On January 20, 1982, the heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne famously bit off the head of a bat on the concert stage. Forty-three years later to the day, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as 47th US President: many Europeans wondered if America had just bitten off a bat’s head on the world’s stage. Is Trump the Ozzy of global politics?
Osbourne, who had thought the bat was made of rubber, was later treated for rabies. The European media speak as though America is about to catch political rabies. What treatment is there for dramatic new tariffs, mass deportations of illegal migrants and Elon Musk intervening in European elections?
Some perspective is needed. You don’t need to like Trump to see he’s no Hitler. In one of his last acts as president, Joe Biden invited Trump in for tea. The outgoing administration has congratulated itself on the peaceful transfer of power. The defeated Democratic Party is looking ahead to the 2028 presidential election. No one who truly believes Trump is Hitler would do any of those things.
Perspective is also needed on US voters. Memes suggesting Trump’s voters don’t care about criminality or lies miss the point. Trump would not have won if he hadn’t attracted the votes of people who had voted against him twice, in 2016 and 2020. Clearly, something else was on their mind.
Lies? Oh, Trump does lie but, in 2024, that was hardly a distinction. The Democratic Party and the legacy media shamelessly covered up Biden’s cognitive decline until it couldn’t be hidden. For many voters, that disqualified the media from preaching about truth.
Other voters spoke of the shock of discovering that Trump never praised neo-Nazis as “fine people”; he had explicitly condemned them. But Democrats, including Barack Obama, continued to say otherwise. That backfired in an election where podcasts could upload the unedited film.
Criminality? When Trump’s police mugshot was taken, his then waning popularity was given a huge boost. That’s not because voters don’t care about the law. It’s because they thought the law was being abused – a view given credence by several constitutional authorities (including some who had sternly criticised Trump on January 6, 2020).
To understand the vote, you need to see the choice before the electorate.
Trump is one of history’s most talented candidates. (I said candidate, not president.) In 2016, he ran as someone who would tear up conventional wisdom; in 2024, he campaigned as the candidate who would restore common sense. And he won both times, re-writing the rule book along the way. Even in the election he lost, he won more votes than Obama at his peak.
Against this once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, the Democrats put up their weakest candidate in recent memory. Kamala Harris had been a historically unpopular vice-president. She had proven electoral weakness. She couldn’t string a sentence together without giving fodder for satirists. When asked, by a friendly interviewer, what she would do different from the unpopular Biden, Harris couldn’t think of anything.
Donald Trump does not have a strong grip on Republican votes in the House and Senate
If you don’t like Trump’s victory, blame his opponents in the Democrat Party and legacy media. Their machinations first boosted his waning popularity, then destroyed their own authority and, finally, put up a feeble alternative.
Voters had repeatedly told pollsters they’d prefer not to have to vote for Trump, Biden or Harris. In the end, they had to choose from what was available. To say Trump’s election represents a failure of US democracy is to miss that the system had been seriously failing before that.
Any liberal democrat should be concerned about the close ties between Trump, the most powerful man in the world, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest. But to speak of this as a radical development is to miss the continuity with previous years. American oligarchy is not emerging now. It preceded Trump and will outlast him.
Fifty billionaires supported Trump in November but 80 supported Harris. The tech founders who support Trump today were once Democrat donors, including Musk. He has an outsized influence on the White House and policy; until recently, so did Bill Gates and Alex Soros.
Oligarchy currently coexists with a paranoid political culture. Large swathes of Left and Right believe in one conspiracy or another. The Right imagines CIA plots at every turn; the Left sees Putin’s agents behind every corner. The Right warn darkly about Gates’s plan to colonise our bodies; the Left predicts one of Trump’s cabinet picks, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, shall abolish the polio vaccine.
The Left may speak of Trump’s determination to destroy the system’s checks and balances; but the Left also argued for abolishing the Supreme Court. In its turn, the Right might wax about Trump’s Golden Age; but the most popular podcasts’ advertising is apocalyptic. You’re urged to invest in gold (in case the dollar fails); to subscribe to guaranteed medical supplies (in case there’s sudden scarcity); to acquire phones that hide your data from sinister state agencies; and to buy safes in which to lock the guns that will keep your family secure.
There’s plenty to keep an eye on for the next four years. Blinkers are the last thing we need.
A paranoid political culture makes for restless supporters. Trump does not have a strong grip on Republican votes in the House and Senate. He has already had to compromise on some of his cabinet picks. And he’s about to find out that negotiation by tweet will only take you so far in tackling inflation and shutting down a war.