A Letter to America: Where did we go wrong?

Since Donald Trump is by now virtually synonymous with bigotry, it’s tempting to reduce every Trump voter to just that: cultish acolytes made in the image of their own God. I’m certainly guilty of this – on November 6th, I posted a rather vitriolic Instagram story, essentially stating that anyone who voted for Trump is a bad person. And though I like to consider myself a humanist who believes that all people are, or at the very least carry the potential to be, good when it really comes down to it, I cannot in good faith say my opinion has changed. The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser beautifully delineated the moral gravity of Trump’s victory: in 2016, his election could be explained as a ‘fluke.’ But today, we are far removed from the blissful ignorance of pre-Trump politics; every voting-age American has lived through his first term and, more importantly, its fallout. Our next president is a 34-time convicted felon and sexual abuser who, having lost his first bid for re-election, organised a coup to overthrow democracy. He emerged scarpered but no less resolute, and, having learnt from his mistakes, promised to only be a dictator on ‘day one.’ And since not a day has gone by where Trump hasn’t dominated national headlines, there is no space left for plausible deniability.

I personally find nothing more devastating than the fact that, for the first time in Trump’s long and illustrious history of running for President, the majority of Americans have chosen the man who, according to his first wife, kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed – presumably to soothe himself back to sleep after nightmares of immigrants ‘poisoning the life-blood of our country.’ Simply put, there is no scope left to weigh virtues and vices: Donald Trump is pathological moral corruption personified, and, respectfully, I have no interest in apologetics. 

Though I know in my heart the unparalleled capacity of empathy, I don’t see myself willingly engaging with Trump supporters anytime soon. And yet, human acknowledgement is essential. So, here is my best effort: logically, all 76,838,984 of my fellow countrymen who voted for Trump cannot invariably, univocally, be heinous bigots. They can’t be, because I cannot reconcile my belonging to such an unapologetically hateful population. In our recent editorial, we unpacked how economic grievances shaped Trump’s victory. It’s worth developing those ideas here, to humanise the now-majority of Americans whom I find otherwise wholly incomprehensible.

Voters prioritising the economy was no surprise; astronomical inflation has been nothing short of devastating. And blaming the incumbent is easy: the ‘powers that be’ offer a clear and cathartic target for one’s grievances. But this reflex neglects the fact that presidents inherit economies. COVID-19 wrought global chaos, beyond the control of any one world leader, but then-President Trump’s woeful mismanagement only accelerated economic collapse, leaving behind the worst economy since WWII. Despite starting from veritable shambles, the Biden administration’s hard work has ensured that this coming January, Trump (in Time Magazine’s words) will take charge of ‘the strongest economy in modern history… the envy of the world.’ Popular opinion aside, Biden’s economic policies are working – it just doesn’t feel like it yet. But more importantly, while inflation remains sky-high and home-ownership moves further and further beyond the realm of possibility, Biden’s insistence on telling us that the economy is strong offers no solace to working class folk living paycheck-to-paycheck. Repeated affirmations of growth and prosperity ring hollow, the empty promises of a detached leader.

Leading up to this election, pundits placed massive emphasis on the supposedly historic ‘gender gap.’ But the real gap was – as, in hindsight, we really should have known it would be – economic. According to exit polls, 80% of voters identifying the economy as their top issue chose Trump: is it really so hard to believe that ordinary Americans so desperately desired change that even the disgraced ex-President became a palatable alternative? Ironically, while Kamala Harris called to raise the minimum wage, increase taxes on billionaires, and cap grocery prices, Trump believes the minimum wage is ‘too high’ and has expressed support for firing striking workers. While the Democrats’ economic ideology supposedly boosts the middle class, Reaganesque trickle-down economics only enrich the wealthiest, exacerbating economic disparity. But don’t take my word alone – why else would billionaires like Elon Musk invest millions in Trump’s campaign? 

Though I understand this reasoning, I still find the speed with which people have forgotten just how bad things got under Trump to be utterly maddening. A bipartisan panel of 154 political science experts may have just ranked Trump the worst President in American history, but to the average voter, four years of distance have softened, romanticised, and fundamentally redefined his presidency in collective memory. Facing today’s hardships, one cannot help but feel nostalgic for the blissful golden days of Trump.

Frustratingly, most Americans do lean further left, at least fiscally – they just don’t know it. YouGov presented voters with Harris and Trump’s respective economic policies, anonymised. Voters clearly preferred Harris’s plans, with majority support for every policy included. And Harris’s policies don’t just seem better to uninformed voters. Objectively – if 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists, liberal and conservative, can be trusted, that is – they are ‘vastly superior’ to Trump’s ‘counterproductive’ plans. Harris’s policies would have created sustainable growth, increased job opportunities, and heightened equity; Trump’s proposed tax cuts and obsession with tariffs will cause inflation. And yet, none of that mattered in the end, because, as Trump lied during the debate: ‘I had no inflation, virtually no inflation.’ Today, thanks to Biden’s abysmal leadership, we have never suffered so intensely. Trump said it best: ‘they’ve destroyed the economy.’ Returning to the YouGov poll, after seeing the names, those same respondents nonetheless claimed to prefer Trump’s economic stance. So, then, we’ve come full circle: is this not just wilful ignorance?

If nothing else, this election must be a wake-up call. All of us on the left, not least the Party apparatus, must reflect on exactly how and when we abandoned the very people we claim to represent. But I’m not hopeful. I would love to say that the Democrats will learn from their mistakes, but they probably won’t. It’s not just that I don’t consider the Party capable of the unflinching self-scrutiny indispensable for any meaningful change – which, by the way, they aren’t – because, frankly, recovery might not even be possible anymore. There is a lot I can, have, and would like to say about the Democrats’ grave failures. Pi’s Lucy Tappin wrote an excellent piece on how Kamala Harris’s refusal to budge from Joe Biden’s abysmal stance on Israel fed low Democratic turnout. Unignorable, too, is Harris’s inexplicable choice to veer radically to the right in the final weeks of her campaign. But, election postmortems are nothing but that – a postmortem. 

Though important, analyses like mine are ultimately stuck in the past, failing to address how we act in the present. To be blunt, what’s done is done: we the people have democratically elected a dictator, and there is no path left to us except forward. But if my development into a truly independent, thinking individual, cast as it was against the backdrop of Trump’s first term, taught me anything, it’s that we cannot ever, under any circumstances, unquestioningly trust those in charge. Acceptance should never mean complacency, for the fight has only just begun.