Explaining the Inexplicable

Joe Biden must take much of the blame for Donald Trump's return to power

Like Ed West and Ian Leslie, I am both reluctant to add to the post-election thumb-sucking and yet also aware that, look, this is our game. And if a remarkable American presidential election is not fodder for Substackers then what, really, could be?

Like all sensible outsiders - and like prudent insiders too, come to think of it - I am wary of explaining Trump’s victory in ways that reinforce my own prior preferences. Distance can be useful but it also requires a certain modesty. I have not lived in the United States since 2008 and for all that I think I can still “speak” American politics, I’m not half as fluent in it as I used to be. To put it another way, the grammar is still there but the idiom is rusty. 

Despite that, I do think some things are clear. The Democratic party spent the first half of 2024 arguing that “Donald Trump is a threat to the American way of democracy” AND that “A clearly past-it Joe Biden is the right man to save the United States from Trump”. It was not possi…