Trump Won—Even If He Loses

*The Liberty Bell peals. Trumpets bray. Somewhere, high in the snowcapped Rockies, a bald eagle cries.* Time for the quadrennial columnist gambit: predicting the presidential election!

Now, now. Stay your hand, dear editor. Simmer down. I’m less preoccupied with who scrapes off 270 electoral college votes and becomes the 47th president of these united states. Joe Biden provided an inestimable service for Washington-fixated Americans in being object proof the president qua president is, at best, a simple vessel. The executive branch doesn’t actually require a forceful personality to function—just a warm body scribbling his or her Hancock across a Xeroxed “bill” fashioned by mysterious, Gideon Rubin manikins scrivening deep in the bowels of a concrete bureaucracy.

Despite its tautological sounding, elections are signal reflections of the electorate, the outcome a still-shot of the country’s immediate feeling. If you stare at the frame, you can make out a hair of movement, an enigmatic blur, that suggests a shift in mood, attitude, dispensation.

In the past quarter-century, the American voter has refused to stand still. And how could he find his footing, what with a terrorist attack, multiple wars, an economic blowup, the spread of the internet, the Great Awokening, a million-murderer pandemic, and unprecedented desocialization all shifting the ground under his feet?

Our body politic can’t find a straight course, spasmodically embracing all-out military adventurism in ‘04, adopting rapprochement in ‘08, rejecting Windsor-knotted vulture capitalism in ‘12, saying “no” to an also-ran schoolmarm in ‘16, and crying out for comforting nostalgia in ‘20. But this year? The choice is already made: Donald Trump won. Even if he comes up short on November 5th—or, God forbid, a week later when the grandmas at the Lancaster County public library finish ticking off the last ballot.

Should Kamala Harris scooch, slip, shimmy, and skate by, picking off enough white degreed do-gooders, she’ll still have lost the larger scrimmage. Harris’s platform, to the extent that any policy bulletin exists uncribbed from clinical Wikipedia summaries, won’t obtain in her administration. She’ll be hamstrung, like Harold Macmillan, by events, and, more crucially, public opinion.

One year ago, The American Conservative Jude Russo authored the urtext of this year’s election: “Trump Won.” The provocative title was both a cheeky wink and poke at febrile fraud fantasies, but also a nod to the future. In announcing Trump a victor, Russo wasn’t referring to the not so mean feat of attaining the White House. Trump’s triumph was larger than being a boss to millions of beavering bureaucrats. “In under a decade, almost all Trump’s policies have achieved the status of conventional wisdom,” Russo observed. Consider the MAGAfication of political discourse. Poll after push poll after probing poll show voters’ forefront worry is illegal immigration. Vice President Harris, despite her flop job as “border czar,” has acceded to completing Trump’s signature “wall,” despite calling it a “waste of money.” So much for principled progressivism!

Trump’s trade tiffs are another crucial act in his repertoire, going back well before he ran for president. Many of the tariffs he enacted were kept on the books by President Biden—without nearly as much resistant vitriol. On the whole, Trump’s zero-sum, out-compete, industrialized vision of America manufacturing versus the world has been internalized even by his own pro-market party. Bipartisan infrastructure bills proliferated in the Biden years. Results varied. But “investing in America” is now a watchword for both parties.

On foreign policy, where Trump garnered the most ire from Swamp periodicals, the working consensus has slowly morphed into America-First-ism. Biden executed Trump’s proposed Afghanistan retreat—messily at the cost of over a dozen servicemen and women. But the tent was at last (though not fully) folded. More so, Biden and Harris refused to commit troops to fight pari passu with hardened Ukraine fighters against Russian invaders, which is a Washington wiggle to save face even as we’ve lent out advisors to aid in the war.

On Trump’s triumvirate issue set, not only has the Republican Party relinquished its past “invade the world, invite the world” bearings, but so has the Democratic Party. Even on its subaltern causes, like environment conservation and legal protection for baroque sexuality, the left is ceding ground. As journalist Dave Weigel writes, “[f]acing Donald Trump for the third consecutive election, Democrats are making rhetorical and policy concessions that they didn’t want to, or think they needed to, in 2016 and 2020.” Other liberal writers go further, wailing a dirge for left-wing politics. “The Progressive Movement Is Over,” declares Substacker Ruy Teixeira. Twitter takester Noah Smith asks “[w]hat remains of the progressive project?” before doubting the “the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years.” Even Vox admits the “left’s hopes for sweeping change from the 2010s have crashed into the reality of the 2020s.”

The libs, it would appear, have at last been owned.

After America’s spasm of DEI Puritanism, complete with racially inverted struggle sessions and mindless conflagrations, rampant identitarianism is retreating to the darkened edges of acceptability. Kamala Harris, the first black and South Asian female presidential nominee, hardly stresses her immutable heritage on the campaign trail—a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s shrill reminders that it was “her turn.” Harris isn’t just ditching her superficial pitch. She’s all but disavowed her previous precepts on everything from sex-change surgeries for jailbirds, Green New Dealism, and decriminalizing border crossings. Particularly on immigration, Harris is adopting the defensive crouch of her center-left peers, with Canada’s Justin Trudeau and the U.K.’s Keir Starmer pledging to slash migrant numbers.

As a final Donaldian coup, the legacy press, which swelled its coffers over fascist-mongering during Trump Term One but has since seen its public esteem go in a katabasian nosedive, can’t even keep up the charade of playing democracy’s essential defender. Both The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times demurred from presidential endorsements this year, despite previously publishing Clinton/Biden hagiographic editorials.

Donald Trump may not be the 47th president of the United States. But he’s won something more: a flag-flying victory that transcends mere office-holding. He’s become, in Ross Douthat’s estimation, “the defining figure of the age.” The center of gravity for U.S. politics now cores within the Aquanet-doused towheaded combover of a blowhard billionaire populist who discovered what really tickles the teeming imagination of the average Yankee voter: indulging their concerns, accepting their fears as valid, amping up their anger, petting their hopes, and widely exaggerating perceived threats to their safety.

Being elected ruler is nice, but it doesn’t beat being the ruler by which all competitors measure themselves.