The us elections: winners and losers  | thearticle

The winners from Tuesday night’s US elections are obvious. Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party that he reinvented in his image over the past decade. This means those who

want to radically cut immigration in America, just as those who oppose current immigration figures throughout Europe, are winning election after election, national and local. It also means

those who want trade wars by raising tariffs, those who support Israel, those who are against abortion rights, want streets made safer, who don’t care about Black Lives Matter, those who

want to shred big government and those who loathe what’s happened to American colleges, what’s taught there and what college presidents have allowed to happen to Jewish students in their

universities. The key figures in the Congressional hearings into what’s happened at American colleges over the past year were Republicans. Democrats barely made a squeak.  None of this is

very new. Pundits have said again and again how “unpredictable” Trump is. They couldn’t be more wrong. He is totally predictable. We all know what his views are on any subject and the only

question is what restraints are in place to stop him. In 2025, unlike in 2017, there is nothing to stop him. This is not 2016 2.0. This is 2016 with the brakes off. Trump has appointed many

of the Supreme Court justices, he has a majority in the Senate and at the time of writing it looks as if he will have a majority in the House. He had the largest popular vote in US

presidential history. This is what an elective dictatorship looks like. All that talk about the balance of powers in the US constitution looks pretty empty. Who will stop Trump from taking

on the TV networks, from cutting aid to Ukraine, from increasing aid to Israel, from taking on the US Justice Department and prosecuting the lawyers and judges who wanted to convict him,

from deporting millions of immigrants?  The largest group of winners, of course, are those who voted for Trump. Those who are not college educated, who are white men with a grievance, who

(perhaps rightly) felt that Harris, like Hillary Clinton before her, despised them and talked past them rather than to them. In 2016 Clinton called them “the basket of deplorables”. In 2024

Biden (referring to Trump’s supporters) called them “garbage”. The smallest group of winners, but not the least important, are the super-wealthy. Unlike the working-class voters who voted

for Trump, they will get what they want from his new administration.  And the losers? Ukraine, first and foremost. It is terrible to contemplate what will happen to Ukraine without any US

support, military or financial. As one Ukrainian politician said on Wednesday, they have to fight on because they have no alternative. But the cost will be terrible beyond words.  Second, a

much more deserving victim, Iran. Compare the congratulatory message from Netanyahu with the typically mealy-mouthed and inert tweet from Sir Keir Starmer. Netanyahu’s message was perfectly

pitched. Just the right number of exclamation marks and the right amount of hyperbole. That’s how you get economic and military support from Trump. Pour on the praise with the biggest trowel

in Jerusalem.  Every liberal commentator has said Trump is no special friend of Israel and Harris was just as good a friend. Nonsense.  Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which

many British newspapers still can’t accept. It was his son-in-law Jared Kushner, not Antony Blinken, who masterminded the Abraham Accords. Harris, Biden and Blinken loathe Netanyahu and

treated him with contempt. Harris didn’t even attend Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Trump knows that Iran is the greatest enemy to peace in the Middle East. He has complete contempt for the

UN and will cut aid to UNRWA again, as he did in his first administration, before Biden restored it. Netanyahu will have a completely free hand in the Middle East to do what he wants in

Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran. It is no coincidence that he fired three key figures in the Israeli state on the day of the US election. He obviously had better sources than Rory Stewart or

_ The Guardian _ . A large minority of American Jews (estimates vary between 20-30% at the time of writing) supported Trump, not the Democrats.  Biden and Harris managed to alienate a number

of core Democrat constituencies: American Jews, many Hispanic voters, many young Black males and even 45% of women voters as well as white men. It’s all very well having Beyoncé, Oprah and

the Obamas at your rallies. But what Harris needed was millions of voters whom she, and before her Biden, had driven away.  Partly this was more Biden’s fault than hers. He should have quit

long before he did. Why didn’t Dr. Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or the Obamas get rid of him sooner? Why did they wait for the terrible footage from Normandy on the anniversary of

D-Day and then _ that _ terrible TV debate? By then it was too late. Everyone knew he could barely walk or talk. It gave Harris no time to prepare properly for an election campaign. And it

gave no time for the Democrats to find anyone else. One problem no one else has mentioned was that if they had had an open contest, think of the scenes from the Convention in Chicago. It

would have been 1968 all over again. All those young leftists with their _ keffiyehs _ , screaming at Harris over Gaza. How would that have looked on primetime? Just as it looked when

Humphrey ran against Nixon in ’68.   So they were left with Harris, unopposed and untested by the primaries. But that led to another problem. Remember her disastrous campaign in 2020. She

didn’t even make it to the primaries. Throughout the 2024 campaign she couldn’t answer any of the key questions. What did she know about the President’s mental decline and when did she know

it? What about the economy, stupid? Trump voters said again and again that was the biggest issue that concerned them and where were her policies that would transform the American economy?

How was she going to stop immigration? How was she going to cut crime? It’s all very well appearing on _ Saturday Night Live _ and having a hip and happening time with Oprah and the Obamas,

but how did that work out for her? Her political career is over. She won’t be running against JD Vance in 2028. If she’s lucky, she’ll be one of the college presidents who will be fighting

for a job next year after Trump cuts federal aid to the most famous colleges in America. There’s always her memoirs.  Who will be left from the Democrat _ ancien régime _ of the last thirty

years? The Obamas? The Clintons? Pelosi and Schumer? Biden? All going or gone. “ _ Après moi, le déluge _ “ _ . _ Of course, Trump may not even last until 2028. Fat, old, he will be 82 then.

But JD Vance will presumably be fighting fit.  The bigger question is not who will run in 2028, but will the Democrats have learned the lessons of 2024? The first of these is that the only

modern Democrats to have been President since the war, apart from Biden, Obama and JFK, were from the South or the Midwest. Bill Clinton from Arkansas in the 1990s, Jimmy Carter from

Georgia, LBJ from Texas, Harry Truman from Missouri. Except for Obama, six out of the seven were white men. The saddest lesson from 2024 (and 2016) was that a lot of American voters are

still not ready for a woman president, even fewer are ready for a woman president of colour, and fewer still are ready for a woman president of colour from California.  In the month that the

British Conservatives have elected their fourth woman leader and their second leader of colour, this is a painful lesson. America remains a deeply racist and misogynist society. Harris

fought for women’s reproductive rights but the Supreme Court, under Trump, repealed Roe vs Wade. That defeat for women’s rights was followed terribly soon by defeat for Kamala Harris. In the

past three elections, the Democrats won under Joe Biden but lost under Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, their only women presidential candidates ever.  The second lesson is to remember

what one of Bill Clinton’s advisors, James Carville, famously said: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The pocketbook trumps cultural and identity politics, unless we’re talking about white men

from the South and the Midwest. Harris had no answer to Reagan’s question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Why didn’t she? Trump did.  Third, whose side are you on?

Law-abiding Middle Americans or angry Black people and students? LBJ couldn’t deal with the students in ’68, Obama couldn’t deal with BLM demonstrators half a century later and Biden and

Harris couldn’t deal with student revolts in 2023-24. The scenes of demonstrating students gave an impression of America amok. It wasn’t just the economy or the borders that were out of

control.  America felt out of control. And at such moments, Middle America turns Right.     Finally, dinner parties in Georgetown and the Upper East Side don’t decide elections. Main Street

USA does. _The New York Times_, _The Washington Post_, _The New York Review of Books _and _The New Yorker_, CNN and MSNBC have been wrong about almost every issue that matters to Middle

Americans over the past year. The classic case was the recent poll in Iowa which said that women’s concerns over abortion were the sleeper issue that was going to sweep Harris to victory. On

Election Night it turned out that her poll was based on interviews with just over 800 women from Iowa. But it was treated with such reverence by the mainstream media because it was what

liberals wanted to believe. Trump beat Harris by 13% in Iowa. We will never see that pollster on primetime TV again. As the respected pollster Frank Luntz pointed out, “The Iowa poll that

changed the narrative for the final 48 hours of the race was off by 16 points. It predicted a Harris victory by 3%.” Finally, the biggest lesson of all is that the real victims of this are

not the Pelosis and the Schumers as they return to their palatial homes and huge savings. I have seen the Clintons’ house in Westchester and I have been to the bakery where they bought

Chelsea’s wedding cake. That’s how the rich live. The losers are the poor people they were supposed to represent but whom they betrayed and who will now be betrayed even more by Trump, whom

the rich liberals let win.  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now

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