inflation our country has seen in 40 years (a partial though direct result of the Biden Administration’s COVID relief measures via the 2021 American Rescue Plan). Yet the numbers don’t lie: Throughout his four years, President Biden presided over historic levels of job growth, market gains, GDP growth, and expansion of domestic manufacturing capabilities.
So how to explain the contradiction?
In his post-election appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers (Nov. 20, 2024), Brian Williams furthered an answer:
“It is tough love time for the Democratic Party. I think it needs to be stripped down and rebuilt …. That means a change in leadership. I want to know who thought it was a good idea that Joe Biden stand for another four years at 80 years of age and 37 percent popularity …. I think it’s insulting [to] members of the working class — which the Democratic Party has lost entirely in our lifetimes — to insist the economy’s doing great …. telling them that the Nasdaq is gangbusters is further insulting. The biggest unforced error of the Biden Administration, by far, was the border. To tell people it’s not a problem is insulting. For the working class to see incoming migrants getting ‘welcome bags,’ debit cards, and motel rooms is insulting as well …. [The Democratic] Party has gone ‘quinoa,’ and the rest of America is eating at 'Cracker Barrel'.”
Yep.
America’s right-wing is weighed down by its own unconscionable sins and extravagances, for sure, but those of the political left are more relevant fodder for discussion now, since it’s the left that drove card-carrying liberals into MAGA’s ranks.
More on that momentarily, but I can’t resist piling on as to one particular point: Until it became manifestly, publicly, irrefutably clear that the emperor had no clothes, it was deemed blasphemous to question whether a demented 82-year-old was the best choice to be the party’s standard bearer.
That gaslighting by our former president’s handlers is appalling; had President Biden grace vice creeping dementia, he might’ve adhered to his pledge to serve only a single term, thereby passing the torch to a more capable candidate.
So with that in mind, I’d now like to say to America’s Boomers what, coincidentally, I’d wanted to say to them back when I was a moody adolescent: Shut up. Whatever sage and transferable political wisdom you Boomers yet need to dispense is already articulated in a book that ChatGPT can summarize for me. There has been a Bush, a Clinton, a Biden, or a Trump on every Presidential ballot since 1980. Go away.
An Aged for the Ages
In 2017, at age 70, Donald Trump was the oldest president ever to be sworn into office. In 2021, Joe Biden clinched that title, before now 78-year-old Trump took it back on what also happened to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day — because of course this would be the first time in 28 years that inauguration falls on MLK Day. And being twice sworn in as America’s oldest president is just one of the peculiarities by which Trump is ensuring his status as Trivial Pursuit’s most cited Commander-in-Chief.
He’s the only president (indeed, the only federal official) to have been impeached twice, and the only president to have then been twice acquitted by the Senate. His second impeachment trial was the first impeachment trial of a former president. He’s the only president to have been criminally indicted, criminally tried, and criminally convicted. He’s now the only felon to ever serve as president.
He’s only the second president to serve nonconsecutive terms. He’s now twice entered office with both chambers of Congress controlled by his own party. He created a sixth branch of the military (Space Force), he appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, he adulterously slept with a porn star, and he was shot by an assassin. None of that even touches on his policies, prerogatives, pronouncements, and pardons — or any number of the unprecedented precedents that’ve blitzkrieged their way out of the Oval Office over the last 10 days. (Has it only been 10 f***ing days?!)
From guest on the Howard Stern Show to human embodiment of the Constitution’s Article II, Donald Trump has been a zeitgeist fixture for 50 years, and he’s now perched at the helm of a slavishly devoted social movement which will absolutely adorn his name on more than just towers, casinos, and golf courses. Bridges, tunnels, airports, vessels — emotionally steel yourself for the world that Trump hath wrought, because “Trump” has transmogrified from person to symbol, and hundreds of millions cling to that Trump mythology as a bulwark against liberalism’s excesses.
Yet although his team has already set about antagonizing the new elements of his broader constituency (like, for example, by installing a big “GO HOME” button on the now inaccessible Spanish language version of the White House website, which has since been conspicuously changed to read “GO TO HOME PAGE”), liberals should prepare for more of the entrenching, transformative sociopolitical achievements that would’ve been scrapped on Aaron Sorkin’s cutting room floor not that long ago.
For example, in 2016, President Trump’s campaign manager became the first woman to successfully run a presidential campaign; in 2024, he appointed the first woman ever to serve as White House chief of staff. In 2020, President Trump became the first president to name an openly gay person to a Cabinet-level position; in 2024, he became the first president to nominate an openly gay person to lead the Treasury Department. (If confirmed, Scott Bessent will become only the second member of the LGBTQ community to ever serve as a cabinet secretary.)
This is why anti-Trump hysteria risks falling on deaf ears. In the words of one young LGBTQ influencer: “The incessant fearmongering from the left is the reason why people are leaving the left in droves. No one takes you seriously anymore.”
Rebel without a Party
To be a progressive liberal is to be like infinity — you can grasp it conceptually but you’ll never actually reach it. That’s by design, as a changing world forever demands adaptation; the chief tension in politics is always just a matter of how fast and in what direction change occurs.
Yet the leftists currently hellbent on reducing themselves to self-parody are no less Jacobin than were their spiritual progenitors, though assassination today occurs “by character” “on Reddit” as opposed to “mortally” “by guillotine.” Portlandia once poked fun at liberal excesses; now it feels more like a documentary.
This is why my peer group’s once solidly liberal blocs now concede in whispers that they feel abandoned by their party, cast aside by onetime compatriots, and adrift in this new political landscape. When I’ve reported such shifting allegiances to the lingering True Believers, readers will be unsurprised to hear that these grumblings are met with dismissive hostility.
“I could care less what a bunch of white men in Albany think,” said the person with whom I was texting on Inauguration Day, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she hails from a demographic that has never once budged on Donald Trump, to wit, white women, 53 percent of whom voted for him in 2024, which is roughly equal to their share in 2020 and 2016.
(I could’ve noted that the particular gripe we were discussing had been vocalized by a proud Bronx-based Boricua, but it seemed best to let that one slide.)
Yet this anecdote accentuates columnist Maureen Dowd’s observation about a “revealing chart” in the Financial Times showing that “white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion.” White progressives claimed that "racism is built into our society" at rates higher than their Black and Hispanic counterparts, while "many more Black and Hispanic Americans surveyed, compared with white progressives, responded that ‘America is the greatest country in the world.’”
So let this sink in, folks: It wasn’t Bush, McCain, or Romney who forged a multiracial Republican constituency atop the pillars of the working class. No, it was the racist billionaire anti-Semite with three Jewish grandchildren for whom the moniker “Hitler” just didn’t seem to stick.
The narrative needs to change.
It wasn’t that long ago that my head was bit off for questioning a student loan forgiveness program that incentivizes academic institutions to saddle students with unsustainable debt while imposing no price controls on tuition, but which then doesn’t make similar financial investments in young people who elect not to go to college. Evidently that was sacrilege to even voice aloud.
And I know readers of this column have been just as aggressively derided for opining on the tyranny of the human resources department, the weaponization of hashtags, the thought-policing of our speech, the abject failure of New York’s bail reform, the futile pandering of indigenous land acknowledgments, the lunacy of prohibitions against plastic bags in grocery stores where everything you’re buying is already wrapped in plastic, and on any number of well-intentioned programs, initiatives, vernacular about which the liberal dogmatists are emotionally unwilling to engage.
Progressives have perfected that dark art of condescension. What happens when mere skepticism or disagreement is met with allegations of misogyny, racism, or ignorance? The country learned the answer to that question last Nov. 5.
Likewise, perhaps you’ve heard of “the Sheriff of Lark Street,” an avenging and incendiary alter ego constructed atop bombast to focus attention on the incidences of vandalism, illicit drug use, aggressive panhandling, and gun violence along our capital city’s most crucial commercial corridor.
One unanticipated consequence of those stunts is that the Sheriff — shown here referencing himself in the third person — has become acquainted with closeted Trump voters who reach out in seeming search of kinship. They’re the tattoo artist in Albany, the developer in Latham, the firefighter in Coeymans, the nurse in Cohoes, the dentist in Colonie, the teacher in Clifton Park, and the farmer who won’t permit me to reference in this column the municipality in which he lives for fear of social ostracization.
Although these folks are all admittedly white, they otherwise differ in age, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. The only other commonality they share is the sense that they haven’t changed, but their (in some cases “former”) party has. (The teacher’s support for Trump illustrated the biggest shift, and was precipitated by her shock/distaste for what she described as sexually graphic material made freely available to students in deference to “a politicized curriculum”.)
If you’ve ever been to a barber shop, or you run with a crew that occasionally finds a time and place for that rip-roarious offensive joke, or you’ve caught yourself nodding along to social media clips of Bill Maher, then you’ve no doubt heard the exact same sentiments I routinely receive in my Direct Messages.
My intent with this column is not to demoralize progressives, indict liberals, or discourage those committed to working on behalf of the oppressed, disenfranchised, and underprivileged. My point is that Democrats must search their souls to find better ways of explaining why, for example, it’s so vital we say “unhoused” instead of “homeless.” To borrow a phrase or two: The microaggressions are piling up, and the left ain’t a safe space for everyone anymore.
If Donald Trump’s second inauguration feels unfair — as if there’s no accountability for a privileged white dude who philandered and pillaged his way through life and escaped prison only by getting reelected to an office which the Supreme Court has rendered immune from consequence — well, yeah, player; he’s the blow torch with which half the country is burning it all to the ground.
It’s now on liberals to articulate a vision that convinces the nation to build it back up. It’s not a matter of compromising your causes or conforming to ensure the comfort of the privileged. It’s about winning hearts and minds by extending the same empathy you expect in return.
Because you will not open eyes by covering your ears. And you will not forge the future by driving natural allies into the waiting arms of the devil we know.
Jesse Sommer is a lifelong resident of Albany County.
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