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 possible for both of these things to be true. The more Democrats insisted on the latter (while denying Biden’s clear decline) the more they undermined the seriousness of the former. For if Trump was such a threat, you wouldn’t choose to fight him with Biden, would you? 

Nancy Pelosi’s heave against Biden was necessary but also too little, too late. To that extent, much of this shattering defeat is owned by Biden. He deserves to be remembered as the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of presidents, who privileged his own vanity over the interests of his party and, indeed, his country. The guy who said “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else” in 2020 built a bridge to nowhere. Over a cliff edge. 

Harris, then, was pushing water uphill from the beginning. Some of this was Biden’s fault too. He promised to pick a black woman as his running-mate and Harris, despite performing poorly in the 2020 primary, was, in Biden’s view the best available choice who met the only criteria he deemed essential: black and female. At some level, I suspect that sunk in with voters: the Veep was not picked because she’d be the best person to be president if something happened to the old man. She was chosen because she was the best black, female, politician in America to be president in the event of calamity. The difference matters and I think it hobbled Harris in the fall of 2024.

In any case, even in early July Harris was still required to pretend that Biden was fit to be president in 2028. Then we were asked to swallow the idea that Old Joe had slipped into a memory hole and that there was nothing for voters to see here because the old fella had chosen to do this himself. There was no coup, no revolt. Come on!

For a while, I confess, I thought this audacious knife work might be enough. Perhaps Trump would come to regret Biden’s departure. Obviously, this was an overly-optimistic view even if I remain convinced that Biden would have been beaten even more handsomely than Harris was. 

You can sketch an alternative history in which Biden makes a virtue of being the one term president who saved the republic from Trump before passing the torch to the next generation of Democratic leaders. That would have allowed for a properly contested primary that would have given the party’s nominee more time and greater legitimacy. I doubt Harris would have been the nominee had that scenario unfolded because, in the end, successful politicians have to be able to communicate ideas with something more than just standard-issue boilerplate. 

Moreover, such a scenario would have allowed the Democratic nominee to put some greater difference between themselves and Biden’s record. That aspects of this record were not bad - the American economy really has outperformed others - is neither here nor there. Perception always trumps (sorry) reality. It might not have been enough for, as has now been noted everywhere, this has been a dismal year for incumbents everywhere. But it would, I think, have given Democrats a better chance. Not a winning chance, perhaps, but a better one.

So we are where we are and this is not where most of us would wish to be. Trump is not just an aesthetic affront but a substantive one too. The aesthetics do count, of course, and so do the policies and attitudes and the collection of deplorables with which he will staff his administration. There are very good and persuasive reasons for pessimism.

But we should also acknowledge some other realities. For, look, Trump is not entirely wrong about absolutely everything. Nations have borders for a reason. The liberal idea that all immigrants are of equal value, regardless of how they have arrived in a given country, insults the intelligence of longstanding citizens and recent, legal, arrivals alike. It is a question of fairness. Those who “play by the rules” themselves do not often welcome those who do not. The wall along the southern border may be an ugly idea; it is not an illegitimate one. The same can be said, alas, of Trump’s enthusiasm for mass deportations. The relish with which Trump and his allies talk about this plan is highly and characteristically unpleasant - the cruelty is the point, of course - yet the ambition itself differs from previous administrations more in scale than kind. Again, immigration controls are a core function of the state and even those of us relaxed about immigration can - and should - recognise this. 

Other aspects of this particular moment favoured the out-party too. The common feature of recent elections across the world  (and especially in developed countries) is that covid bills are now coming due. The huge splurge in state spending occasioned by the pandemic has to be paid for. That said spending also fuelled inflation no longer seems in doubt. This may have been better than the alternatives with which policy-makers were confronted in 2020-21 but it was not a cost-free enterprise either. Inflation, meanwhile, hits everyone and, as Noah Smith observes, a bit of pain for everyone (inflation) is much worse for incumbents that a larger dollop of pain for a smaller number of people (unemployment). 

I don’t know how much of that could be avoided but it is also another way of saying that although I recoil at the idea of anyone voting FOR Trump I can certainly understand why Americans voted AGAINST Biden/Harris. Many people really did think themselves worse off than they were four years previously and they weren’t altogether mistaken about that. 

The fascist thing did not help either. Not because Trump does not have authoritarian instincts (he very plainly does) but because most voters cannot offer a sensible definition of fascist that ALSO maps onto their view of Donald Trump. There is a cognitive problem here too and British analysts should recognise it immediately for it also helps explain why Jeremy Corbyn came so close to becoming prime minister in 2017. 

Many people (hello, me!) warned that Corbyn’s foreign policy views were wildly outside the mainstream traditions of mainstream British politics. But voters either didn’t accept or didn’t care that, amongst other things, Corbyn had supported the IRA or that he would cheerfully hand the Falkland Islands over to Argentina. Their reasoning was, I think, something like this: “If this was true, Jeremy Corbyn could not possible have become leader of the Labour party. But he is leader of the Labour party. Therefore this cannot be true.” (The penny only really began to drop in the aftermath of the Salisbury Poisonings and that in turn helped explain why Corbyn did so poorly in 2019.)

I suspect a similar line of reasoning applies to Trump and that this remains the case despite the considerable evidence to support a darker view of the 45th and 47th president. Viewed like this, January 6th was such a bizarre event it can be reclassified as a freak one-off that tells us nothing important about how Trump will approach his second term. A kind of freak-show carnival that got out of hand. I do not subscribe to this gentle, forgiving, view myself; I merely observe that others may. 

What’s more, for some voters the fact that the republic had survived one Trump presidency indicated that, despite what pessimists averred, it could likely survive a second one too. This may prove an optimistic view but it is not, in itself, either perverse or ridiculous. I subscribe to the contrary belief that an unfettered Trump, buttressed by a Republican Congress, and knowing a little more about how to operate the machinery of government is a much more dangerous proposition than the blundering, lazy, Trump of his first term. Moreover, the lean and hungry and really quite extreme men around him must also know this is their best, last, shot at creating the kind of change that cannot easily or quickly or cheaply be undone. 

Yet, even so, I also acknowledge that although the “smart” approach is to now insist that Trump may not be as disastrous - for the United States, for the world - as many people instinctively fear, it remains the case that none of us can really know. This is a prognosis based on hope more than on persuasive evidence. Perhaps we shall get lucky but I wouldn’t wish to bet there’s more than - let’s be generous - a fifty percent chance of this happening. Given the stakes, that seems like an uncomfortable wager, regardless of its outcome. 

In some places, the direction of travel seems obvious. It would be a surprise if Ukraine is not left to fend for itself. If the Americans cut off support most of europe will too. Let’s not pretend otherwise and let’s not pretend, either, that this will be anything other than a monumental, and shameful, betrayal. Perhaps, even, the last breath of seriousness on the old continent. Russia’s aggression will be rewarded and the world will be a markedly more dangerous, and darker, place. 

Sure, there will be much talk of europe “stepping up”. Defence budgets will have to rise anyway, not least since Nato will cease to exist in anything like its previous incarnation. The American guarantee, sustained for its own interests as well as europe’s for so many decades, will no longer apply. That will change many things and we don’t yet know what some of those changes will be. 

In some sense, though, cutting off Ukraine is once again a harsher iteration of a direction of travel begun by the Biden administration. As with trade, Trump is not so much an alternative to Biden as, in certain respects, a super-concentrated version of existing American policy. Biden’s caution on Ukraine is both reasonable and maddening and it has also left Kyiv in an unenviable position: strong enough to continue the fight, not strong enough to prevail. The US has never been “all-in” on Zelensky. 

Similarly, the debacle of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan - however rational - was a not just an admission of localised fatigue so much as it was a symptom of a wider impatience with the burden of leadership. The new world is also quite old now and the strain is showing. Viewed with Olympian detachment, perhaps it is not a surprise that 80 years of engagement now give way to a reversion to other, older, instincts. Here again, the difference between Biden and Trump is measured more in degree than kind. 

None of which is terribly reassuring any more than it is cheerful to reflect that Trump’s proposed tariffs will hurt American consumers first and more than consumers elsewhere. The craving for a simpler world is always there but it’s rarely rewarded by better outcomes. 

Simplicity and attitude are at the heart of Trump’s appeal, though. He offers CLARITY. He’s mad as hell and just mad enough to keep the other fellow guessing. There is a nihilism here that, in the circumstances, is extraordinarily dangerous. Combine that with his longstanding belief that there is no such thing as a win-win set of circumstances or outcomes and you create the conditions for a presidency that is unstable precisely because it is chiefly fuelled by resentment and fear. Trump’s alpha-male posturing is the way in which he disguises his suspicion that he’s always the guy being screwed. It is unfortunate that this neurosis is now played out on the national and international stage. 

One final observation: this was both a close election and one which was not very close at all. Trump won 50.3% to Harris’s 48.1%. Of course it was not close at all in as much as Trump increased his share of the vote almost everywhere and won all seven swing states. It was, measured that way, a thumping victory.

Nevertheless, that does not make this an election of realignment. Nor does it guarantee any kind of permanent conservative majority any more than prior Democratic successes (as measured by the popular vote) made the United States a permanently liberal country. Worms turn and pendulums swing and if we assume the great republic makes it past its 250th birthday intact then, for what little it is worth right now, I would wager that the Democratic candidate will prevail in 2028. Getting there, of course, is the tough bit, for a lot of hard-wrecking can be achieved in four years.