X Close

Donald Trump’s strange sincerity His vulgarity looks like authenticity

While Trump woos the raging electorate, the Democrats now speak for the sputtering elite (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)

While Trump woos the raging electorate, the Democrats now speak for the sputtering elite (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)


October 26, 2024   8 mins

The faster American culture spreads, the less foreigners seem to understand it. In October, the Irish novelist Anne Enright shared a few thoughts about the US elections. “[T]hese politics are playing out in some secret part of the American psyche,” she wrote. “The words that are not said are more important than those spoken aloud, and voters are not listening to their politicians in any real way.”

To an American living through the election season, things look very different. There’s nothing secret about the American psyche these days. Kamala Harris describes former president Donald Trump as “unstable and unhinged”, and compares him to Hitler. And he describes her as having “the mental faculties of a child”.

Enright’s worry that voters are not listening to politicians marks her as a Harris person; Trump people tend to see the problem as politicians not listening to voters. The American elections pit a party of the System (Harris’s Democrats) against a party of the Electorate (Trump’s Republicans). Naturally, worried foreigners will rally to Harris’s side. They know the American system, depend on it, and get all their news from it. They don’t generally know the American electorate and don’t think they depend on it. They might be about to discover they are wrong. Recently there were hopes for a reconciliation between the country’s raging electorate and the elites who run its sputtering system. With less than two weeks to go before Americans count their ballots, those hopes are likely to be dashed.

Time will tell whether Kamala Harris was an adequate pick to replace Joe Biden, once his age-related incapacity could no longer be concealed. But the method of her selection sealed the public’s understanding of Democrats as the party of monied elites — not a good thing to be this year. Concealing Biden’s condition required the collusion of the whole party, Harris included. It wrested the choice of Democrats’ 2024 candidate from rank-and-file voters and delivered it to the party’s billionaire backers in finance, entertainment and tech. The party is taking on a fat-cat profile. It has relied on ruses to hand-pick its presidential candidate in the past three elections. In 2016, the officially neutral chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, worked behind the scenes to see off the socialist Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton. In 2020, donors and strategists, desperate to unify the party factions against Trump and (again) to thwart Sanders, rescued Joe Biden’s failing candidacy by purging other moderates. Biden’s win was a vindication of their tactics. But they damaged the US — because the factions that made way for Biden would all have to be paid off when Democrats took power. The Biden administration was a junta of special interests — Black Lives Matter, immigrant and transgender activists, green-energy moguls, neoconservatives — without, we now realise, any guiding intelligence at its centre. Keeping these special interests together has cost money. That is how the American debt has rocketed to historic highs.

As a president is supposedly powerful, it was assumed that ousting Biden would require his assent. It didn’t. Once Biden stumbled in a debate last June, a funding strike called by the entertainment and finance billionaires did the trick. Cartoon heiress Abigail Disney, cryptocurrency billionaire Mike Novogratz, Netflix founder Reed Hoffman cut the party off until it agreed to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. In a sense it doesn’t matter which politician the system chooses. The party belongs not to voters but to interest groups, as it did between the Gilded Age and the reforms that democratised the nominating process in the early Seventies.

Donald Trump has turned that into a liability for Democrats. Working people remember fondly the economy as Trump ran it in the three years before the Covid emergency. It was not perfect: growth was lower than under Obama. But it was better distributed. The lowest quarter of workers saw their real wages rise by 5% under Trump, the first sustained improvement for the working poor since the 20th century. The great polling surprise of the 2024 election — the highest Republican support among black males since 1960 — is more plausibly explained by concrete economic achievements than by the intangible factors that pundits usually adduce, from Trump’s “ghetto” ostentation to his troubles with the legal system.

Gains for the working class proved unsustainable under the Biden Administration, amid a flood of 7.5 million illegal immigrants. If one episode could sum up the whole campaign season, it would be the exchange between Trump and Harris, during their televised debate in September, over allegations that Haitian immigrants were — in the Trumpian phrase that launched a thousand remixes — “eating the pets of the people that live there”.

Judged as a contest, the debate was an outright victory for Harris: a drubbing, a shutout. Trump is lazy (he obviously did not even outline a closing statement), ignorant (he did not seem to know what a “bill” is), inarticulate (there were moments when he was nearly as woolly as Joe Biden was in the embarrassing debate performance that drove him from the race).

But Harris’s victory was Pyrrhic. The issues Trump raised, however inarticulately and inaccurately, cut in his favour. Many American swing voters understand that the opening of the country’s Southern border was brought about by concrete actions urged by the immigrant-activist wing of the Biden “junta” and undertaken by executive order in the very first days of the administration in 2021.

But most Americans had no idea until Trump started going on about eating cats and dogs that there were so many places like Springfield, Ohio, a withering industrial city of 58,000 people that has received 12,000-15,000 Haitians in the last year or so. That sounds like a “minority” problem, but as Germans discovered after Angela Merkel’s invitation to refugees from the Syrian war in 2015, such newcomers are disproportionately young and male. They can become a majority in the public spaces during business hours. They can wind up laying down the law. This does not mean they are violent or even rude. They just have the force that cohesive groups of men naturally possess in the prime of life.

Many of the Springfield newcomers have rent subsidies and food stamps, and — this being the United States — a heavy carapace of rights and protections that derive from civil rights law. When you inject a federally subsidised population of 15,000 people into a small city that has not seen new housing construction in many years, natives’ rents get driven through the roof. American workers have reason to fear competition from workers who were formed in a country where the per capita income is barely $1,600.

Distant people in positions of authority sometimes accuse voters in places like Springfield of grumbling. You can see why: no one ever sets out actively to screw the natives. It’s just something “the market” does to them while the mayor and the federal government are busy patting themselves on the back for their generosity. Under such circumstances, the besieged-feeling viewers of the Trump-Harris debate might well have preferred the guy who sputtered and turned red at the very thought of Springfield to the lady who read her lines and kept her composure.

Regardless of whether he wins the presidency, Trump has won a victory in the argument about immigration that he introduced on the day he announced his candidacy in 2015. It is also a loss for elite-led campaigns of shaming and ostracism. Clearly “Woke” — that set of moral proscriptions about diversity, backed up by the power granted by civil-rights law to harass and disgrace refractory citizens in the courts — has lost much of its power to intimidate. The Trump campaign’s single most powerful television ad shows Harris passionately telling a transgender interviewer that she would back publicly funded sex-change operations for prison inmates. “Kamala is for they/them,” the ad closes. “President Trump is for you.” The Pew Center recently reported that there are more registered Republicans than Democrats for the first time since it started tallying these numbers in 1992. In the closing days of this campaign, three Democratic senators in tight races who had voted to impeach Trump twice — Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania — hurriedly cut TV ads implying that their own positions on immigration were the same as Trump’s. Those who lived by the sword of woke are now dying by it.

We are getting a better idea now of why half the country is willing to be led by a man whose personality would have unfitted him for leadership at almost any previous juncture of American history. Trump’s seeming indifference to policy, a sign of unseriousness at other times, looks like a savvy refusal to be taken in. His vulgarity can look like a post-modern kind of authenticity. After making a crude joke about Kamala Harris’s husband at a Catholic gala in New York, he stared down at his printed speech and admitted others had prepared it for him — something an American politician never does. “That’s a nasty one,” he muttered. “That’s nasty. I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.” Bizarrely, at times like these, Trump seems like the only sincere political figure in an otherwise rigidly scripted system.

“Bizarrely Trump seems like the only sincere political figure in an otherwise rigidly scripted system.”

Pandering politicians often assign a set of policy opinions to the citizenry, and then take a bunch of phoney positions to match them. Harris, discovering that swing-state voters like cars and guns, has presented herself in the campaign’s final days as a Formula 1 enthusiast (a backer of Sir Lewis Hamilton) and a gun owner — a gun fanatic, even. “If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” she told Oprah Winfrey. After not holding a single press conference in the first two months of her campaign, the teleprompter — which she used even at such traditionally impromptu occasions as voter town halls — became a symbol of her campaign.

And Trump’s strange sincerity may be why the various attempts to prosecute him have not been fatal. On the contrary. Harris commonly calls him a “convicted felon”, but what has he been convicted of? A business misdeed so small, so obscure, and brought to a verdict by a process so partisan, that it would be more accurate to say Trump had been designated a criminal than proved one. No Trump opponent has ever managed to explain his offence in a convincing way.

One factor both in blunting the propaganda effect of criminal prosecutions against Trump and allowing the enemies of Woke to rally together has been the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk two years ago. It is not that Musk is in Trump’s corner, although he (stridently) is. It is that, in this election cycle at least, Democrat-aligned tech executives have been unable to slow the movement of narrative-disrupting stories through the news ecosystem — as they were able to do in 2020 with stories concerning the laptop of wayward presidential son Hunter Biden. Under heightened scrutiny American elites are finding it harder to stick together than they did back then.

The question arises of whether these same elites can hold the country together well enough to continue to exercise what they like to call “global leadership”. The answer appears to be no. If the world has become a much more dangerous place under Biden, it owes partly to how he was nominated. Among the interest groups that won a free hand in the 2020 coalition of anti-Trump forces was a bipartisan group of neoconservatives — foreign-policy thinkers who rose through the system under the “democracy promotion” agenda that led Bill Clinton into Kosovo and George W. Bush into Iraq.

They have drawn the United States (and its allies) into a proxy war in Ukraine that the West cannot win without an active Nato military involvement that would be reckless in the extreme. Reckless because, at the core of the Western military/diplomatic system, the American public is too badly divided ideologically to commit to a war anywhere. In January, it is true, President Biden gave a State of the Union address in which he likened both Vladimir Putin and the Republican opposition to the fascists who were on the march on the eve of the Second World War, and yet, with the help of Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, he passed a $60 billion aid bill for Ukraine.

But such bipartisanship is unlikely in the future. As things now stand, Johnson would pay with his career for any future collaboration. Harris is less connected to pre-Trumpian hawks than Biden was, even if she has received the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a stalwart opponent of the Ukraine war. And Trump’s own bizarre reminiscences at a late October rally of threats he allegedly made to Putin are neither believable nor the basis for a bipartisan foreign policy.

This is especially since the parties, one representing the raging electorate and the other the sputtering elite, have not been so at odds in a long while. Americans may yet have a future as leaders of the free world. But that will have to await an end to the conflict between Republican populists and Democratic elitists, a conflict that 5 November is more likely to exacerbate than resolve.


Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

 


Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

146 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 month ago

Well, I’ve just been in Washington DC for a few days and was surprised at just how little of the election jamboree was actually noticeable. Seeing Doug Emhoff out jogging in Georgetown was about as “election” as it got.
Whether the consistently rude service was a sign of popular discontent under the surface I have no idea. Don’t know what on earth happened there, the US used to be an oasis of customer service coming from Europe. Maybe it’s an expression of the problems and frustration that lead to toothpaste being under lock and key in the supermarket. Sad to see.

T Bone
T Bone
1 month ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

DC is like a Greek City State. It votes 95% Democrat. Don’t conflate DC with the actual States.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 month ago
Reply to  T Bone

It did feel remarkably “insulated” and kind of sterile in some ways. Fantastic museums though.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
1 month ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

A Parisian told me once that DC has better art galleries than his own city. I’m inclined to agree.
But you’re correct, it’s a strange town. DC’s only real product is politics. Service workers there are very much a servant class – they depend utterly on their disinterested, unaccountable overlords – in an expensive and uncaring metro.
Small wonder they’d be surly, distracted, and hostile.
DC, as JFK said, is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm. One of his better wisecracks, but unfortunately that combination of bad manners and incompetence now describes much of our federal government, as well as the scowling young woman pouring your coffee.

Michael Mcelwee
Michael Mcelwee
1 month ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Yes, the portrait museum is gem. Not sure there is anything quite like it elsewhere.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
1 month ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Rudyard Kipling made the same point about hotel employees in San Francisco in the early years of the 20th Century when he was returning to England from The Raj. ““When the hotel clerk — the man who awards your room to you and who is supposed to give you information — when that resplendent individual stoops to attend to your wants, he does so whistling or humming, or picking his teeth, or pauses to converse with some one he knows. These performances, I gather, are to impress upon you that he is a free man and your equal. From his general appearance and the size of his diamonds he ought to be your superior. There is no necessity for this swaggering, self-consciousness of freedom. Business is business, and the man who is paid to attend to a man might reasonably devote his whole attention to the job.”

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

Excellent historical context, Jerry. Thanks. (Being sincere).

He would have been used to a more deferential servant class in India, since even the term “servant” or “class” other than middle sounds harsh to many American ears.

Cantab Man
Cantab Man
1 month ago

“Concealing Biden’s condition required the collusion of the whole party, Harris included.”
Sure.
It also required the collusion of governmental employees.
And it required the collusion of the credentialed journalist class within the mainstream media.
These people represent institutions and governmental systems that the American people once trusted, but not anymore according to the polls
Joe Biden was caught on video shaking hands with ghosts. Even the Easter Bunny was forced to step out of character to become Joe Biden’s savior caretaker at an Easter event. This was also caught on video and aired before eyes of the nation.
And yet credentialed journalists declared that questioning Biden’s mental acuity was ‘right wing disinformation’ … up until they couldn’t maintain the deceit any longer. Then, once Kamala was selected, they proclaimed how shocked – SHOCKED – they were that Biden’s mental acuity had somehow aged overnight and within a month of many of them writing articles about how Joe’s mental acuity was never better.
When one represents an institution or governmental system, one can only lie to the electorate a small number of times before the institution or governmental system gains an earned reputation in the eyes of the electorate of being thoroughly untrustworthy.
If these are the type of ‘systems’ that the elite are responsible for maintaining, then they can’t blame anyone but themselves for destroying people’s trust in the systems. The elite of the current generation that hold power have been very poor caretakers indeed.

Chuck Burns
Chuck Burns
1 month ago
Reply to  Cantab Man

Don’t forget the COVID scam. The elitist players who lied to us about Biden and his 81 million votes also lied about COVID and the mRNA. And the lies and deceit continue.

Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
1 month ago
Reply to  Chuck Burns

The public also seems to be less inclined to believe in THE Science of man made climate doom…

Will K
Will K
1 month ago

My thanks to Mr Caldwell for this excellent article.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
1 month ago
Reply to  Will K

Hear hear

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Will K

Really the last thing I expected at UnHerd: a little unvarnished, honest, reporting. It must’ve slipped through, somehow…

Su Mac
Su Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Will K

Agree! A refreshingly unmediated run-down of the hole USA is in, Trump warts an’ all. Thanks!

Bruce Lance
Bruce Lance
1 month ago
Reply to  Will K

Excellent observations. Sadly, we are being shown there is a shadow gov behind Biden and potentially Kamala. With a modicum of research, you will find Kamala was part of the trio that destroyed San Francisco some 15 years ago [along with Newsom and Gascon]
It’s sad to see the Dem party hijacked- RFK must be rolling in his grave. It will be interesting to see how many US voters are fooled into thinking the remade facade of a politician that has done absolutely nothing- is worthy of being president.

It’s more of a commentary on the IQ of the avg US voter and whether they are able to see behind the curtain than anything else.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
1 month ago

It is informative that even Trump supporters like this guy have to concede that he is stupid, vulgar, lazy and dishonest to a degree rarely seen even among politicians.
And you people worship him like a deity and would toss your constitution in the trash for him. Amazing!

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

CS, in American idiom, stands for “chicken shit”. The moniker really fits our very own champagne socialist..

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I’d advise you to delete your account after that effort but it doesn’t even seem like you have the wit to create one.
Be better.

John Overstreet
John Overstreet
1 month ago

I very much doubt you have any conception of the US Constitution. It was ‘tossed’ long ago mostly by the socialist champagnards. Most federal activities are unconstitutional. Even constitutionally valid amendments, especially of the Progressive Era, destabilized the constitutional structure to the point one could call them, in spirit, unconstitutional. But it was all done for a good cause: the constitutional system is too slow to achieve ‘real progress’.

What’s bothering you then is that you don’t like the Trumpians’ particular set of presumed constitutional violations. But then that’s just a matter of politics, not constitutionalism or the rule of law.

Brett H
Brett H
1 month ago

Very good article. I could read more like this.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
1 month ago
Reply to  Brett H

Indeed, and rather less from people whose only qualification appears to be that they write obscure Substacks.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
1 month ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

People don’t have to be officially credentialed to write interesting essays

Steve White
Steve White
1 month ago

Just be thankful you aren’t stuck at a dinner party pretending to be interrested this writers pompous above-it-all thoughts.

Carlos Danger
Carlos Danger
1 month ago

Excellent article. Though I disagree with some of it, the argument is well made.
This election is an important one, and I have no idea who will win, not in the president’s race, nor in the races for the Senate or the House. It looks like the Republicans will finish strong, but we saw that fail to happen two years ago. It could fail to happen again.
What has interested me the past several days is the way the media has beclowned themselves. Reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, once well-regarded for their journalism, and properly so, now is like reading Pravda. I’ve read both papers for years and have never seen them like this. It’s crazy.
Even Jeff Bezos has had enough of the Washington Post’s bias; same with Patrick Soon-Shiong and his Los Angeles Times. They have each been heavily criticized for their action in refusing to endorse Kamala Harris for president, but they still did it.
Regardless of who wins this time around, I think the Democrats will take a lesson from this election. They have had a scare put into them. Let’s hope they mend their ways.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Carlos Danger

The democrats need to undergo a sort of “debazification” for awhile. The Clinton’s, Obamas, Schumer’s, Pelosi’s, etc etc etc need to take an exit. Along with the RINO/ neocons. And the coddled, arrogant, malicious deep state desperately needs real reform. Frankly it will be miraculous if 50% of it gets done.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

It’s much easier and therefore more likely that they just keep letting people take pot shots at Trump and anyone else who refuses to fall in line with their policies.

T Bone
T Bone
1 month ago
Reply to  Carlos Danger

One would think but they actually did this in 2020. They ran away from the Defunding the Police narrative. There was no extremist climate change rhetoric in October 2020. Then, they flipped the script once in office for 3.5 years. They’ve figured out how to Memory Hole the populace. Its getting harder but they still have a substantial base of Parrots.

Nobody knows how accurate the polls are but never underestimate a Party Apparatus this desperate.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Carlos Danger

Bezos is hedging against the strong possibility of a Trump victory, which could lead to financial and even criminal consequences for heretic billionaires like Jeff and Mark Zuckerberg.

Michael Lipkin
Michael Lipkin
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Indeed, it is purely a business decision

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

He’s literally losing hundreds of millions propping up WaPo. If he was seriously worried about lawfare, he would simply dump the charity project. It’s not like WaPo is suddenly writing positive stories about Trump. You often have insightful comments. Give your head a shake on this one.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Ok maybe. I don’t pretend to know the full of true motives of Bezos with any certainty, but a (sometimes) well-regarded newspaper provides prestige and cultural power, apart from the bottom line. And like Musk with Twitter, he doesn’t intend to KEEP losing money. Also: Does anyone doubt who the Post, or LA Times, WOULD endorse? (The Harris endorsements had already been drafted in both cases).

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

I’m glad you took my critique in good spirit. I don’t pretend to have any knowledge either, but I suspect he just doesn’t like Harris. Some hate her because she’s too pro-Israel. Some hate her because she doesn’t support Israel enough. The conflict is creating a deep divide within the party IMO.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Makes sense. The Dems are definitely not united around Harris in the way the Reps are around Trump since about six month after Jan. 6th. For one thing: GOP office holders who are openly disloyal to Trump get pressured to shut up and often get run out of office by the ascendant MAGA block, or by Trump himself. Very few dissenting voices remain among elected Republicans or even in the registered-Republican electorate.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

I actually think the Dems are much more disciplined than the GOP. Something is fraying there right now. I agree about Trump. Everyone has to fall in line. I’ll be happy when he’s gone.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Amen to that Jim.

ERIC PERBET
ERIC PERBET
1 month ago
Reply to  Carlos Danger

Sadly, the “Pravdaisation” of the so-called liberal media is to be seen everywhere across the West…
Given what erstwhile reliable newspapers like The New York Times in the US, Le Monde in France or The Independent in the UK now regularly stand for, we can rightfully assume that in less than ten years’ time they’ll be telling us that oncoming elections should be avoided when a liberal governance is already in place: indeed, the frightful prospect of a majority of citizens electing a conservative – i.e. Fascist – Government/Parliament/Mayor could be a dangerous threat to what they call “Democracy”.

Carmel Shortall
Carmel Shortall
1 month ago
Reply to  ERIC PERBET

“…erstwhile reliable newspapers like The New York Times in the US, Le Monde in France or The Independent in the UK”

I don’t know about the others but The Independent has NEVER been a reliable newspaper!

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 month ago
Reply to  Carlos Danger

A philosopher has argued that things change into the inverse of themselves over time (eg barter-trade-money-credit). Newspapers started out delivering ‘news’, then more recently ‘entertainment’, then ‘opinion’, and most recently (you could argue) ‘propaganda’.
Newspaper ownership is more responsive than political parties (also doing their own ‘inverse’ thing) and some have realised that propaganda for the wrong side puts limits on the size of readership and hence profits.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
1 month ago
Reply to  Carlos Danger

“…Beclowned…” I love it!
NYT has gone bonkers. And there’s still two weeks to go. If they were a friend or loved one I would organize an intervention before they did something regrettable.

Philip Broaddus
Philip Broaddus
1 month ago

This is an edit. This is a response to champagne socialist’s post.
We only want that you think of him at 3 a.m. every night. We’re not crazy about him. As Michael Moore said, he’s a human Molotov. I want him to break some windows, including yours.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago

People tend to assume their own windows won’t get broken. Far from a safe bet when hitching your hopes—or violent urges—to a firestarting manchild who’s now worse than he’s ever been in his selfish life.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

You are obviously referring to Biden.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Made me laugh, I admit. But just remember who was president during the whole summer of Floyd. And on 1/6/20, which was only a taste of how things will go if his demagogue slurs and goofy rants are rewarded this time around. People should be sure they want that before they pull the lever for Trump.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Doesn’t this article contain the truth of why Trump may well be re-elected? That’s not just once, but elected twice? And that it’d be due to the obvious dissembling of the elites, to maintain their positions at the expense of the vast swathe of US citizenry? Don’t blame the latter for the sins of the former.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

No, it would be due to the delusions of a large – but never close to a majority – of large parts of the American electorate and their willingness to believe that this clown will solve their problems.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago

You wouldn’t know what problems the majorities in either the US or the UK might have. That makes you part of the problem; you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to offer. And why? Because you’re thick.

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Invoking the principle of charity perhaps not ‘thick’ but contrarian or an ideologue?

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Uh oh, our kid is getting mardy!

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

To begin with: Elites are not monopolized by Democrat voters, far from it. The world’s richest man is all in for Trump now, and Donald himself is the ultimate silver-spoon, third-base “success” story. And people in megachurch, deep-pocket religion, as well as finance and tech, tend to be very pro-Trump. A near majority of both houses of Congress, as well as many governors and federal judges are subservient to Trump. Are those not elites?

Also, Generals Kelly and Milley have little to gain by calling out Trump’s folly and authoritarianism, and much to lose. I also regard them as genuine patriots; well-intentioned whether I’d share much of their politics or worldview or not (doubt it). Same with Liz Cheney. Perhaps she’ll benefit from her integrity and courage down the line, but I don’t see that as her main motivation. I have less respect for Bill Barr, but think he’s absolutely giving an honest and well-informed take on Trump—these days.

I’ll concede that America in some fundamental sense deserved Trump as president before, and will again if that comes to pass. But the people I’d place at the top of the blame list are those who see how vicious, petty, and amoral he is—but either play that down or actively cheer it on.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Missing the point, which is that Trump wouldn’t exist (as a political entity) without the self-serving nature of the class of people who’re bringing a once-great country to it’s knees, and once great cities to wrack and ruin. The evidence is on the streets of Los Angeles, for all to see.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

For a committed non-theist you are framing things in apocalyptic terms 😉

I accept the broad stroke of what you want to frame as The Point. We did this to ourselves through grotesque, worsening inequality, made worse by greed, mismanagement, and aloofness. But not only among elites, nor from one side of the sociopolitical divide.I am making what I think is a more urgent point about what we are facing now, especially those of us who have votes in contested states, unlike me.

I’m not saying there’s no validity to it but I think Evil Elites is a too simple framework that can serve as a catch all excuse for untempered bad energy: cynicism, nihilism, rage, total self-concern, disregard for law and order, and outright violence.

We won’t bring a country up from its knees by kicking it in the teeth or pushing its face in the mud. Or by making the movie The Purge into real life. No one thinks he or she is part of The Swamp; not many at least.

We need an engaged coalition of the broad Center to protect us from the fringiest, most-unhinged 5 percent at either extreme. Donald Trump agitates both extreme wings. Perhaps he can indirectly, unintentionally activate the middle too.

Wrack and Ruin looms; one candidate is using that as a form of currency and self-protection. Let’s not set things on fire nor vilify our fellow citizens en masse in a sincere, or staged attempt to save ourselves.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Exactly.

Karen Arnold
Karen Arnold
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

From outside of USA, we can see Trump has many faults and is not a great choice, but if he is the preferred choice of the majority, it begs the question, how bad is the opposition? It looks to me as if Trump will win and that is as a direct result of the behaviour of the Democrats.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Karen Arnold

Fair enough to a point. But he has never had a majority of the electorate, nor come very close to winning the popular vote.

The present situation and looming result we face should not be conveniently assigned to one party, nor to Elites, foreigners, woke fools, backwoods bigots, or whomever else. There’s plenty of blame to go around. And plenty of living possibility to turn things around, if we don’t resort to violence or wallow in hatred and anger. Well, maybe not PLENTY, but some.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Because Kamala and Biden are just so much more altruistic . Letting in millions of illegals is so responsible and has no dangerous consequences . And Kamala is just so grown up .

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Alan Osband

And sarcasm makes SUCH a good argument, one that’s super likely to convince those who don’t already share your perspective.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
1 month ago

I personally didn’t enjoy having my real income cut by 30%. And a trip to the grocery store in my “sanctuary” state feels a bit like a trip to the interior of Honduras, now.
Lincoln said that you can fool some people all of the time, and all of the people, some of the time. But you can’t fool everyone, all the time.
Democrats seem to be attempting the latter. If they instead lose huge amounts of power, authority, and wealth, I won’t shed one single tear.

B Emery
B Emery
1 month ago

‘They have drawn the United States (and its allies) into a proxy war in Ukraine that the West cannot win without an active Nato military involvement that would be reckless in the extreme. Reckless because, at the core of the Western military/diplomatic system, the American public is too badly divided ideologically to commit to a war anywhere.’

Perhaps the UK and Europe should brexit nato, leave the Americans to sort their issues out and finish their war for them. As much as they should take responsibility, it seems that they can’t be trusted with the prospect of actually finishing a war properly.
Perhaps we could get heavy discounts on weapons supplies, for the inconvenience of having to finish their job for them.
The ability of western armies to be more flexible outside of natos framework surely can’t be a bad thing at this point.
Macron talked about sending troops a while back, if wasn’t for nato and article five, the UK and France could have sent support without bringing the us and Russia into direct confrontation. Also our electorates aren’t quite as mad as the Americans, and Ukraine had a lot of support in the UK.
Obviously if nato didn’t exist, russia wouldn’t be so p*ssed off in the first place either. So it would help enormously with any peace process.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
1 month ago
Reply to  B Emery

By peace process you mean the Trump peace process which involves doing exactly what his boss in Moscow tells him to.

B Emery
B Emery
1 month ago

No. I do not mean that. Try reading the comment again.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Well presented. Approaching a good presentation of the reality and the challenges.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
1 month ago

This is an excellent article and made me think about aspects of this election I have not read about elsewhere.

Mark Kennedy
Mark Kennedy
1 month ago

Yes, Caldwell seems to have a genius for spotting things that in retrospect seem obvious but that others routinely overlook, for example that voters’ failure to listen to politicians and politicians’ failure to listen to voters are different concerns, and that there are insights to be gained into the priorities of those whose concerns diverge in this way.
 
Caldwell’s similarly acute observation, in his book cited at the foot of this article, that America’s warring political cultures appeal to two different understandings of  America’s constitution (one rooted in the original document, the other in the judicial activism of the 1960s and 1970s) also has considerable explanatory power when it comes to understanding why the two sides are so divided. This is a writer definitely worth reading.

Andrew Langridge
Andrew Langridge
1 month ago

Name me a country in the world that isn’t governed by ‘elites’. If Trump gets in, his lot will be the elite. Were Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln not members of an elite? This is the biggest straw man argument I’ve ever heard. The author’s allegiances are betrayed by his dismissal of the American judicial system: ‘a verdict by a process so partisan’. If the very institutions that have worked so successfully over centuries and were a beacon to the rest of the world through the long years of the Cold War are so lightly dismissed in this way, I despair of America.

0 0
0 0
1 month ago

Franklin, Washington etc. were hardly the kind of “elites” that we are saddled with today.

michael a skinner
michael a skinner
1 month ago

“Judged as a contest, the debate was an outright victory for Harris”, really? She can’t answer a question, jibberis. The MSM touting her lies is a disgrace, although I think CNN has seen the light with the recent Cooper interview where they put the softballs away.

Terry M
Terry M
1 month ago

He was judging on the basis of Kamala far exceeding expectations, which had been lowered significantly by the press, and style. Trump clearly won on issues since he actually discussed them. But he rambled and was not very sharp that night.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago

Even when she’s given the questions in advance she still has a problem.

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
1 month ago

‘It is just possible that future historians might see the perceived “vulgarity” of the Trump phenomenon – including his flamboyant pronouncements “however inarticulately and inaccurately” expressed – as a much-needed, if inchoate breaking out from mainstream conservatism’s imprisonment in an establishment political etiquette that has long been a philosophical stacked deck.’ https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Whatever else Trump is, he’s the genuine article….he’s not dissembling, playing the poitically good-mannered ‘nice guy’ that has been the modus operandi of almost all career politicians in modern times.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
1 month ago

The authors should start by getting his facts right regarding Springfield. The town’s population was 40,000, and 20,000 Haitians were flown in. Of course there is trouble there when 1st world meets 3rd world. There would even be conflict if they had flown in 20,000 cocktail party going, snotty nosed Manhattanonites. As for Trump being vulgar I suggest he listens to the recent Jo Rogan interview with Trump. He is far from vulgar and in fact it is evident he is exceptionally smart (which is precisely why he’s been so successful in his business career).

Bobby Levit
Bobby Levit
1 month ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

Thank you Johann…but TDS has effected way too many brain cells

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
1 month ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

I am looking forward to watching it tonight!

Duane M
Duane M
1 month ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss
Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  Duane M

No risk no reward. And it appears these bankruptcies were only of limited companies.

Tom Philokalia
Tom Philokalia
1 month ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

Thank you, Johann. The Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump shows us a pretty smart and actually compassionate man. If I dare say, it also shows us a man who indeed has humility. The American media has painted a dishonest picture of this leader.

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Tom Philokalia

Yeah. Saying “I am a very stable genius” is an excellent example of what humble people say.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Martin M

Or is that an example of humor?

Michael Layman
Michael Layman
27 days ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

I have listened to Trump live as well have friends who have sat down with him to converse. He is a down to earth guy you would want to have a conversation with every week. The Democrats propaganda is all BS.

Michael McFalls
Michael McFalls
1 month ago

Reckless in the extreme would be not responding to a revisionist, authoritarian nuclear power that is acting recklessly in the extreme.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
1 month ago

 If one episode could sum up the whole campaign season, it would be the exchange between Trump and Harris, during their televised debate in September, over allegations that Haitian immigrants were — in the Trumpian phrase that launched a thousand remixes — “eating the pets of the people that live there”.

This is interesting. The article clearly is in favour of this Trump quote – it did not actually happen, but it reflects the feelings of the electorate and is therefore emotionally ‘true’. All of a sudden I understand the Republican preoccupation with voting fraud. There is no evidence for it, and no reason to think it has happened, but it reflects the feelings of Republicans, and is therefore emotionally ‘true’ – and people like Caldwell back the lie. Of course the feeling it reflects is that Republicans just cannot accept that those Democrats can keep winning by honest means, when it so obvious that they, the Republicans, are in the right. And, for Trump, that it is not possible that Trump can lose when the universe knows that Trump is a WINNER and not a loser.

The problem with this tolerance for emotionally satisfying lies is that people actually believe in them. There are lots and lots of Republican footsoldiers getting ready to falsify the election result because they have become convinced that if they lose it is the result of cheating. Pizzagate may have been nonsense, but people were shooting real bullets at that pizzeria.

How about we agree, mutually, to stick to things that actually happened, and keep the daydreaming out of politics? I am sure there will be plenty to fight over even so.

M Ruri
M Ruri
1 month ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

In the days after that day, I saw a post on X from Marianne Williamson saying Dems would regret the denial of Haitians killing and eating pets, saying that Voodoo is real and is practiced. I also saw a post from a second generation Haitian in this country that said it is very true that Haitians do so. I also saw other posts saying the same thing. And there were many reports from that town in Ohio that they were killing all the ducks and geese in parks. So what is reality other than that?

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

The left’s fixation on whether Haitians were truly eating pets and semi-domesticated animals was a convenient distraction from the real point: when 10-15,000 people who don’t speak English, don’t know or understand American culture, and have not been vetted for skills are dumped into a town of 50-60,000 residents, it’s not going to go well. Now multiply Springfield, Ohio by who knows how many other towns and see if the problem presents itself.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
1 month ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Not good enough. You cannot spread these inflammatory lies – that you know damn well people will believe and remember and act on – and then complain that those who disagree want to rebut them. If the real point is that having too many foreigners is too disruptive, then you can stick to talking about the real point instead of inventing your own blood libels to muddy the waters.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
1 month ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

Your fundamental problem, Rasmus, whether it relates to Springfield Ohio or to Covid is that you are an uncritical believer in the MSM narrative. There were pl;enty of reports and police cruiser recordings of Haitians wringing the necks of the local ducks and geese. And then there were photos from NYC where Haitians were stringing up cats and grilling them on the barbecue. So I suspect the Springfield story has more than a grain of truth to it.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
1 month ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

This is well-known territory:
I will now ask you to point to the evidence of that story being true – if you have any.
And you will pretend the evidence exists but refuse to say where, under some silly pretext of ‘not wanting to do my research for me‘. What is it the atheists say: “What is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

That’d be nice. It’s like the other side of coin as when those on the hard left held that the Duke Lacrosse gang rape hoax or Jussie Smollett scam somehow illustrated “a larger truth” though proven false. Stop it, all of you, please. Don’t be so loyal to a tribe or team that cheating seems fine when your side does it.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

I so agree.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
1 month ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

AJ is referring specifically to you. You pretend to be smart but are in fact a stooge and follower with zero common sense. Something you have illustrated consistently in the pages of Unherd for the last 4 1/2 years.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
1 month ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

I do not accept lies on the pretext that they point to ‘a larger truth’ (unlike you, might I say?). And all I ever cared or heard or thought about those examples is that the Duke Lacrosse story was by all accounts a false accusation, and the Smollett things was a pretty despicable attention-seking scam. So if AJ wants to hit at me, he needs to find something else to accuse me of. On the point he makes, he and I agree completely.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

Not intended as a hit at all. Just agreeing in away that more here might (I hope) get on board with.
Please don’t stop contributing to these dicusssions.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Thanks.

I did not think so – but then, one can never be quite sure.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

No, I wasn’t. I respect Mr. Fogh and agree with much of what he says. His thoughtful contributions to these comment boards are welcome, to me at least—and I know I’m not alone on that.
Please speak for yourself.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 month ago

I’m a 69 year old educated, American, female lawyer who has watched the news meticulously since I was a college student in the 1970s. I moved from Democrat to Republican 24 years ago. I can say emphatically that our professional news outlets are fake all around from MSNBC to Fox News. The outlets are beholden to Hollywood and imitative of Hollywood. As you point out, one of the biggest makers of fiction, Reid Hoffman, dictates our politics.
Our public schools, universities, and institutions are also corrupt. Affirmative action and identity politics has been corrosive. Rather than a fake system to give ‘minorities’ a level playing field, Donald Trump preaches that hard working Americans of all backgrounds will get an equal shot at the American Dream just by playing by the rules, because the fair shot comes from within the system, not from an artificial political identity mafia.
Over the 50 years I’ve consumed news, I can say that the “Fourth Estate” as we call the free press, is completely responsible for our sad stat of affairs by NOT doing its job. Our news is curated and fake. It is not fact driven. It has become a propaganda arm of political interests and its worse than lobbyists. At least lobbyists don’t pretend to be neutral.
So yes, politicians have lost the trust of the American people. Especially the Democrats. Hiding Biden’s frailty is a major reason no one trusts the Democrats. Donald Trump can face off with the fake news and fake politicians. He doesn’t talk ‘politician’. He is a loyal patriot behind his showmanship. Not only this ….. he forced the snakes and pigs of the Democrat party out into the open.
Donald Trump will be our next President. Thanks God !

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
1 month ago

You mean Trump is ‘fact-driven’?

Anyway, how do you know he is a loyal patriot behind his showmanship, and not just a selfish egomaniac? Do you have any examples where he has been driven by patriotism and not just self-gratification? Or is it just wishful thinking?

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

He was elected once already.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Bret Larson

In his first administration, he was (barely, perilously) restrained by actual patriots like General Kelly and Mike Pence.

Duane M
Duane M
1 month ago

I believe you are confusing vulgarity with authenticity. I have also watched Trump carefully over the past 24 years and I have never seen him do anything that was not intended to benefit his own private interests. I have never seen him do anything that could be construed as patriotic, if patriotic means anything beyond egoistic selfishness.

I can agree with you that Fourth Estate is a shambles in America. Which also includes Fox News, the Sinclair TV syndicate, and the various hatemongers on the Internet and AM radio (Rest in Hell, Rush Limbaugh).

Barry Dank
Barry Dank
1 month ago
Reply to  Duane M

Confusing vulgarity with authenticity? Not so. Trump is an authentic vulgarian. It is his commitment to vulgarism that turns on so many of his supporters. Or to put it another way, his utter contempt for polite society is a core part of his attraction.

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 month ago
Reply to  Duane M

There is nothing un-authentic about Trump.
What you see and hear is exactly what you get… and he drives the narrative, he doesn’t follow it.
Harris is a follower and totally incapable of anything else.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

As you point out, one of the biggest makers of fiction, Reid Hoffman, dictates our politics.
Hoffman was a founder of LinkedIn, not Netflix

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
1 month ago

I’m the same age and also with a university education from the 1970s. One of the big changes I have seen is the split between elites and people. Elites now identify with each (nationally and internationally) and largely despise or have contempt for the people (“contemptibles”). Hence Trump’s campaigns. During our lifetimes, and especially over the last thirty/forty years, Left and Right have swapped places. Another big change is that most of the mainstream media (or at least senior media people) now identifies with the global elite and likewise is not sympathetic to the people.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
1 month ago
Reply to  Michael Clarke

This is a very significant point. The “elites” around the globe, but especially around the West, see themselves as one tribe, separate from the rest of us. They feel that their interests are in competition with ours, which leads me to wonder what their real interests are.
We’re halfway to feudalism already.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Well said and I wonder how many negative and outraged responses you will get. Many I bet.
what you wrote is almost exactly the same in the UK with almost everything woke and liberal. Are you aware that in Scotland the devolved administration tried to pass a law allowing men to legally become women.
we all need Trump to eradicate the loonies from politics.

Lynwen Brown
Lynwen Brown
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Where is our British Trump? I don’t think Farage is up to the task

Michael Layman
Michael Layman
27 days ago

As so he is, despite the filtered news to voters. Is their one news outlet that offers an independent view other than unHerd?

Robert
Robert
1 month ago

Bizarrely, at times like these, Trump seems like the only sincere political figure in an otherwise rigidly scripted system.
This sentence captures so much of why Trump is popular. I didn’t like the guy long before he ran for president, I won’t vote for him because of Jan.6, and yet I hope he wins just to spite the system. He’s the human embodiment of a large middle finger pointed at all of those I watched lead us into Iraq (etc), offshore our industry in the name of ‘free and open markets’ and drive our ‘deregulated’ banking system right over the cliff in 2008 with no attempt by Obama to hold anyone accountable. And let’s not forget the ‘open borders’ policies that have been supported politically by pretty much everyone – democrats, republicans and libertarians.
I’ve watched this show for decades. I’m fed up. Bring on the giant orange middle finger.

M Ruri
M Ruri
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

Gonna be interesting for you when the IG report on J6 is released after the election. The release is being held because the report answers the long-posed question as to how many Intel operatives were in the crowd that day inciting the color revolution…

Robert
Robert
1 month ago
Reply to  M Ruri

Doubtful. I have no doubt there were instigators and I abhor the FBI’s entrapment practices. I also know that erecting gallows and chanting ‘hang Mike Pence’ and smashing one’s way into the Capitol (I could go on and on) cannot all be blamed on the feds. I can only hope that the FBI will be reformed (maybe just abolished as it is) but I won’t hold my breath, even if Trump gets elected.
Worse, and this is why I will not vote for Trump, when he saw what was going on he sat in an anteroom off the oval office and watched the show on TV while eating – wait for it – McDonald’s (I loved his appearance at MsDonald’s recently, btw). His kids, and countless others, were pleading with him to call a stop to it, to do something. But, for three hours he just sat there watched.
Yeah, that was a messed up day. But, there was one man who could have stopped it and he just sat there enjoying it.
He didn’t even try.

Barry Dank
Barry Dank
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

But his enjoyment was authentic, watching “his” vulgarians invading polite society.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

Trump is a very flawed man, yet the Dems are sooooo much worse, and with open borders and net zero, a tangible threat to the wealth and prosperity we enjoy today.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
1 month ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Still with the open borders fantasy, Jimmy?!?!

Addie Shog
Addie Shog
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

I’m with you there. although I would vote vote for trump (as Harris is just so mind blowingly terrible) he was slow on Jan 6. I don’t think he appreciated just how out of control it got.

Duane M
Duane M
1 month ago
Reply to  M Ruri

So, you have read the report?

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  M Ruri

Makes you wonder why all things Jan 6 haven’t been relayed yet. It’s almost like the political will of those in power only allowed certain narratives.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

Unfortunately voting trump looks like the only way democracy and free speech can survive in the us.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

YES!!!!

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
1 month ago

The UnHerd headline writer had to drill 15 paragraphs into a 22 paragraph story to find something to make this almost wholly Trump-positive piece sound like an attack on him. Ridiculous.

Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
1 month ago
Reply to  Daniel Lee

I read the headline and headed right down for the comments to see if the article was worth reading. Thought is was another boring hit piece. Read the first view comments and went right back reading the article. The UnHerd headline writer should be sacked.

Ardath Blauvelt
Ardath Blauvelt
1 month ago

An astute analysis of America’s two parties. Clear and concise. Rare. Thank you.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago

Trump people tend to see the problem as politicians not listening to voters.
Politicians unwillingness to listen is what made Trump possible in the first place. He threatens the cozy status quo that has long existed in DC and is why there are Repubs lined up against him, too He’s not one of ‘them,’ not part of that exclusive club of would-be masters of the universe.
It is interesting to see someone, at long last, point out how the Dems have a habit of disenfranchising their party’s primary process, which has now been corrupted for a third straight election cycle. Dem voters summarily rejected Harris in 2020. Until Biden’s ouster, she was considered among his greatest liabilities.
Since then, the attempted makeover has been equal parts comical and disgusting. Every single scripted encounter with a news network has been worse than the one before it. It’s why Harris is reduced to the tedious “Hitler” references and also why the left spent a week freaking out because Donald Trump made some french fries.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago

I know authors don’t usually write the headlines, but I hope we can agree that what looks like authenticity doesn’t count as authentic. “If you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made”. That’s fitting in Trump’s case. The nasty, vengeful, attention hungry things he says are his authentic self. His claims of caring about anyone who doesn’t play his one-way loyalty game, or have similar affluence, fame, or power are false.

Caldwell is correct that shaming and ostracism have lost much of their cultural sway since their recent peak—rightly so. Slander and vilification are not a good replacement for them. The 47-48 percent who vote for the eventual winner and the 47-48 who vote for the eventual loser—whoever is which—need to live in something that more closely approximates a united country. Calling all your political opponent shameful hooligans or wicked elites just won’t do.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Yes trump has his problems. Unfortunately they are a lot smaller then the other sides problems.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Bret Larson

Certainly a common opinion, just as the exact opposite take is. Neither is simply a fact.

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Bret Larson

Trump’s problems are that he is mad, senile and a felon. What were Harris’ problems again?

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  Martin M

She’s a puppet who wants to make you a slave.

Addie Shog
Addie Shog
1 month ago
Reply to  Martin M

there really is no evidence that he is mad or senile. And a felon on absolutely ridiculous charges. Weaponising the legal system by trump. Pot calling kettle black.

Duane M
Duane M
1 month ago

Caldwell spends most of his essay trying to shore up the argument for Trump, when in fact there are no positive reasons to vote for Trump.

Caldwell is correct that Harris is the candidate of the Establishment (or as he calls it, the System). But Trump is not the candidate of the Electorate by any means; Trump is the candidate of the Anti-Establishment.

In that sense, MAGA Republicans are similar to the Yippie Party of the late 1960s, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, whose only message was, “Reject the Establishment.”

Part of the reason that Trump can lie openly about anything is that he can do that while portraying himself as an outsider running to overthrow the corrupt Establishment.

Never mind that no such thing happened during his first term, while the national debt rocketed upward as he gave huge tax cuts to the already wealthy, and that he corruptly enriched himself while President. He still remains a personality onto whom his followers can project their anti-Establishment desires.

Harris is indeed the candidate of the Establishment, running against Trump who is, above all else, the candidate of Trump.

For American voters the choice is clear: we have no choice.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago
Reply to  Duane M

That – or he opposes open borders, net zero, and host of other destructive, progressive policies under the Dems.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
1 month ago

Who said Trump lost the debate? That was the agreement of the legacy media that nowadays earns the trust of only 30% of the people. Kamala was well-drilled, witty and mocking. Trump was perfect in his well-constructed role as a regular guy who doesn’t need rehearsals because he has said everything a thousand times. He has continued in the same vein while Kamala has been floundering since that high point. Now, she is deflated and back on word salads because she has rightly read the handwriting on the wall. Hillary fell back on chardonnay at these moments, but I rhink the Second Gentleman (who came up with that?) better have something stronger in the cupboard.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

You’d better too. Just in case your insistent claims of confidence don’t reflect reality, or produce the expected result.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
1 month ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

“Who said Trump lost the debate?”
Everybody except him – but even he, in his declining cognitive state, knows that he got thrashed.

Bored Writer
Bored Writer
1 month ago

A really excellent article. Thank you!

Chris Milburn
Chris Milburn
1 month ago

“many of the Springfield newcomers…”
Even in a good article, the choice of the word “newcomer” rather than the more accurate “illegal immigrant or more neutral “migrant” is telling about how the psychology of this issue has been shifted towards acceptance as normal.

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
1 month ago
Reply to  Chris Milburn

Most of the Haitians in Springfield have been there perfectly legally under the Immigration Parole Program for many years and are employed locally. Few, is any are “illegal immigrants”

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago
Reply to  Will D. Mann

The parole program is not a normal vetting process, and does not make them legal immigrants. It’s disingenuous to not acknowledge that the vast majority of them have arrived within the last couple years.

Sabrina Page
Sabrina Page
1 month ago

As a former progressive who became fed up the last few cycles, I watched Trump on the Joe Rogan show today. I find him refreshing, wonder if he may be a little on the spectrum, but found him highly intelligent and his comment on windmills was right on, “they’re driving the whales frickin’ crazy.” I am hoping he wins, and will vote for him. I can’t think of anything good to say about KH,

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Sabrina Page

“A little on the spectrum”? Talk about an understatement!

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
1 month ago

The Democrats might represent an educated urban elite and this is reflected in the policies and values they promote, however this “elite” is a large plaurality of the population, even if not a majority.
The Republicans, even under Trump, still espouse policies favouring the even smaller elite of plutocrats and the very wealthy, even as they seek the support of the working class and people without college degrees.
Somehow I doubt if a majority of Americans will be very happy with the end results of a further Trump administration

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
1 month ago
Reply to  Will D. Mann

I have no clue what you just said.

Rosemary Throssell
Rosemary Throssell
1 month ago

Thank you for this excellent article.
I have become so frustrated by how Trump is portrayed by the media but more importantly by how is supporters are.
I have lived here for 19 years in a solid Republican area of Upstate New York and I love my neighbours. Hard working, kind and true patriots with strong family values.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 month ago

Were any of them in DC on 1/6/21? How did you feel about that day, from a patriotic standpoint?

Nestor Diaz
Nestor Diaz
1 month ago

This is simply the best overview on the present situation I’ve read.

Chauncey Gardiner
Chauncey Gardiner
1 month ago

“The issues Trump raised, however inarticulately and inaccurately, cut in his favour.”
It may have taken him 8-9 years to come up with it, but his stump speech is now very, very good. So, enough of the “Trump is vulgar” hoo-hah.
Trump is about to deliver that speech at Madison Square Garden … in New York City. It will be excellent.
Elon will be introducing him.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
1 month ago

Trump’s speech was indeed excellent and funny, if a bit long. But he wasn’t introduced by Elon. Elon introduced somebody else to absolutely massive cheers. MSG went absolutely wild when she stepped on stage, and then went even wilder when she introduced and then kissed DJT.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

America is broken. People think Trump can fix. Too late. Unfortunately they are dragging down many allies with them. The elected don’t run USA. Wall Street, special interest groups, big corporations, Jewish lobby and other lobby groups, Hollywood, big banks, and Jewish owned media, call all the shots. Democracy? Don’t be fooled.

Luke Lea
Luke Lea
1 month ago

With Trump, the continuation of our current trade and immigration policies is on the table, and for the vast majority of the ten or twelve thousand wealthiest families in America, the so-called donor class, that’s pretty much all they care about. It’s where the really big money is made. And since these families between them control most of the major institutions in our society, including the media, this explains the present sorry state of our national discourse. For even though hidden behind the scenes, this class not only tolerates but actually encourage inflammatory cultural issues (LGBQT, CRT, DEI) that are currently riling our society. They see them as a way to distract and divide the electorate, thereby keeping themselves in power..
At least that’s this 82-year-old man’s economical understanding of this moment in history.