Question From a Democrat: Why Do You Think Trump Won?

People who hold you in utter contempt are likely to do literally anything to you, especially when they’re telling you at least some of the things they’re planning.

by Rod D. Martin
November 21, 2024

A Democrat friend, perhaps more introspectively than most, writes to ask why I believe Trump won. Her question:

“Good morning, my sweet friend. I have always trusted you to be someone I can have conversations with and, if you'd be willing, I'd really love to hear about how/why you think Trump/Red won so handily in this election. I didn't vote Trump, but I've been, shall we say, less than thrilled with where most Democratic policies have taken us here in Denver. I worry I am falling into an echo chamber because I didn't really see this coming on the federal level (even though I track state politics daily! Lol), and I am trying to understand. I welcome your insight, but no pressure. Regardless, I hope you are doing well and please know I am sending you all my love, always!”

The following is my response:

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It is always delightful to hear from you. Thank you for your kind words.

There were a number of factors that led to Trump’s victory, certainly including the effect of inflation on the vast majority of regular people, widespread upset regarding the border, and so on. But nothing turned out to be so important as the sense that when Harris and others accused Trump of being a totalitarian they were projecting.

Two aspects of this particularly stand out, and we heard them again and again from people like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan (not to mention RFK and Tulsi Gabbard), not one of which is historically anything in the ballpark of “Republican”.

1. The ever-growing number of political prisoners. Lots of senior Trump advisors jailed for things no one or virtually no one else has ever been jailed for (“contempt of Congress” topping the list), “crimes” which the other side not only blatantly committed but which the media made into heroic causes when they did. There is an overwhelming sense among many regular people that they have become second-class citizens, that government can and will target them any time it feels like it, and that if they only had different political beliefs they could get away with literally anything.

I don’t want to get deeply into the details of any of these cases because that completely misses the point. But the Trump documents indictment is a perfect example. Biden literally kept classified documents in his garage; Clinton had all the secrets of the U.S. State Department on an unauthorized server in her basement; Sandy Berger got caught smuggling classified documents out of the National Archives in his shoes, and NOTHING HAPPENED to any of them. Nothing.

But Trump’s home gets raided by federal agents authorized to use deadly force.

I’m not opining on whether Trump was right or wrong, though I believe the President’s power to declassify is absolute, that there’s no good reason to believe he didn’t declassify anything he kept, that the Presidential Records Act covers everything he did, and that none of those things apply to any of the other three people I just named. All that is true, in my opinion, but irrelevant. That’s not why most normal people got mad, or scared.

They got mad, and scared, because of the selective prosecutions. Justice that isn’t equal is absolutely unjust, and you don’t need a law degree to know that in your gut.

So that’s the bigger of the two, which leads me to:

2. Mass censorship. Leading Democrats absolutely horrifying repudiation of the First Amendment — which, like the prosecutions, was nevertheless highly selective — was already bad enough before Labour won the general election in Great Britain. And then, all of a sudden, Starmer’s government was releasing violent criminals from the prisons to make room for people who posted memes the government didn’t like.

Oh, and threatening to extradite Elon.

Did they retract that last bit? Yes. Does that mean they wouldn’t try it tomorrow? No, as evidenced by the CEO of Telegram getting arrested in France (again, don’t get caught up in whether you like or don’t like Telegram: that’s not the point). Add this to the church closings during COVID while strip clubs and casinos were allowed to stay open, and the overwhelming documentation of the media’s suppression of important stories as “disinformation” which later turned out to be true — and later turned out to be known to be true by the government before the suppression took place — and this became rightly terrifying to many. Basically, what I’m describing sounds a lot like Venezuela, from the mouths of people who call themselves Socialists and mouth slogans previously used by Castro, Chavez, Maduro and Ortega.

So I refer you back to RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, as well as people like Bill Maher who still endorsed Harris but have been highly critical of the current Administration on all these points. There came to be a growing sense that we are on the brink of losing “Our Democracy” (a phrasing which has come to be seen as highly condescending by half the country), but that the people threatening it were actually the Democrats themselves. Who wants to close your church (but not the things your church opposes)? Who wants to censor your internet posts and (if Europe is our example) possibly jail you for them? Who wants you to show an ID for absolutely everything except voting? Who actually jails their political opponents?

Not the Republicans.

And on that last note: Trump made a lot of hay with the “Because you’d be in jail” line in the 2016 debate:

But we don’t have to wonder who he is or what he’d do, because he’s actually been President. And once actually in office, he refused to allow a prosecution of Hillary Clinton precisely because it was a Third World kind of thing to do. All of which suggests to normal people that his rhetoric was making the point that she did things that were wrong, but not that anyone should use the full power of government to silence and imprison the opposition.

The economy mattered. Demonizing half the country as fascists and Nazis and deplorables and “garbage” mattered. Telling working class people that it doesn’t matter if they lose their jobs because they should just “learn to code” mattered. Lots and lots of things mattered.

But all that condescension was crystalized in the unequal “justice” and the censorship, and the sense that under Harris it would not just get worse, but go far past the point of no return. People who hold you in utter contempt are likely to do literally anything to you, especially when they’re telling you at least some of the things they’re planning.

Bernie Sanders is correct: this is a self-inflicted wound. Democrats lost the working class, and men, and a lot of minorities, including nearly half of Hispanics, because they hold all those people in open, vocal contempt. Disgust, really. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it shouldn’t be.

But even more essential than stopping the demonization of half the country is giving up the weaponization of government against domestic political opponents. America rightly ran Nixon out of office for a great deal less.

“Our Democracy” requires no less.

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