Trump is Going to Win Again
History is repeating itself with unprecedented swiftness
Düsseldorf, 21 November 2023 Filed under: Politics
When Donald Trump won the election in 2016, I was still working at the offices of a large media company. I can remember that morning like it was yesterday; including the fact that I was significantly less shell-shocked than almost all of my colleagues at the office. I was also a lot less surprised than most commentators talking about the event on TV or in the papers, here in Germany, and abroad.
For many years since, I have heard the question “how could people possibly vote for that man?” And even before the now-debunked conspiracy theory of Russian meddling in the election surfaced, I tried to answer people. It’s really rather simple, I would say. All he does is not deny that people, common people, have problems. Problems that are very often caused by the people in power. And then he tells these people who have problems, who feel mistreated, misunderstood and are often talked down to by other politicians — and increasingly the media — what they want to hear. This is something, I would say again and again, which politicians have been doing for hundreds of years. Rather successfully, most of the time. If they deliver on their promises later — spoiler alert: mostly, they don’t — doesn’t really matter. It has never mattered much throughout history. Winning the election, that’s what counts. It’s like winning the war. Afterwards, people don’t ask how many Japanese cities you had to nuke. What matters is that you won. The only amazing thing here, I would remark, is, that all the other candidates in American politics, aside from Trump, seem to have forgotten this simple winning strategy.
But most people I told this theory to over the years didn’t want to hear it. Something else must be at fault. Hackers. Russian spies. Anything. It can’t possibly be that simple. Only: it is.
And it is happening again. Because those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it1. Germany isn’t the only country that’s manoeuvred itself into the shit these days. The infrastructure and social systems in the US aren’t in much better shape. If anything, it’s worse in states like California where whole city blocks are being consumed by homeless camps, tens of thousands of people are forced to sleep in their cars and petty crime has become the daily norm. Inflation is rampant. And, much like in Germany, the political establishment and legacy media corporations are trying to ignore all of this. One of the most important freeways in the country burns down? In a huge megalopolis that’s perennially on the verge of traffic collapse as it is? The New York Times will suggest that things actually aren’t that bad. Or, if anything, things are already so horrible that a bit more horror can’t make it much worse anyway.
And you’re seriously surprised that people will vote for anyone who will simply say that this shit is unacceptable, that it wasn’t like this a few decades ago and that we need to fix it? No matter what kind of clown runs on that agenda, it’s the easiest ticket you can hand anyone to win an election. The candidate who isn’t ignoring reality. Who’s talking about what’s actually going on out there, instead of trying to eradicate reality from people’s phone screens. Trump doesn’t have to deliver on these promises. The fact that he’s dealing with reality head on instead of drowning it in propaganda and declaring everyone who’s actually looking out of the window a conspiracy theorist means he’s already about a mile ahead of everyone else in the race.
It doesn’t help, of course, that the Democrats are doing everything they can, once again, to secure Trump’s victory. Just like in 2016, when they torpedoed their one candidate who was also addressing actual reality for a majority of voters — Bernie Sanders — they are now trying their utmost to make Robert F. Kennedy Jr. go away. Who happens to also be addressing the reality people outside the bubble of the privileged social justice warriors are living in every day. If I was an American voter, I’d much rather vote for RFK Jr. than a clown like Trump or a doddering, senile puppet like Biden who fucks over his staunchest allies and a day later probably doesn’t even remember what order people told him to sign.
But, of course, RFK Jr. can’t be allowed to run because he’s against vaccines. Honestly, in the grand scale of things, who gives a fuck? The guy could run on a platform to make all science and medicine illegal in the United States and he possibly couldn’t do more damage than Sleepy Joe, who’s allowed two major wars to escalate during his watch. And, worse, instead of trying to use the USA’s considerable diplomatic and geopolitical influence to end these wars, he’s perfectly happy to finance them and have his pals at Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon make a pretty dime from murder by the tens of thousands in the rubble on the Dnieper and the Mediterranean. What exactly are we afraid of here? That nobody will want SARS-CoV-2 vaccines anymore? That NASA will lose the ability to go to the moon? Give me a break. The real reason you’re not supposed to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is because he’s an outsider on a war footing with established power centres in Washington. Just like Trump. But unlike Trump, the establishment of the Democratic party has ways to keep him down.
Which is why Trump will win again in 2024. Unless the establishment wakes up and starts to acknowledge the problems of the actual voter down on the street — or at least pretends to — instead of trying to distract them with issues that, in the great scheme of things, really don’t matter, the Big Bad Orange Man is going back to the White House. And we’ll have a replay of a lot of people — many of them professional journalists — being completely shocked and dumbfounded of what happened on the night of 5 November 2024.
That it’s happening this fast, though, is a wholly new development. Technically speaking, history (as in historical science) is only concerned with things that happened longer than thirty years ago. As such, 2016 hardly qualifies as history and falls entirely in the realm of political science.