Here’s why Trump won the election, and what he may do now

Donald Trump has won the US election. After serving as the 45th president between 2017 and 2021, he will now be the 47th. Trump has not merely defeated but trounced his opponent Kamala Harris. She was crushed so badly, she even failed to address her supporters at the traditional election party and instead – there’s really no nicer word for it – slunk away.

Claiming his victory, meanwhile, Trump told his voters that they – and he, of course – had “made history.” He is very likely to be right about that.

While rhetoric about “the most important election in our lifetime” has been badly overused for campaigning purposes, in this case, Trump’s second victory really is special. The fact that he is the first president since the 1880s to win a second term after being out of office is the least of it. Such trivia will make for good game-show questions. But what turns the return of the Donald – as he used to be called semi-affectionately when still generally mistaken for a buffoon – into a historic event is that it is occurring at a very peculiar moment.

We are witnessing the decline and fall of, at least, American supremacy, and, possibly, of the American polity as we know it. At the same time, a multipolar world order is emerging. It is against that background of historic change that we have to understand the Trump Phenomenon.

And a capital-'P' Phenomenon it is. That much is beyond doubt. Full disclosure: I have almost no sympathy for Trump’s politics; and since I am a socialist, he would be very unlikely to have any for mine. But whoever is still in denial about the fact that the uncouth and stubborn real-estate billionaire and former reality TV star is a natural-born politician of outstanding savvy is a fool. That gift makes Trump neither good nor bad; it simply means that his impact will continue to be massive.

Regarding the past, we may have gotten a little too used to Trump already and find it hard to recall just how sensational his trajectory has been. As a reminder, a very brief summary: Since 2011, he has broken into the US political system from the margins, imposing himself on its traditional elites. He has catalyzed the transformation of that system and those elites, not only but especially of its (very) right-wing section, the Republican Party, into his personal domain.

He has held one presidency for a full term – as many predicted he would not – against enormous media and deep-state resistance (including the mass idiocy of Russia Rage/”Russiagate”). And now “the twice-impeached semi-pariah” of 2021 has staged a formidable comeback against even more of the same, this time featuring a combination of assassination attempts and total lawfare, including felony convictions that turned out not to matter (except they helped him fire up his base and donors).

You neither have to like nor admire the man to register the plain fact that the above is the imprint of very unusual political talent because no one is just that lucky.

And all the signs are that Trump is far from done. Because, make no mistake, he has not run for the presidency again merely to take his revenge for being defeated in 2020 and harassed ever after. He is a textbook narcissist, and the sheer pleasure of showing them all certainly matters to him. But, still, it is nothing more than the fun part.

Beyond that lies an almost messianic will to principally change the US, politically and culturally (in the broadest sense of the word), including the way it relates to the rest of world. How far will Trump get with that agenda? Trumpism is certainly much more organized, as the hostile Economist grudgingly recognizes, this time around. Ultimately, though, time will tell. What is certain is that Trump will try because he is not one to rest on his laurels. 

Before we look at what he may do in more detail, a few words are in order about the causes of his triumph and the Democrats’ second, devastating humiliation at his hands. Some may even recall the rare predictions made in 2021 – one by this author, as it happens – that a Biden presidency could well turn into the perfect springboard for Trump’s revenge.

Others will stick to the obvious: the debilitating senescence of President Joe Biden and the shameless, as well as stupid, lying about it; the malodor exuded by the Bidens as an influence-peddling, power-hungry clan; the obstinate march of folly deep into the quagmire of a losing, wasteful proxy war against Russia via Ukraine; the clear and often brazen neglect of the interests and lives of ordinary Americans to go along with that waste; the sleazy last-minute promotion to the top of the ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris, a careerist who has never won a primary and offered a bizarre mix of what sometimes looked like somewhat substance-enhanced “joy” and embarrassingly empty rhetorical hogwash even by US standards; her transparent shortsighted and painfully desperate play to the right, roping in neocon liabilities such as the Cheneys and mistaking them for assets.

And, overshadowing it all, abetting – really co-perpetrating – Israel’s crimes, including genocide and every war crime and crime against humanity ever codified, as part of the administration of “Genocide” Joe Biden.

Even if Harris and her Democrats have lost for many more reasons than all of the above, there is something special about the issue of genocide. In moral as well as political terms, that those who have participated in this crime at least lose an election is a relief. A small, far too small victory in a very dark world, but still better than if they had suffered no consequences at all.

In addition, their ostentatious neglect of American voters of Palestinian or generally Arab descent may not have been quantitatively decisive for the election outcome. But callously offending these voters, as in Harris’ bizarre equating of the Gaza genocide “issue” with that of grocery prices, did play a role. And that is, in and of itself, a fact of historic importance.

As the highly perceptive Middle East expert Mouin Rabbani has observed on X, this was “the first time in modern American history” when “contempt and disdain for Arabs, and demonization of Palestinians, has proven to be a losing rather than winning electoral strategy.”

Indeed, an even larger shift is in play. One of the fundamental changes the US is undergoing domestically is, in the words of a recent article in Foreign Affairs, “the country’s ongoing transition from a white-majority to a white-minority society.” From that perspective, the Democrats’ politically suicidal affront to Arab-American citizens is a harbinger of a future in which it won’t be enough anymore to satisfy the Israel lobby to stay in power. Indeed, it will take confronting the Israel lobby.

But back to Trump. If it is true that the most intense of Trumpism – the best, the worst? I leave that to your individual preferences – is yet to come, what might it look like? Let’s simplify things by asking where his second term is likely to make a difference and where it will not.

To start with, what is not going to change? Whatever Trump is – a fascist? a nationalist isolationist? a populist? a patriotic conservative? – he is not a (small-'d') democrat. His instincts clearly bend to authoritarianism. Yet there is no need to cry crocodile tears, because never mind its self-idealization and propaganda, the US is, of course, not a democracy but an oligarchy with authoritarian tendencies anyhow. It’s a harsh but elementary truth: one cannot lose – or, for that matter, defend – a democracy one does not have. In that regard, Trump is, like it or not, as American as apple pie, and his rule won’t make a principal difference.

Another thing that, as far as we can see, is extremely unlikely to change, is the politically insanely self-damaging as well as evil – yes, “evil” is the word – commitment of the American establishment to Israel. At least, Trump has given no substantial reason to doubt that he also plans to be unconditionally submissive to the genocidal Zionist apartheid state. It is true that, in the last days of campaigning, Trump suddenly signaled some ambiguity, demonstratively listening to American critics of Israel in a manner that his Democrat opponents equally demonstratively did not. Yet that may well have been nothing but tactics, a cynical move to exploit his rivals’ weakness. The record of his first time in office, in any case, offers no hope for the critics or victims of Israel. 

Wishful thinking is a bullet train to perdition. Just look at the EU and NATO and their delusions about Russia (and Ukraine), and the price they will have to pay for them. And yet, could there possibly be reasons to believe that a Trump administration may surprise us with regard to Israel? Yes. As a matter of fact, there are three of them.

First, Trump is generally hard to predict – and proud of it. Second, Trump is a nationalist, fed up with the costs of America’s imperial overstretch – and Israel is one hell of an expensive item. Trump’s base – and he certainly knows it – includes not only Christian Zionists but also America-Firsters who have had enough, if not of Israel’s crimes, then of its relentless sponging. Third, Trump is, as noted frequently, highly transactional, a fancy term for saying he is capable of a quid pro quo, which, come to think of it, isn’t such a bad quality in a politician. If Iran should acquire nuclear weapons and – this is crucial – the means to deliver them to the American empire’s homeland, Trump might (!) come to think of Israel as a strategic burden rather than an asset.

Which brings us to one of the first litmus tests of the coming Trump presidency. The Israeli leadership would like nothing better than the US fighting yet another insane war in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, this time, of course, against Iran. The key question is whether Trump will do so.

That question may be much harder to answer than it seems. It is true that Trump is buying into the very worst of anti-Iranian propaganda, and his first term was dedicated to a campaign of “maximum pressure” against Tehran, including the perfectly criminal and cravenly cowardly – US-style – assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, a man who had done more to defeat the scourge of ISIS than any other single leader. Iranians have good reasons to be very worried.

But will Trump go for another great war just to oblige, once again, Israel and its US neocon allies? That is the real question. And there, his nationalism and his pragmatism – or opportunism, if you prefer the unkind term – may cut the other way. Let’s hope for that. Until Iran has the nuclear weapons to effectively deter America, the best we can hope for is that whoever rules in Washington will keep hesitating simply because large-scale war is risky.

With China, things seem to be even more obvious. Chinese currency and stock markets have dropped in response to Trump’s win for good reason. If there is anything that has been stable about the Trump political trademark it is hawkishness toward Beijing. The former and next president seems set on a course of confronting China as Washington’s favorite enemy. Here, however, the key question is not if but how. Unlike his Democratic opponents, Trump is more likely to cast his attack on China purely as economic warfare. The threat of a military confrontation, especially over Taiwan, may, as a matter of fact, be decreasing under him. A good outcome? Hardly. Could there be worse? Definitely.

And then there is, of course, Russia. Trump is not a Russian agent. Biden may have been a Ukrainian and an Israeli one. Blinken certainly is working more for Israel than the US. But that is a different matter, and also foul water under a decrepit bridge.

Yet Trump has always been capable of being non-hysterical about Russia, which, in the realm of US politics, is a rare superpower nowadays. Some form of a US-Russia rapprochement is almost inevitable now. But it will depend on Washington what form it will take, how far it will go, and how productive it will become – because Moscow won’t give anything anymore for free. Those days are truly over.

Russia has bled – profusely – in fending off the US-led Western attempt to degrade it into insignificance. That is why Trump will have to offer real concessions to mend the relationship. Silly fantasies of splitting the de facto Chinese-Russian alliance will have to be abandoned. And if the US cannot do that much, then it will find itself without anyone to talk to.

In the final analysis, it is, though, more likely than not that the US under Trump can find a common, sensible language with Russia under Putin. And that will be a good thing for humanity. Except, of course, the “elites” of the EU, Canada, Japan and other places thoroughly vassalized by the US. They may very well find themselves frozen out in the worst of all worlds – still in daft opposition to Russia (and China), while also abandoned by the US. That will be a cold, sad, lonely place to inhabit. Perhaps together with a symbolic remnant of NATO. Let’s hope for the best.