Can anything rival, in the long annals of the American Republic, the astonishing political comeback engineered by Donald Trump’s campaign in the last few hours? Even the insurgent victory of Andrew Jackson – a predecessor with whom Trump has often been compared – four years after his controversial defeat in 1824 does not rival his stunning reversal of electoral fortune.
After all, Jackson did not have to reckon with anything approaching the scale and intensity of Trump overcame. Outspent three to one, countless indictments, raids of his home, two impeachments, two assassination attempts and perhaps the most concentrated and widespread campaign of demonisation ever orchestrated against a political figure in modern history. Arrayed against him stood not merely the Democratic machine, but the combined might of corporate America, the entertainment industry, academia and the administrative state itself.
And yet like Jackson’s, Trump’s return marks a victory for vast swathes of an electorate that had been treated with contempt by the ruling classes and consolidates a fundamental realignment of America’s political landscape, begun in 2016 and interrupted in 2020, that will echo far beyond its shores.
For all the lazy caricatures of him as a dangerous extremist, Trump won because he successfully snatched the centre ground from his opponent on almost every major issue, from abortion and parental rights to border security and energy policy. While Kamala Harris, arguably the most radically left-wing candidate ever to run for the presidency, veered wildly towards the progressive extremes in both her rhetoric and policy proposals, Trump offered a pragmatic mixture of social conservatism, economic nationalism and technological optimism that resonated across the political spectrum and chimed with the instinctive moderation of Middle America.
The electoral coalition he has forged triggered a tectonic turn from the tired identitarianism that has bedevilled America and her cultural colonies across the West for far too long. The carefully curated appeals to racial and ethnic voting blocs that had been the staple electoral logic of the Democrats seems to have given way to one centred on the family, individual freedom and cultural values. Married women, for example, broke heavily for Trump. Indeed the gap in support for him between married and unmarried women was roughly the same as the gap between women and men. Black and Hispanic voters shifted towards a candidate routinely labelled a racist and xenophobe in higher numbers than any Republican candidate has ever attracted.
Equally unprecedented was Trump’s success with the working-class base, a demographic that the Democrats’ misguided foray into identity politics had led it to ignore with catastrophic consequences despite the lessons it should have learned in the wake of his first electoral victory and the Teamsters Union refusal to endorse either candidate when it became clear that its membership’s support for Trump was nearly twice that for Harris.
Trump’s winning combination of political moderation and transactional instinct was even more obvious in his steady accumulation of a deep and varied pool of talented lieutenants, including former opponents such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democrats such as Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard, and, of course, his once-sceptical running mate J.D. Vance. These figures will most likely comprise the most energetic, influential, and ideologically diverse Cabinet since Lincoln’s ‘Team of Rivals.’ All the signs that Trump 2.0 will be Team Trump, an alliance that will transcend the partisan tensions that have paralysed America’s politics for so long. It is a coalition that represents a new synthesis of a broad but non-dogmatic social conservatism, an economic policy prioritising the national interest, and a profound scepticism of the excesses of managerial liberalism and the administrative state.
As America teeters on the brink of an increasingly interconnected global conflict, with active fronts in Ukraine, the Levant and the Red Sea, while Chinese ambitions regarding Taiwan loom on the horizon, the geopolitical implications of Trump’s victory are hard overstate. Trump’s return, buttressed by his running mate’s principled and articulate realism in foreign policy, will usher in a more muscular and approach to shoring up the hegemonic influence of America, an influence that waned sharply after the cascade of crises overseen by Biden’s disastrous handling of foreign policy, most notably his humiliating and ham-fisted withdrawal from Afghanistan and the naïve appeasement of an Iranian regime that has wrought unending terror and destruction on its neighbours in the years since Trump left office.
Team Trump’s victory underwrites a fresh ideological coalition taking hold across the Western world, a national conservatism that combines a focus on working-class economic concerns, a qualified pride in America’s history and heritage, and a sorely needed dose of sanity on social and cultural questions. The Conservative Party, intoxicated for so long by an electorally fatal cocktail of technocratic managerialism, social liberalism, and pliant internationalism, would do well to take note.