Yes, You Do Have to Hand It to Trump Jeffrey Blehar
In a very real way, Donald Trump was running not just for the presidency but for his life.
Many political observers, myself included, spend more time mocking or castigating the losers of an election than crediting the winners. “If it bleeds it leads,” and for someone prone to engage in rhetorical carnage, few better opportunities present themselves than by counting coup on the political sad sacks moping around the Losers’ Table. So, if you’ll permit one last laugh about Kamala Harris’s blessed political demise, let’s marvel that the official line in Washington, D.C., and among Democratic media types is that “Harris ran a perfect campaign.” A “flawless campaign.” She did “everything she needed to do,” you see — why, she even secured Queen Latifah’s endorsement — but, alas, fell just a bit short.
You know who surely did not run a flawless campaign? Donald Trump. His consolation is that he has completed the most impressive act of political resurrection in American history, one that makes Richard Nixon’s 1968 return look trivial, and that he, not Harris, will become the 47th president of the United States. The Trump campaign’s victory this year was a landmark — and not just because Trump managed to win despite his behavior and the events that have surrounded him since the last election. The campaign was remarkable also because of its breadth. It organized a voter coalition very different from those of the Bush years and one much better equipped to compete nationally against Democrats in the longer term. It produced an increasingly multiracial party now reoriented toward working-class economic and cultural concerns, whose constituents are bound together in their skepticism of elites, all by the force of Trump’s success.
Who deserves the credit? Surely everyone involved in the campaign is eager to claim some. As John F. Kennedy said after the Bay of Pigs disaster, “victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan.” Trump must have been impressed, for example, with lifelong Florida GOP operative Susie Wiles, who was his informal campaign manager and will soon be his new White House chief of staff. (I doubt this is the last we’ve seen of Chris LaCivita, too.) But let’s properly credit Trump’s campaign operation, top to bottom. The candidate’s freewheeling demeanor notwithstanding, these men and women proved themselves to be clear-eyed professionals. Fundamentally, they had the correct theory of the electorate: that working-class minorities, disaffected low-propensity (and low-affinity) young males, and normal people terrified of the Left’s cultural project would combine in their shared anger — over inflation, the border, and the last four years of misgovernance — to get Trump reelected.
Trump’s ad people created a devastating series of TV spots that cut through the surrounding din of political messaging and froze Harris’s image as a creepily out-of-touch California progressive who is merely hiding her radicalism. His communications team intelligently capitalized on new media, deploying Trump time and again, for discussions as long as three hours long on podcasts, for instance, to appeal directly and for extended periods to the young voters he needed. And they somehow managed to get Trump to curb most — not all — of his worst public instincts, which was something less appreciated in the moment but appears equally as important in retrospect.
Trump’s campaign was tonally quite upbeat, though the media class seemingly never realized this, too busy as they were hyperventilating about Democracy Dying in Darkness. Trump himself did the vast majority of the hard work on this front, but his team also did something that Harris’s handlers clearly could never get right: They constantly put him in situations in which he could succeed. That they were able to do all of this on a comparatively meager budget of around $720 million, including staffing and ad expenditures, only becomes funnier when you learn that Harris’s campaign, which raised an astonishing $1.2 billion, is now millions in debt with nothing to show for it save public humiliation on the grandest of scales.
Trump’s team also had extra help because, unlike Harris, Trump chose his vice-presidential nominee wisely. Ohio senator J. D. Vance was undeniably the breakout star of this campaign season. Instantly painted by Democrats and the media as a “weirdo” who misogynistically fulminated about childless women, Vance benefited immensely from that initial caricature. He was revealed at the vice-presidential debate to be charming, witty, respectful, hyper-intelligent, and able to articulate a coherent vision of Trumpism in a way that neither Harris nor the hapless Tim Walz, who sought to criticize it, ever could. Vance did everything that Trump (and the Republican Party) could have reasonably hoped for and then some, and now he will provide both intellectual heft and elite-level communication skills to the administration.
Word is that Vance was put on the inside track for the VP nomination because of his friendship with Donald Trump Jr. If so, Don Jr. should be feeling pretty good about having given his father solid advice. But, ultimately, Trump was the man who took that advice, and very few commentators have noted the fact that his pick revealed confidence in a way Harris’s transparently did not. Harris — an acknowledged fool with equally well-known insecurities about her dimness — could not allow her ego to be threatened by the superior skills of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, so she chose Walz. (Vice-presidential picks do not decide elections, but, given that he couldn’t even carry his old congressional district in Minnesota, Walz did the Harris campaign no favors.) Meanwhile Trump was unafraid to pick an Ivy Leaguer and a best-selling author, a younger man with obvious ambitions to make MAGA into a serious governing project rather than just a slogan. It was a pick made from a position of strength, not weakness.
That, of course, brings us to Donald Trump himself. My opinion of his previous tenure in office — particularly of how it ended — is no secret. But if elections ultimately come down to the quality of the candidates, then surely it must be granted that Trump won in large part because he is in his own way a truly superb politician, an authentic generational talent who should be compared to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Some people would blanch at such a characterization — Trump will never be as popular as either of those two were, nor will he ever receive such lovingly gentle, supplicatory media coverage as they did. But the fact that Trump has, in all likelihood, earned the GOP its first popular-vote victory in a presidential election since 2004 and nearly achieved an absolute majority despite his obvious handicaps suggests that, if anything, his skills are underrated. (“Another Republican candidate would have won by an even larger margin” is the constant counter-argument. Be skeptical of it. For now, this map and demographic mix is, for better or worse, sui generis to Trump.)
On a purely personal level, too — perhaps one we consider less, because Trump knows too much about showbiz to get caught displaying vulnerability — his electoral performance was quite a feat. Imagine for a moment what it must have been like to run under all the encumbrances Trump faced. (That he brought many of these encumbrances upon himself is amusing but beside the point.) He left office in 2021 in poor odor, to say the least. He was then hit by myriad lawsuits and criminal charges, all of them transparent lawfare designed to keep him from running for office a third time. He was found liable in the E. Jean Carroll case and later convicted of 34 felonies derived from a single trumped-up charge in the hush-money case. (Sentencing still awaits.)
So perhaps the most ironic thing of all was how Trump ran a mostly upbeat campaign. Again, you would not know this from the tenor of mainstream media’s coverage, because their reporting was filtered through their incandescent outrage at his continued competitiveness. But while the media relentlessly characterized Trump as a dark specter of vengeance prepared to swoop down upon America and take us toward fascism, Trump’s fans instead saw the man they remembered from 2016: a guy dancing like a goofball to “Y.M.C.A.,” cracking jokes at Harris’s and Walz’s expense in his typical way, and trolling his political opponents with abandon. When he went on podcasts, he sometimes spoke with touching honesty about subjects the rest of the media rarely, if ever, discuss. His appearance on Theo Von’s show in late August, during which he talked wistfully about his brother’s death from lifelong alcoholism and how it made him a sworn teetotaler, was one of the most surprisingly humanizing interviews I’ve ever seen Trump give.
Harris’s informal campaign catchword may have been “Joy,” but Donald Trump and J. D. Vance were the only people out there who seemed to be having any fun. The closing month of the campaign saw Harris rallying solemnly with Liz Cheney in suburban Detroit, grimly warning of the danger to the republic should Trump be reelected. Trump, meanwhile, was working a shift at McDonald’s (in one of the most successful campaign stunts in recent electoral history) or rolling around an airport tarmac in his own personalized garbage truck to mock Joe Biden’s errant words. At nearly every moment when the Trump campaign could have been pinned down by a bad news cycle, Trump went out and changed the news by himself. It was a bravura performance, and, if you doubt that, simply look at the number of first-time voters he activated.
For all the chaos and madness that will forever surround Donald Trump, he is also the man who gave us one of the most authentically stirring political images of my lifetime. His rising from the stage in Butler, Pa., on July 13, holding off his Secret Service agents as he bleeds profusely from a bullet wound, and turning around to throw up a defiant fist for the terrified crowd — that was a moment that genuinely made me proud to be an American. I was proud to see the former president immediately shake off an assassin’s bullet and announce to the world that he would not be intimidated, or stopped, by any gunman. I wrote that day, “He probably won the election tonight.”
And he probably did.
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