Let the Autopsy Continue

Ten Reasons Trump Won — and Why We Must Soldier On

I hope that your post-apocalypse self-care is underway. Keep at it. Even amid Donald Trump’s clown car Cabinet appointments, it makes perfect sense for most partisans to wait a bit before returning to the fray. But return we must, when Trump bursts through the remaining guardrails and becomes a lawless president, emboldened by the Supreme Court. Withdrawing from politics — while understandable — is just what the MAGA world wants.

It’s important to pick our battles, or we’ll waste time and energy on fruitless opposition. But the bad shit has already started. Trump is refusing to commit to an ethical transition, attempting to politicize the military, and demanding that the next Senate majority leader allow him to use recess appointments to run roughshod over the Senate’s constitutional duty to “advise and consent” on the composition of the Cabinet. Worse abuses are likely on the way.

The bottom line for the rest of us is this: We don’t choose when it’s convenient to protect democracy; history chooses us. I start my new book with the story of my father enlisting after Pearl Harbor. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of other young Americans have risked their lives fighting for the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. Today, you and the estimated 75 million other Kamala Harris voters don’t have to risk much of anything. All democracy asks is that you set aside a little time for citizenship.

If you’re a writer, that means bearing witness, as writers in even the most repressive societies do. If you’ve got some spare cash, it means helping the nascent pro-democracy movement and the lawyers suing to stop Trump’s carnage (I use that Stephen Miller line intentionally) or helping retire Harris’s campaign debt so Democrats can regroup. If you’ve got a spare attic, it might mean sheltering immigrants who have lived here for decades but face deportation. It will probably mean taking to the streets for millions, as pro-democracy forces have worldwide.

Now, to the election, in which one of the candidates ended his campaign by pretending to give a blow job to the microphone before completing the greatest political comeback in history,

Many of you doubt whether your effort counted this year. You think you labored in vain. You didn’t. Please recognize that you prevented a rout in the Senate that would have taken Democrats at least a decade to reverse. A 53-47 Republican edge (the likely result) is a helluva lot less bad than 57-43, which is nearly filibuster-proof. The swing to Trump from 2020 was 3.1 percent in the battleground states, compared to 6.7 percent elsewhere. The difference was Harris’s now-maligned ground game, which cut Trump’s margins and helped shorten his coattails. Harris-Walz door-knockers and postcard-senders played a crucial role in victories by Tammy Baldwin, Elissa Slotkin, Jacky Rosen, and Ruben Gallego.

And don’t mistake the 2024 results — which Trump won by two and a half percent — for a landslide or a realigning election. Trump won a popular majority with almost the same number of votes he got the last time. Harris lost because more than 11 million Democrats stayed home. I live in New Jersey, where everyone is clucking about how Harris only won by five points. The explanation is straightforward. Latinos, young people (a fair number turned off by Harris’s position on Gaza; others just apathetic), and Arab Americans didn’t vote. This was the story everywhere — the illusion of a Trump surge when his support barely moved up.

Trump’s share increased across the board, which is a matter of great concern to Democrats, but not his total number of votes. Even the heavily analyzed movement among working-class and Latino voters is not likely to be permanent. Both Richard Nixon in 1972 (49 states) and Ronald Reagan in 1980 (44 states) and 1984 (49 states) dominated among blue-collar voters who soon shifted back to the Democrats. Latinos, who are increasingly absorbed by the white majority as the Italian and Irish voting blocs were in the mid-20th Century, will be swing voters now, not a part of some enduring coalition. Unless, of course, Democrats learn no lessons from this election.

Historians will argue for decades about why Trump won, and they will never reach a consensus. There are just too many factors for a monocausal analysis. I offer ten possible reasons, in no particular order:

Biden’s Selfishness

Let’s start with Biden’s decision in early 2023 to run for reelection. He interpreted the surprisingly strong Democratic showing in the 2022 midterms as an endorsement of his record. It wasn’t. The idea of him serving until age 86 was preposterous on its face — or should have been. Biden isn’t senile; he has good days like the day he spoke for nearly an hour last summer with great nuance and knowledge at the close of the NATO summit. But he should have had the self-knowledge to recognize that his party and country would be better off if he kept his pledge to be a transitional figure.

The Democrats who enabled him even after his disastrous June 27th debate didn’t seem to understand the sole purpose of a political party — to win. They bear responsibility for not staging an intervention at least a year ago. Jill Biden and Joe’s senior staff had a duty to tell him that he was too old and should step aside. Prominent Democrats should have said publicly that he shouldn’t run, which would have opened the door to other candidates.

Biden worried that without him, Democrats would cannibalize themselves with progressive excesses, as they did in 2020 before Jim Clyburn stepped in and saved him in the South Carolina primary. However, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders weren’t running in 2024 (also too old), and no young progressive stood in the wings. So the Democratic nominee would have likely been either a successful governor who— after a thorough vetting in the primaries — would have come across as a fresh outsider unburdened by inflation and immigration, or Harris herself, battle-tested by primaries that would have made her stronger and given her time to gently put distance between herself and Biden.

Global Anti-Incumbent Headwinds

For the last three years, inflation and migration have been the top issues in every country holding an election. Almost everywhere, incumbents have lost, which is why a candidate other than Biden or Harris would have had a better chance.

Inflation in the U.S. was lower than elsewhere — cold comfort to many Americans but a fact that should have been drilled home nonetheless. Biden could have taken a leaf from Franklin Roosevelt, who used his Fireside Chats to educate the country about banking. “Supply chain inflation” and “price gouge inflation” should have entered the national vocabulary starting in 2023, not a few weeks before the election. It was possible to spread those and other cogent explanations far enough to hear them back in focus groups.

While this would not have neutralized inflation as an issue, it might have allowed the administration to at least spread the blame. But Biden was too feeble and too insulated from the press to stress that point —or any other, for that matter.

Inflation, which hits 100 percent of the electorate, has always been a political killer; it’s often more damaging politically than high unemployment, which afflicts about 10 percent of the workforce, a disproportionate share of them non-voters. Just ask Jimmy Carter, who was crushed when he ran for reelection in 1980 primarily because of inflation and high interest rates.

Why wasn’t this better understood? Because comfortable Democratic elites often view inflation as an abstraction. It isn't when you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck with less than $1,000 in savings. A 25 percent increase in your grocery bill since Biden took office will inevitably be top-of-the-mind. So will housing inflation, which puts home ownership — and even rent — out of reach for younger voters, who hurt Harris badly by not voting in large numbers.

The Migrant Crisis

Biden also muffed immigration, which unfortunately is right in every strongman’s sweet spot, second only to war as a way of stoking fear of “the other.” Trump was elected in 2016 by stressing immigration, so it’s almost political malpractice that Biden didn’t handle it better. Why didn’t he and Harris bash Trump for employing scores of undocumented workers at all of his properties before he became president? No one even mentioned it. Democrats were correct that Trump blew up a hardline immigration bill. But that turned out to be a bank shot. In general election campaigns, if you’re explaining bills and Washington stuff, you’re losing.

Early on, the White House misread the politics of immigration, bending to progressive Latino activists who didn’t represent the views of many of their culturally conservative, pull-up-the-ladder constituents. When Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott began flooding northern cities with migrants, Democrats were slow to recognize the political danger to them.

Instead of endlessly conceding that “our immigration system is broken,” which sounded lame, Democrats could have taken earlier steps to fix it. They wouldn’t have even had to seal the border. Biden should have hired hundreds of retired lawyers to work for a few weeks, each briefly adjudicating asylum cases at the border (under the law, non-lawyers could also have served in an “asylum corps”). That would have stopped thousands of job-seeking migrants who were not fleeing persecution from disappearing into this country.

Covid Relief Checks

Biden’s not a showboat, so he didn’t sign Covid relief checks, as Trump did in 2020. Maybe he should have. I talked to many voters in Pennsylvania who remember those checks (for thousands of dollars) and felt that they had more money in their pockets when they were sitting at home in the Trump years. That was more important to them than  “authoritarianism” or “fascism” — two words that, according to focus groups, most voters either thought were overblown (democracy had, after all, survived Trump’s first term) or did not fully understand. And we shouldn’t minimize the overhang of the Covid era, a time when even many Democrats resented unnecessary school closures (courtesy of the teachers’ unions) and mandating masks for five-year-olds.

Harris’s Race and Gender

Some post-mortem reports concluded that the U.S. would simply never vote for a woman for president, especially a Black woman; others said it wasn’t that at all — that even Blacks and women were voting on other issues this year. The unknowable truth likely lies between the two.

What we do know is that the boys won this year’s boys-versus-girls campaign. I heard an intriguing theory for why the United States has so much trouble electing a woman. Unlike former monarchies, which have queens as cultural role models of women in power, Americans have no dominant matriarchal figure in our history. Catholic cultures can look to the Virgin Mary, which might help explain why Ireland, the Philippines and several Latin American countries have had women heads of state. Mexico just chose a woman president. (Yes, the Virgin Mary partially explains how Mexico recently elected a Jewish woman, Claudia Sheinbaum).

But culture cuts the other way, too. To understand the shocking defection of Latinos from the Democrats, check out this video of Victor Martinez, a popular Latino radio talk show host in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Martinez, who has often said that Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in 2016 because voters thought Bill would help her, argues here that much of the Latino swing away from Harris was little more than machismo-based misogyny.

I’d add something else: Yes, white racism is hardly dead in America. But there’s also racial enmity between the Black and Latino communities. It may have played out in this election in ways that no one wants to admit. All we know is that the candidate who called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals” — who said these immigrants were “vermin” who “poisoned our blood” — won nearly half of the Latino vote, up 14 points over 2020.

The Triumph of Fuck-You Politics

In 2016, Trump tapped into what — outside of family newspapers (which don’t exist anymore) — should properly be called Fuck-You Politics. In 2020, Trump was the incumbent with a terrible bleach-stained record on Covid, which was an awkward place from which to extend his middle finger. But a nation that loves its outlaws, anti-heroes, and underdog celebrities gunning for a comeback warmed to him in 2023 when he was repeatedly indicted and again in 2024 when he survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump’s grievances connected him to voters who might not have been in his cult but liked his bully-boy attitude.

When Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans said that Harris would win because “this is not who we are,” they were wrong. Trump and all he represents is, alas, at least part of who we are — the ugly part. 2016 was an aberration. 2024 shows that he’s in the American grain now.

Demagoguery

It works. When candidates lie, demean, and exploit fear, it often pays off for them. We learned that with Huey Long in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and George Wallace in the late 1960s and 1970s. We caught a break in the 20th Century when none of these men came close to the presidency.

When he took office in 1933 at the depths of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt could have easily become a dictator. Mussolini was popular in the U.S. (Hitler was brand new), and “dictator” had a positive connotation. Studebaker had a car called the Dictator, and it sold well. Even Eleanor Roosevelt thought Franklin should briefly assume a few dictatorial powers. FDR considered it, as I explain in The Defining Moment. But he decided not to exploit our weakness for strength.  He rejected demagoguery and dictatorship, and so did the country until now.

2019 Woke Bidding War

Democrats picking through the rubble rightly conclude that the roots of defeat lay partly in 2019 when their presidential candidates outdid each other in pandering to the left. All except Biden raised their hands when asked if they thought crossing the border without documents should be legal. A few down-ballot Democrats (not as many as the GOP alleged) had, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, supported “defund the police” — a politically suicidal notion that even at the time was endorsed almost nowhere outside Berkeley and parts of far-left Brooklyn.

As part of that woke bidding war, several candidates — including Harris — lost their heads on trans issues. Only a single TV ad will be remembered from this campaign, the one that showed Harris approving of taxpayer-paid sex change operations for transgender prisoners, including illegal aliens.

This trifecta of political harm (crime, trans, migrants) ran tens of thousands of times in battleground states and repeatedly during football games. It ended with a killer tag line: “Kamala’s for they and them. President Trump is for you.” Many local Democrats pleaded with the Harris campaign to respond. When she finally did, by telling Fox News’ Bret Baier that Trump had also upheld the law allowing this treatment in prisons, it didn’t land.

Harris, who ran a fine campaign overall, preferred to talk about the economy and the future. Her convention in Chicago was largely stripped of identity politics. But it was too late.

Lesson for Democrats: Don’t fill out questionnaires from interest groups or abandon your common sense.   

Rightwing Disinformation

I write in American Reckoning about my run-ins with Roger Ailes, whose development of Fox News in 1996 is the origin story of our current travails. For a slightly different perspective, I’d like to share some of the thoughts of Michael Tomasky, who uses this visual analogy:

Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Again, I’m not monocausal, but no analysis of what went wrong is complete without an account of siloed information (or misinformation) that leaves much of the public in the dark.

Low-Propensity Voters

This year, roughly 150 million Americans voted. That compares to roughly 112 million who vote in midterm elections, a disproportionate share of them college-educated. So, roughly 38 million registered voters don’t bother with midterms, school board contests, or other elections. However, these mostly non-college-educated “low propensity” voters have a high propensity to cast a ballot once every four years. They went heavily for Trump.

The problem for Democrats is that there are more of these working-class low-propensity voters than there are, say, Liz Cheney Republicans. The split between college-educated and non-college-educated voters will likely continue, with the former decisive in midterms and the latter holding the key to general elections. This means the Democrats have their work cut out for them.

Despite smoking too much hopium this year, which made him too optimistic about Harris’s chances, Simon Rosenberg remains one of our clearest political thinkers.

I wanted to include here the key questions he will lead discussions on in his newsletter, Hopium Chronicles:

• “Why didn’t fear and opposition to MAGA drive this election as it did the 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 elections, particularly when MAGA 2024 was far more dangerous, criminal and extreme?

• How can Dems tell better stories about themselves, who we are and what we want to do, particularly on the economy and getting ahead/opportunity?

• Could we have handled the story telling around the pandemic and inflation differently? Didn’t we fulfill the core Biden-Harris campaign promise which was to get us to the other side of COVID, successfully? Should we have talked about that more?

• Was it wise to end the election telling voters prices were too high, which was one of the core arguments being made by Trump?

• Why did we win down ballot races in the battleground states in 2022 and 2024 but did not win at the Presidential level?

• How much of what happened with due to Harris being a bi-racial woman, particularly given that Trump’s central message was the demonization of otherness?

• What in the world happened with Latino voters and young people, and what do we do about it?

• What’s the future of the fight for reproductive freedom?

• Did Republicans cross over to vote Dem, and what happens next with Liz Cheney and the NeverTrumpers? Do they become part of a new Democratic Party, make peace with Trump or stake out some other path?

• How do we keep the millions of Americans who left it all out there on the playing field in 2024 engaged and prevent them from losing heart?

• Trump had fewer ads and less field than us, and still won. What does this mean?

• How can Dems get louder and more effectively counter the right’s information superiority?

• How should we be thinking about countering Trump’s agenda and building an effective opposition?”

Finally, we’re right to be frightened by what lies ahead. My longtime take on Trump is that every time you think he has touched bottom — he crashes through the floor. We must avoid despair, fight back, and be comforted that history strongly suggests that 2026 will be a Democratic year and that Democrats have several great young candidates for 2028.

I want to end here the way I end my book with Lincoln.

In 1861, on the eve of civil war, he said:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

I’m not a natural optimist, but I have always been hopeful. I’m convinced that our angels are still better than they now appear, and that those mystic chords of memory will, over time, swell our chorus and carry us home.

Please consider ordering my new book American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial - And My Own.

PRAISE FOR “AMERICAN RECKONING”

“I have been deeply indebted to Jonathan Alter for his political wisdom and journalistic experience these last 20 years, and I’m grateful for this gripping guidebook through a bizarre chapter in the life of our strangest president.”—Stephen Colbert

“No cameras in the courtroom, but Jonathan Alter’s brilliant book is the next best thing or better. Alter was the best writer there, and he delivers the historic drama as no one else could.”—Lawrence O’Donnell

“Jonathan Alter’s American Reckoning is a wonderful hybrid—a memoir of an extraordinary career in journalism, a political history of our recent past, and above all, an insightful account of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York. It’s also a cry for decency and democracy at a critical moment.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Rightwing Extremism

“Because the trial wasn’t televised, the country couldn’t experience it. Alter’s lively account brings home the drama, the twists and turns, the moments of real accountability—with broader thoughts about his own life experience and essential constitutional values. First-rate.”—Harry Litman, former federal prosecutor

“A must-read for anyone who truly cares about the majesty of the rule of law during these perilous times.”—Retired New York Judge George Grasso

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"Alter’s fine, indispensable book offers an understanding of the presidency worthy of Robert Caro and a legal account of a celebrity trial that would have enthralled Dominick Dunne. It is a must-read." —James Zirin, The Washington Monthly

“A clear-eyed paean to equality under the law.”—Kirkus Reviews