10 Reasons Why Trump Won- Part 1
Before I cover the first 5 points, I will cover an important point by way of an introduction as it overlays all these reasons and that is that a big reason why Donald Trump won and won convincingly is because of a series of unique skills that Trump brings to the table. For his opponents they are character flaws but to his supporters they are features not bugs:
* His phenomenal resilience in the face of a wall of overwhelming hostility and opposition from the his opponents, media, governing elites (some from his own party), the unrelenting lawfare that could have led to prison time and the attempts to bankrupt his businesses due to the corrupt actions of Federal intelligence agencies and New York state and city law enforcement and finally the near successful attempted assassination. Any other candidate would’ve given up.
* His work ethic. Trump thrives on an average of only 4 hours sleep a night and has energy that belies his age. Trump held 80 rallies since the US Labor Day on 1 September that signals the business end of any US Presidential election campaign. In the last week he was averaging 3 rallies a day and in the final three days, he managed 4 full campaign rallies, often ending in the small hours of the morning and beginning at 10am the next day.
* His personal wealth not only helped top up his campaign during fund-raising lulls but he was able to pay millions to a large team of lawyers to defend himself in the various court cases he was involved with. It also meant he was never beholden to the elite Republican consultant class to whom GOP Presidential candidates invariably must turn to fund their campaigns.
* His phenomenal political instincts combine with a great sense of humour. Trump is a genuinely funny guy, but he also responds to events on the fly with the aplomb of the most seasoned pol. To rise from the floor of the stage at Butler, PA after being protected by Secret Service agents after the attempted assassination and fist pump Fight Fight Fight beneath a giant US flag created not just one of the most iconic political photographs of all time but sent a signal of Trump’s power and courage. That single act earned Trump probably a million new votes. His trolling of Kamala Harris’ false claim of working at McDonalds by donning an apron and serving burgers and fries to customers of America’s most iconic fast-food giant was epic…. and highly effective, as was his garbage truck appearance and hi-vis jacket wearing at a rally mere hours after Biden’s “garbage supporters” throw way comment.
* Much is made of Trump’s aggression, his inartful speaking style and partisan, personal barbs at his opponents. To millions of Americans, sick of being lectured to and abused by governing elites, Trump abrasiveness and forceful personality is seen as essential to getting the job of draining the swamp done. Media and governing elites all over the globe hate Trump for this trait but tens of millions of voters see him as the last hope to actually get things done, break some eggs, crack heads in Washington DC and to stand up to the Putin’s, Xi’s Khamenei’s and Jung Ill’s of this world.
- Harris and Waltz were poor candidates
Harris replaced Biden at a crucial point of the campaign after Biden’s disastrous summer debate performance against Trump where his clear cognitive decline could no longer be hidden by a biased and incurious MSM. Biden’s polling was weakening before the debate and cratered after the debate pushing the Democrat elites to find a replacement. Rather than turning to its bench of seasoned, experienced, media-savvy operatives like California Governor Gavin Newsom or Michigan Governor Gretchen Witmer or even a media super star like Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, the woke DEI obsessed Democrat elites felt the optics of skipping over the sitting Vice President Harris as a woman of colour would be too devastating to the liberal base of the party and so they opted for Kamala in the hopes that their superior war chest and wall to wall favourable media coverage would cover for her manifest deficiencies. The gamble didn’t pay off because her failings couldn’t be hidden. They include:
* She ran an awful campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2019/2020 with faltering debate performances and a grab bag of far left policy positions that became frequent fodder for Trump campaign ads (anti fracking – a killer in PA, defund the police – she actually raised money for people arrested for arson during the hugely destructive Minneapolis Floyd riots, no restrictions on illegal immigration and defanging border enforcement, state funded trans gender surgery for prison inmates AND illegals, etc. etc.)
* She came across as scripted and inauthentic with her every public word crafted by her handlers. When teleprompter scripts stalled, she was unable to go off script and would seemingly glitch and repeat previous lines over and over unlike Trump who can riff off the cuff for hours. After Trumps’ 3 hour long spontaneous unscripted appearance on No. 1 podcaster Joe Rogan’s show, Harris was invited on as well but attempted to limit the time and the questions and Rogan declined. She would never have been as remotely authentic and real was Trump was in that interview. Teleprompters were used in seemingly ‘spontaneous’ town halls, questions and questioners were screened and known in advance and every voter interaction was choreographed often poorly.
* Her few interviews, almost exclusively on Democrat friendly venues like CNN and The View, went poorly. She could not answer simple expected questions except with rambling incomprehensible word salads. Her first interview as a candidate was awkward with poor camera positioning and with her running mate present like a minder. Her Fox interview with Brett Baier was so disastrous that her team frantically cut it off 30 minutes into an expected 50 minute sit down and her 60 Minutes interview was so bad that CBS actually edited her rambling answer about the Gaza war and spliced in a simple better answer in a brazen act of political interference. Trump on the other hand faced multiple lengthy hostile interviews (National Association of Black Journalists and Blomberg) that he handled with ease.
* She talked confidently of what she would do as President to solve the big problems like the cost-of-living crisis and the border crisis and when confronted as to why she hadn’t done anything about these pressing voter concerns over the almost 4 prior years as VP, she descended into yet more word salad circular answers.
* Her rallies were the definition of astroturf. Unlike Trump’s huge rallies that were packed to the gunnels with ordinary unscreened voters, Kamala’s rallies were often by invitation and held in locations small enough to create an illusion of a large full crowd. Many had paid attendees who, based on the analysis of cell phone pings, criss crossed the country as professional rally attendees attending 3, 4 even 5 rallies across state lines and that were bussed in by the thousand.
* The Harris campaign tried to run on joy, “brat summer”, happy vibes and a New Way Forward when she was an integral part of the poorly run Biden Harris Administration. Her campaign tried to create distance between her and Biden except that she was joined at the hip on all his policy failures (e.g. the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan) and when asked twice if she’d do anything different from Biden, she essentially said no thus undercutting her own campaign strategy.
* Vice Presidential picks are usually not too impactful with the top of the ticket hoping to do no harm with the pick. In this election, Trump’s selection of JD Vance enhanced his candidacy and Harris’ choice of Tim Waltz diminished hers. Despite a relentlessly negative media campaign against him, Vance proved to not only have a compelling back story of the hillbilly working class boy made good from an addicted solo mum home (turned into a successful book and Netflix movie) but he was a powerful and articulate advocate for the Trump agenda going into the lions den of hostile media interviews and knocking it out of the park over and over again. Conversely Waltz was poorly vetted and was confronted by friendly mainstream media about untruths about his miliary record and rank, his purported movements at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989, his over 30 visits to China and his very liberal track record as Governor of Minnesota. Waltz proved to be almost as bad in interviews as Harris being stumped a few times and the mismatch between him and Vance became painfully obvious during the single VP debate that was one of the most one-sided debate victories in favour of Vance of this type of contest in a generation.
2. “It’s the economy stupid.”
In the 1992 election when Bill Clinton beat popular Ronald Reagan’s Vice President George HW Bush (who had won easily 1988), the main reason was the recession of 1991/92 and its economic impact. Clinton’s famous aggressive Louisiana hard ball advisor James Carville kept Clinton and his campaign focused like a laser on the economy to the point where everywhere in their campaign offices was the sign “it’s the economy stupid” to avoid distraction on other issues. The massive printing of money that began with Covid and accelerated with all the Green New Deal spending boondoggles had the predictable effect of driving up inflation. The Biden Administration’s war on traditional energy (cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, cancelling new oil and gas leases on Federal land and the EV mandates) all had the effect of scaling back the massive domestic energy boom under Trump’s first term causing a rise in energy prices, a process accelerated by the war in Ukraine and the uncertainty in the Middle East. This had the effect of driving up grocery prices in leaps not seen since the high inflation of the ‘70’s and a substantial increase in prices of petrol at the pump. Whilst the high inflation rate did come down somewhat as did prices at the pump, for the latter part of the Biden Harris Presidency, increasing numbers of Americans were struggling to make ends meet and suffered a decline in their standard of living. When combined with a doubling of mortgage interest rates due to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to curb high inflation (which in turn increased domestic rents), job uncertainty and massive house price inflation fueled by the Covid supply chain shortages and untrammeled immigration, the American dream of home ownership for the rising generation became a more distant and unreachable goal. For the first time since the formation of the Republic in the 18th century, Gen Z became the first generation of young American adults to face a country less prosperous and with fewer economic opportunities than the previous generation.
American voters across almost all age, gender and race demographics were demonstrably and intuitively worse off under Biden than they were under Trump and in this election, for the first time since Andrew Jackson ran for a second term in 1836, we had a race between an incumbent (Harris) and a challenger who had recently been President in the previous term and the economic juxtaposition proved to be electorally damaging for Harris.
3 . The weeping sore of the open border = rising crime
This was a hot button issue that sailed somewhat under the radar for the first two years of Biden Harris until the cumulative numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the border reached a critical mass in cities and towns across America. For many years, the problems of illegal immigration were largely confined to the border states of CA, AZ, NM and TX. Trump worked hard to seal the border with a raft of policies: ending catch and release, the ‘stay in Mexico’ policy for asylum seekers, no benefits for migrants and building sections of a border wall. The net effect was, by the end of his Presidency in 2020, that the US had the lowest number of illegal border incursions in a generation.
Biden ended all that on almost Day 1 of his Presidency reversing a raft of effective Trump Executive Orders essentially throwing open the border. Asylum seekers could enter and then be given a court date years hence and then be released with no repercussions for failing to appear. Border Patrol and ICE were re-instructed to release captured illegals rather than deport them and when so-called asylum seekers arrived, they received a cell phone, an EBT card (Federal Government pre-loaded debit card for buying food) and in the liberal so-called sanctuary states and cities, free accommodation in hotels, motels and hostels. Conservative states like Texas and Florida began an aggressive bussing programme where State agencies and law enforcement would bus illegals captured to the large liberal cities of the northeast and mid-west due to being already overloaded.
The impact of this steady stream of illegals, many being young men of military age, into many more northern cities led to pressure on resources usually only seen in border states, a very visible presence on streets and in places like parks and swimming pools but most significantly, because of zero vetting of unsuitable migrants, a surge in violent crime that saw a string of high profile rapes and murders of innocent usually women at the hands of criminal illegals who had been previously convicted of serious crimes in their home countries. In late September, the Assistant Director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a letter to the relevant House of Representatives Oversight Committee representative detailing that 11,000 murderers and 15,000 rapists had been allowed illegal entry into the country. Trump masterfully personalised the illegal migrant crisis by highlighting one of the more bizarre cultural side effects of untrammeled immigration by pointing to the killing of domestic pets like cats and dogs in the small Ohio town of Springfield where some 22,000 Haitians had been allowed in on flimsily disguised refugee status. Trump was fact checked by the ABC debate hosts and the MSM for sensationalising the situation but the reports were true despite the Democrat mayor of the town claiming otherwise plus it swung the spotlight onto the way small rural communities across the country were being ravaged economically and socially by the uncontrolled influx of essentially illegal migrants from 3rd world countries with a history of violent crime and disregard for property and culture. The straw that broke the camel’s backs was the reports of violent Venezuelan gangs taking over whole apartment complexes in middle class suburbs like Aurora in Denver Colorado and other cities like LA and Seattle and of organised Chilean gangs of professional thieves robbing wealthy homes in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Trump and Vance hammered these huge negative impacts of illegal immigration relentlessly at every opportunity and the promise of a mass deportation of illegals beginning with the high-profile criminals wreaking havoc across cities and towns across America. At first the Democrats tried to gaslight the electorate that there was no border crisis, then they tried a bait and switch with RINO Republicans on a border bill that was amnesty lite and offered only a minuscule improvement in numbers of illegals and then blame Trump and the GOP for not properly securing the border until Harris, finally sensing the electoral damage the open border was causing her party, became all bullish and strong on the border vowing to do as the new President what she never did as Biden’s VP despite being appointed by him as the Border Czar. It was too little too late and Trump’s extreme sounding solution to the problems caused by illegal migrants began to resonate with more and more voters.
4. Trump is winning the cultural war
The Democrat Party and liberal elites are obsessed with abortion and trans gender rights. Many liberal and never-Trump commentators (such as the guest post on November 5 by yokeovermarmite) made much about how pro-choice Democrat candidates in the 2022 mid-terms and subsequent special elections (like our by-elections) overperformed versus the polls and this signaled somehow that with most polls showing a close 2024 race that abortion post the overturning of Roe v Wade was the secret sleeper issue that would propel Kamala to victory. The problem was the left, as they often do, over egged the abortion pudding with a drumbeat of inflammatory rhetoric of women dying due to restrictive abortion laws since the overturn of Roe v Wade. The trouble was the picture child case of Amber Thurman’s death in Georgia was due to medical complications from an abortion pill she ordered online and poor subsequent medical treatment rather than being denied an abortion by Georgia’s more restrictive abortion laws. This was a medical malpractice issue and not an abortion rights issue. But more stupidly, Harris (and many Democrats and the MSM) went all in on claiming Trump was going to enact a nationwide federal abortion ban and they relentlessly scare mongered off that. Trump deftly defused the abortion issue’s potency during the campaign by doing three things: (i) he disavowed any claim to be at all supportive of any Federal abortion ban saying he’d veto one if passed by Congress, (ii) he rightly placed the Dobbs v Jackson decision (overturing Roe v Wade) in its proper legal context as merely returning the abortion issue to the States where constitutionally it belongs and, (iii) rather than being afraid to touch this third rail of US politics, Trump and Vance sometimes went on offence on the issue of late and post birth abortions (both allowed in a handful of uber liberal states) and rightly surmised that majority US public opinion was opposed to, and deeply concerned about, these types of abortions. Pro-choice candidates and media would then straight up lie repeatedly about all three of these points: they banged on endlessly about Trumps’ planned abortion ban, they mischaracterized the overturning of Roe v Wade, and they denied that pregnancies were terminated weeks prior to birth or even after birth. Trump drained the venom out of the abortion stinger such that it was not the decisive factor in 2024 that it was in 2022.
The left’s obsession with trans rights was personified by Harris when she bragged that when she was Attorney General of California, she arranged for the State to pay for trans gender surgeries for inmates. As more and more biological men who benefited from male puberty chose to transition and compete in women’s sports and to invade women only spaces like bathrooms, changing rooms and refuges, gradually this became the pointy end of the cultural war between traditional views on sexuality and the progressive left who see gender as a fluid continuum with an ever increasingly long acronym to cover all of the new sexual gradations on this everchanging spectrum. Often Democrats and their sympathizers became advocates for trans gender hormone treatment and even surgery for minors and in some states, the whole binary male/female structure of society was upended with Parent A and Parent B on birth certificates, male menstrual products, mothers became a birthing person and breast feeding becoming chest feeding. A stark divide opened up between Harris and Waltz (who installed tampons in boys’ toilets in all public schools across Minnesota hence his Trump nick name of Tampon Tim) and Trump/Vance who pledged to end men in women’s sport. The New York Times just reported that the most potent and effective of all the political ads that the Trump campaign ran was the one where Harris bragged about trans gender surgery for prisoners and illegals with the tag line Harris: They/Them – Trump: You! Consumers had voted with their pocketbooks and destroyed the brand image of Bud Light after Anheuser Busch allowed prominent trans woman influencer Dylan Mulvaney to front an ad campaign. The boycott of Bud Light, once the largest single beer brand in the US, at one stage wiped billions off the asset value of Anheuser Busch. The 2024 election gave voters the opportunity to use their silent majority electoral muscle to end what many see as nonsense and stop the imposition of extreme liberal values being forced on middle America by an out of touch elite. A vote for Trump was seen as a vote for a return to sanity and normalcy in the cultural wars.
5. The impact of a free Twitter
In the run up to the 2020 election and in its aftermath, the Democrats and governing elites were able to augment their overwhelming sympathetic support of the mainstream broadcast media with indirect ability, through the intervention of the FBI and other government agencies, to silence the voices of critics through the major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, You Tube, Tik Tok and Snapchat. This meant that information that might be politically damaging to the left (such as the release of Hunter Biden’s laptop just prior to the 2020 election and the accusations of fraud in the same election) could be ruthlessly suppressed. The cutting edge of this suppression was Twitter 1.0 because it was the social media space most frequented by the politically active and influential media, celebrity and businesspeople. In tandem with weaponising intelligence operatives (past and present ) to falsely declare Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, the Biden campaign used law enforcement agencies to pressure Twitter to take down all posts (and even suspend accounts) promoting or linking to the laptop story most particularly the New York Post who broke the story and had a link to the full contents of the laptop that had been digitized by the Marco Polo App. This was election interference at its most effective and sinister because post 2020 election polling showed that, had the truth of the laptop been allowed to disseminate and not be blocked by mainstream and social media, a significant minority of Biden voters might have changed their vote.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in the summer of 2022, he not only fired the woke compliant left leaning management team but 75% of the whole work force and repositioned Twitter 2.0, renamed “X”, as a more neutral public square on social media. He engaged the services of prominent left leaning journalist Matt Taibbi who he allowed to pour over the files and, in a series of posts called the Twitter Files, revealed the extraordinary efforts undertaken by the Biden campaign then Administration to suppress any information critical of things like the Biden family corruption, Hunter’s laptop and 2020 election fraud as all this was deemed as dis or misinformation. Musk spent time removing the various algorithms that were embedded to screen for ‘misinformation’ and he restored the accounts of high profile Biden critics like Trump and even controversial figures like Alex Jones.
Whilst Mark Zuckerberg, via his ownership of Meta, has been able to continue to control content deemed to be damaging to the left on Facebook and Instagram and the same is true of Google influencing searching of Trump v Harris (against the former and in favour of the latter) and blocking accounts critical of Harris on You Tube, a raft of high profile conservative influencers who were suspended from Twitter were restored then allowed to tweet and post without restriction through the run up to the 2024 campaign. Twitter/X became the favoured platform for numerous releases of information that were restricted or never covered by the other social media platforms and the MSM such as:
* Tucker Carlson’s explosive interviews with people from new right wing Argentinian President Milei, Barak Obama’s alleged former gay lover, January 6 whistleblowers and a raft of people with critical and controversial things to say.
* Robert F Kennedy Junior’s fight against his own former party to stay on the ballot as an Independent candidate for President and then his subsequent endorsement of Trump.
* Libs of Tik Tok who shines a light on the crazy social media posts of the radical left.
* Trumps rallies and indeed the speeches and campaign ads of a raft of conservatives whose content is banned elsewhere.
* On election day and in the run up, various abuses of election integrity perpetrated by local Democrat election officials were revealed in full making it harder to hide and easier to counter.
Breaking news of a controversial nature that would either be ignored by legacy media or suppressed by all other platforms can now be done freely on Twitter where, contrary to the naysayers that predicted that Twitter 2.0 would fail, it has increased its reach and viewership even more since becoming a genuine free speech platform. Musk’s decision to liberate Twitter has had a profound impact on the type of dialogue that could be had in the run up to the 2024 election and it became impossible for Harris and the Democrats to silence their critics in the way they were successfully able to during the 2020 election.
Tomorrow I will cover the last 5 points:
6. Greatly improved Republican ground game
7. The fall of legacy media and the rise of alternative media
8. The fear of global conflicts
9. The RFK Jr – Tulsi Gabbard coalition
10. The lawfare and assassination attempts against Trump backfired