Member Newsletter
There’s a delicate balance in moments like this for anyone who has any level of megaphone. You don’t want to sound pollyannaish or appear that you’re in some kind of denial about the gravity of the situation. Just as much, though, you don’t want to affirm perceptions or feelings that are natural and even healthy but are still not altogether accurate.
America is not in or destined for autocracy. We took a step closer to it on Tuesday. And it was a pretty decent sized one. We elected a man all of whose instincts and desires are to govern as an autocrat. And that was after the country got a chance to see who he was up close once already. So we not only got that but we got that with a majority, though the tiniest of ones, voting for it with every reason to know who Trump is. I said in an earlier post that I don’t believe a majority of the country wants the future Trump is promising. In response, one reader wrote, with a lot of intensity, that I was letting voters off the hook. They knew exactly what they were getting, etc.
There was a bit of miscommunication here. That reader is totally right that who Trump was and is is totally visible. He made it visible. Harris made it visible. It was visible to anyone who was an adult during his first term. So it is absolutely on voters. But this isn’t a matter of giving anyone excuses. I don’t think in those terms. I’m simply saying that I don’t think they’ll like it when they see it. I could be wrong about that. But that is my strong belief.
Indeed, we are already seeing Trump and his supporters say he has a historic mandate after a big election victory. First of all, mandates aren’t real. When you get elected you can do whatever you can get away with. Mandates aren’t real. It’s also not a big election victory, if we mean that in any quantifiable sense. It looks like Trump will get 51% of the popular vote, just slightly under what Joe Biden got four years ago. Winning is winning. But the last time I heard this kind of talk about big historic mandates was back in 2004 when George W. Bush won a close election, proceeded to try to push through a series of highly ideological programs that no one voted for, stumbled quickly and basically never recovered.
Will that happen again? I have no idea. But I think there’s a pretty decent chance it will.
I continue to be of the opinion that the big story of this election is that people experienced a lot of hardship coming out of the pandemic and they have basically blamed it on and punished the incumbent party in power. This is pretty borne out by the actual results. It looks like the Democrats won’t reclaim the House, though it’s still possible. But in the House it’s a very, very status quo election. The Senate losses are very real and given the GOP’s small-red-state advantage they will take time to recover from. But two of those seats were likely close to hopeless for purely regional reasons. Sherrod Brown’s race in Ohio — by far the greatest loss in my book — was a huge challenge. Bob Casey, well that’s just a big loss and one that could have gone differently. I emphasize again: the point isn’t “oh this is fine.” It’s that all the firepower is focused on the administration and really Joe Biden. Everywhere else it’s a status quo election. Generic Democratic Senate candidates either won reelection or got elected to open seats. Same in the House. It’s not, “it’s fine.” It’s “don’t fool yourself about what actually happened.”
This doesn’t mean the administration or Democrats generally didn’t make any mistakes. Of course they did. It also doesn’t mean the post-pandemic hardships are all that mattered. We have the running battle between masculinity/dominance and femininity/empathy. But I believe that the defining and determining driver of this election — fair or not — was a rejection of the administration’s management of the post-pandemic.
Elections have consequences — a truism we are about to see demonstrated in full force. But there’s very little here that suggests any desire for a national lurch to the right. And if that’s what the country gets, I suspect the consequences will be predictable.
I don’t read every single email that comes to the “talk” email or that comes to me directly at my personal TPM email address (the latter is the email I respond from and which you can always find simply by replying directly to The Backchannel). But I read a very high percentage of them. They are sort of the ideational water I swim in, get ideas from, respond to in fictive conversations in my head. In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s election results, many readers were working through what I’d call this question or set of reactions in their minds. A few described a reaction like, “Well, fine. If people want to vote for their own pain, fine. Let them feel that pain!”
To be fair, none of these readers said they want that to happen. Just that they felt the impulse. We’re all entitled to our impulses in moments of great stress. Actions are what we’re responsible for. More generously, some were saying, “Maybe people need to feel the full brunt of what Trump’s policies are and what he represents to vote otherwise?”
In either case, the internal monologue was the same: Do I really want this or do I not? Is this necessary or isn’t it?
There’s a simple answer to this quandary if it’s a quandary for you: You don’t have to decide. It’s not up to you. The American people have made Donald Trump the President for the next four years. With that goes a huge amount of discretionary power that is now his alone.
In my job as a writer and as a media nano-mogul, I’m clear on my role. I plan to highlight these things as they happen. The corruption, the cruelty, the incompetence, the terrible ideas. If anything, this is the most natural posture of the entire organization. It’s very literally what it was built for. I know because I built it.