In a just world, Donald Trump would have won the Nobel Peace Prize for securing the historic Abraham Accords peace agreements of 2020. So too, in a just world, would A-list Hollywood studios now be bidding for the rights to produce the film adaptation of the single greatest comeback story in American history: Donald Trump, the once and future president.
Trump’s electoral landslide this week is one for the history books. His myriad foes illegitimately spied on his 2016 campaign. They fabricated a “Russia collusion” narrative out of whole cloth, then spent years “investigating” it. They impeached him twice. They prosecuted him across four separate jurisdictions, 91 criminal counts in total. They have tried to humiliate him, bankrupt him and incarcerate him. Assassins have tried to kill him — twice.
They have failed — repeatedly and catastrophically. Trump has solidified his status as the most consequential American political figure since Ronald Reagan. He has become the first Republican presidential candidate to win the national popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. He has scrambled America’s political coalitions for a generation or more, expanding beyond his white working-class base to reach the full tapestry of modern American life.
And he has done it all despite the impassioned opposition and scorn of ruling elites from sea to shining sea. Never again will Grover Cleveland, that venerable 19th-century “Bourbon Democrat,” be the sole answer to the trivia question, “Which president has served two nonconsecutive terms?” We can now add the maestro of Mar-a-Lago to the list. It is a mesmerizing, astonishing tale.
Besides being the single greatest comeback story — political or otherwise — in American history, there are at least two other crucial takeaways from Tuesday’s romp.
First, it is evident that the 2008 Barack Obama Democratic Party intersectional coalition has died. It is not that the coalition is wounded or endangered; it is that it is dead. Trump made historic inroads with Hispanic voters, Black voters, young voters and other demographic subgroups that have been vital to the Democrats since 2008. Trump won the nation’s single most Hispanic county — 97% Hispanic Starr County, Texas — by 16%. Queens County, New York, famously one of the most ethnically and racially diverse counties in the country, moved over 20 points toward Trump from his 2020 performance. Overall, Trump won just under half the national Hispanic vote, and he made historic inroads with black men. Voters under the age of 35, such a core Democratic constituency in the not-so-distant past, are now a swing voting bloc.
Obamaism is dead.
This is a seismic shift in the American political landscape, and it’s not clear where Democrats go from here. They can scream “Nazi!” or “fascist!” until their lungs give out, but the reality is that their policies on a host of issues — from race to gender to immigration to crime to the economy — have alienated large swaths of modern America. Democrats seem inclined to scapegoat the senile president of the United States — as if Uncle Joe is somehow to blame for not bowing out of the race weeks, or even months, sooner. This is pure cope. The problem, Democrats, is not that Biden stayed in too long. Nor is the problem, as the insufferable Sunny Hostin laughably suggested on “The View,” rampant sexism or misogyny among the American electorate. The problem is that the Democratic Party is no longer a mainstream political organization.
Second, Trump, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and the broader MAGA movement are now blessed with a unique opportunity. That opportunity, as this column put it in July following Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate, is to “effectuate transformative change in American political life by scrambling arbitrary old political lines and building a durable, generational coalition of the broader center.” It is imperative that Trump and — perhaps even more important — his soon-to-be allies in Congress understand this. America’s cultural and civilizational divide, which was reflected in this election, is less a traditional “Right” versus “Left” ideological split than it is a more prosaic — but no less stark — divide between normalcy and sanity, on the one hand, and decadence and freakishness, on the other hand.
Republicans are about to control the White House, the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. These opportunities are infrequent, and Republicans must take advantage. Each and every day, the presidential and congressional agenda must be oriented toward prioritizing the common man who has been left behind for decades by both parties. Let the Democrats continue to navel-gaze and morally preen about their “virtue.” Just enact tangible policies, from the economy to trade to immigration and everything in between, that will better the common man’s lot in life.
The opportunity to refashion the Republican Party as America’s majority party is ripe for the taking. And what a Hollywood ending that would be.
