President Joe Biden stepped to the microphone in the Rose Garden Thursday and told his assembled Cabinet and staff that he had spoken to President-elect Donald J. Trump and congratulated him on winning the election. “In a democracy, the will of the people always prevails,” Biden declared, promising a “peaceful and orderly transition” of power to the man he had compared to Adolf Hitler. “That’s what the American people deserve,” he said.
For her part, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a concession speech Wednesday afternoon at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory,” she said. “I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”
Then she went on to use the words “fight” or “fighting” 19 times, in case you had a bet on the over/under.
Meanwhile in New York, Attorney General Letitia James held a press conference and vowed to “fight back” against Trump. In San Francisco, California Attorney General Rob Bonta bragged to reporters that his department “fought” the last Trump administration and would be a “force to be reckoned with” again. And in Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom demanded that the legislature come back for another special session. He directed them to find the money to pay for lawsuits to stop the policies of the democratically elected Trump administration.
Democratic (and some Republican) office-holders and media commentators frequently use the words “chaos” or “chaotic” to describe the first Trump administration or Trump himself. The truth is that any “chaos” stemmed from their nonstop efforts to use their power to destroy him from the moment he came down the escalator in Trump Tower. Not metaphorically, as in “destroy” somebody by winning an argument. Literally destroy him. Call him a Russian agent. Bankrupt him. Jail him. Leave a Pennsylvania rooftop unguarded so a gunman could shoot him.
But a majority of voters found out, slowly at first and then faster after Elon Musk bought Twitter and stopped “moderating content” flagged by outside censors, that the “chaos” was a lot of lies, hoaxes, politicized prosecutions and dirty tricks.
And it never ends. On Wednesday, Trump-denouncing reporter Bob Woodward was on CNN to share this: “I talked a couple of months ago to Dan Coats, the former Director of National Intelligence under Trump, and I said, ‘What’s going on in this relationship between Trump and Putin?’ And Dan Coats said, ‘It’s almost, it’s so close, it seems like it might be blackmail.’”
Almost? Close? Seems like?
These clickbait smears go a long way toward explaining Gallup’s finding that a record-low number of Americans, just 31%, have “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in “the mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly.” Sixty-nine percent said they have “not very much” trust or “none at all.”
Consider that when Trump “totally condemned” the “neo-Nazis and white nationalists” at a 2017 protest rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, these words were consistently edited out of news clips of his remarks, perpetuating what has become known as the “fine people” hoax.
Or that when Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t elected, he was discussing the economic harm that would befall the U.S. auto industry if Biden’s policies continued, not threatening a literal bloodbath if he lost the election.
Or that when Trump told his supporters on January 6, 2021, to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol, those words were intentionally left out of clips shown on TV news programs and by the January 6th Committee.
There are too many hoaxes to list here, but now there’s a website devoted to cataloguing and exposing them: americandebunk.com.
The truth is that Trump has realigned the U.S. electorate, and that’s a mortal threat to the existing political order in both parties.
Trump drew the votes of 46% of Latino voters in 2024, according to exit polls, up from 32% in 2020 and 28% in 2016. He carried border counties in Texas, including Starr County, where the population is 97% Hispanic. Starr County has not voted for a Republican since 1892.
Trump improved his numbers with “seemingly every possible grouping of Americans,” the New York Times reported. And some states that were expected to fall easily into the Democratic column were instead surprisingly competitive. Harris won New Jersey by only 5 percentage points, Illinois by 9. Trump swept the crucial swing states, carrying Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and leading in Arizona and Nevada as vote-counting continued on Thursday.
Forty percent of California voters and 44 percent of New Yorkers went for Trump, helping the former president to the first popular-vote victory by a Republican since 2004.
But it would be a mistake to consider Trump’s re-election a “Republican” victory. What Trump has built is a cross-party movement of Americans who have been suffering economically and in other ways from the foreign and domestic policies of the people who have been in power since the 1990s.
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How long has it been since typical Americans could afford college, find a job that pays four times the cost of housing, feel confident that their kids will get a good education in public school and earn a pension that will support them comfortably in retirement? Since the 1980s? The 1960s?
Meanwhile, the size of government has grown. The national debt has grown. The resulting inflation is a vicious tax destroying the value of Americans’ earnings and savings.
Donald Trump promised to use the threat of tariffs to muscle companies into bringing their factories back to the U.S. from overseas, creating more jobs here. He promised to increase U.S. oil and gas production to bring down the cost of energy and everything that uses it. He promised to secure the border, make government more efficient, and end “forever wars.”
It looks like he won’t have a “honeymoon,” but he has something better. A mandate.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley