Nov. 6, 2024, 6:30 a.m.
Somewhere the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter is celebrating, perhaps over a dinner of liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. The man who made him a star of the presidential campaign has overcome unprecedented political, legal, and personal challenges to return to the White House four years after being tossed out.
The improbable path Donald Trump followed to his historic win on Tuesday was strewn with self-built obstacles, including speeches punctuated by references to Lecter, sharks, windmills, "the nuclear," crowd sizes, and more personal insults than anyone could count. But when voters went to the polls, those things were insignificant compared to the one large hurdle Vice President Kamala Harris just could not scale.
President Biden revived her career in 2020 when he rescued Harris from her unsuccessful 2019 campaign and tapped her to be his vice president. But, four years later, he doomed her effort to take the next step up the electoral ladder by hugging her just a little bit too tightly.
She never successfully separated herself from the deeply unpopular incumbent president. The depth of that unpopularity was made clear in the network exit polls in one of the battleground states, North Carolina. Fully 70 percent of the voters in the state said they were either dissatisfied or angry about the way things are going in the United States, while only 27 were enthusiastic or satisfied. State after state showed similar results.
It is daunting for any candidate to overcome such strong headwinds, and Harris fell short.
It may not overstate the case to suggest that Harris lost the election on the morning of Oct. 8 when she was asked by The View co-host Sunny Hostin if there was anything she would have done differently from Biden during the last four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she responded.
Harris never recovered from those nine words.
Republicans pounced immediately. “There you have it, folks,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt tweeted. “Kamala wouldn’t change a thing that’s happened over the four years. If you elect her, you can expect four more years of the same: Inflation. Border crisis. Crime. War. Chaos. Division. Only President Trump will bring CHANGE!”
The president’s approval ratings in the exit polls were brutal, particularly in the battleground states. Wisconsin voters gave him 38 percent approval, 61 percent disapproval. In Georgia, his disapproval was 58 percent; in Arizona, 57 percent; in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, 56 percent; in Michigan, 55 percent.
Even with those numbers, it still is stunning to see the country do something for only the second time in its history—return a president to office four years after tossing him out. Before Trump, only Grover Cleveland in 1892 managed to pull that off.
In his four years out of office, Trump did nothing to moderate the erratic behavior that cost him the job after the most chaotic and disruptive presidency in modern history. To the contrary, he refused to concede, spread wild falsehoods about his defeat, and became even more of a bully to his opponents.
In his victory speech that ended shortly before 3 a.m., Trump more than once used one of his favorite phrases, "Nobody has ever seen...." This time, he was absolutely right. No one before in American history has come back so completely and so triumphantly from the political grave he dug with his 2020 defeat and his incitement of violence on Jan. 6.
By welcoming Trump back to the White House, Americans have said more about themselves than about the man they elected.
For many Americans, Trump did not win despite the turbulence of his first term, an ex-presidency marked by grift, and a campaign fueled by distortions and dishonesty. They voted for him because of them. In doing so, they have sent shockwaves far beyond American shores. American allies who were shaken badly by Trump’s aversion to alliances in his first term are reassessing whether they can continue to rely on Washington when the president is someone who calls them deadbeats and has suggested NATO no longer matters.
In Ukraine, those fighting off a brutal Russian invasion know they have lost their staunchest supporter. In South Korea, they know they will have to deal with a president who views ties with Seoul in purely transactional terms.
All world capitals will now brace for a markets-rattling trade war if the new president presses forward with his plans to impose 19th-century-style tariffs on imports.
The voters knew all this when they went to the polls. They also saw that Trump was increasingly erratic in this campaign, and could well get worse as the oldest candidate ever to be elected. Putting him back in office while knowing all this confirms Trump’s belief that a campaign of bluster and insults could triumph with unremitting appeals to nostalgia for a long-gone America that was 90 percent white, economically dominant, and culturally uniform.
Trump was right that he could ride fears of a porous border and price shock at the supermarket right back into the Oval Office. He tried his mightiest to obscure that message in a perplexing final campaign push that put the worst of the candidate on display. But he carried the day with four years of repetition that his four years in office were the best ever in American history before Biden turned it toward socialism and weakness. Trump’s message of catastrophe that only he could fix triumphed over all the charts and graphs and statistics that showed the opposite was true.
Harris never found a way to get across the enviable strength of the American economy. Nor was she able to communicate that the worst of the inflation that flowed from a global pandemic was over. Most important, she never persuaded voters that she was not Joe Biden.
