Setting aside that he's likely to win the popular vote for the Republican party for the first time in 20 years, Donald J. Trump has accomplished something not seen since Grover Cleveland and been elected to serve two nonconsecutive terms as president. Next January, he will become America’s 47th president after four years out of power. Trump’s ascendance to this rare, historic moment is a story of unlikely, even fantastical success, and historians will, no doubt, spend decades unearthing the many, many factors which made Trump into the once-in-a-generation political success that he is. Equally, there is much for his supporters to thrill at, including the chance to shape the Supreme Court decisively, cement the United States as a center of global commerce by making the Trump tax cuts permanent, and the promise of decisive American leadership which will (God willing) end the many wars which have sprouted like weeds in the wake of his predecessor.
However, we think there is one thing, above all, which all Americans – regardless of party affiliation – ought to celebrate about this result: the people are still in charge. Indeed, the need to prove this has been the strongest argument for supporting Trump ever since he announced that he would run again in 2024. Even those who may have preferred one or the other of his primary competitors on policy grounds, if they were honest, had to admit that Trump’s opponents disproportionately came from the permanent Washington establishment, or the “Deep State.” However, unlike previous presidents of whom this was true, the establishment went far further with Trump.
They spread disinformation about his ties to Russia in order to create an impeachment trap.
When that didn’t work, they leaked classified information in order to get him impeached.
They “fortified” the election and censored his campaign’s best arguments out of existence in 2020.
They prosecuted him on the basis of legal theories concocted solely to make him criminally liable for crimes that had never been prosecuted before.
They lied endlessly about what he said.
We do not say this to play the victim; the time has passed for that. Rather, we say it to establish that the Washington bureaucracy tried to countermand the will of the voters – and possibly even shape it to their preferences – due to their disdain for one man. In their zeal to defeat the Bad Orange Man, they took not just cautious steps but reckless leaps toward authoritarianism. To those of us with even a basic understanding of civics, the problem was clear: if the establishment was able to veto one president, it could veto any president. Which means that electing Trump, whether you like him or not, sends a message to that establishment: you work for us, not the other way round.
We, of course, like Trump. We like him very much, and we think America desperately needs him back in office. We have made no secret of that. But now that he has won, the hard work of uniting America around its once and future president must begin. And after eight years of relentless gaslighting that Trump’s victory spells the end of democracy as we know it, we think the American people deserve to hear that the opposite is true, not as a polemical counterargument, but as soothing reassurance. Democracy won in 2024; the American people proved we – and not our self-appointed betters in the three-letter agencies – are sovereign.
And knowing this, we can also say that one other thing has triumphed: imagination. When Donald J. Trump descended the golden escalator in June of 2015, the entire political and media class laughed in disbelief. They could not believe that a campaign run on issues that were considered declasse and outside the Washingtonian Overton Window could win a majority of voters in any primary, let alone a general election. Donald Trump proved them all wrong, not because Americans already agreed with him, but because he persuaded them. His vision might have sounded ridiculous to Washington, but to the average American, the grandeur and optimism of it was infectious. “Make America Great Again” is a simple slogan, and one that Trump did not invent, but it is one that he gave meaning to in the eyes of voters.
Washington, of course, sniffed at it. “Make America Great Again?” they scoffed from the safety of their mansions on the Potomac. “It’s already great for me. What are these rubes talking about? I bet they’re just racist.” Ironically, the only retort they deserved for this was a line drawn straight from the woke: “Check your privilege.” For it was privilege that made Trump inscrutable to his opponents, that blinded them to the true unstated second part to his famous slogan: “Make America Great Again…for every American.” Because, as President Trump stated in his first inaugural address, “we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.”
Against this, the Left never had much of a chance. It was only when Americas were convinced to be ashamed of America – in other words, to not be patriots anymore -- by the terror of COVID, the guilt brought on by the death of George Floyd, and the relentless gaslighting of an arrogant and unconstrained woke elite that they swept back into power by a whisker. We now see what would have happened without these political forms of domestic abuse. In this, we are reminded of the great British liberal Christopher Hitchens, who called the 1980 election “the election that Watergate postponed.” By that same token, this was the election that COVID postponed. But that plague is dead, and the American people have now voted for the cure for the moral, political, and psychological plague that rose with it.
Which, to return to our earlier point, means that after this election, all things are indeed possible in American politics. A reality star can become a world-historical leader. A vision declared dead and disrespected by the powerful can rise again with the right messenger and win the hearts of the people. We are free to imagine a better world in whatever shape we wish, and to believe that one day, if we are persuasive enough, our fellow citizens will want to imagine it, too. In the words of Barack Obama, of all people, “yes, we can.” But thanks to Donald J. Trump, that phrase, which always lacked an object, now has one, and we think that taken as a full sentence, the two slogans will define not just Donald J. Trump’s second term, but American politics for decades to come:
Yes, we can make America great again.
