The False Effort to Blame Trump's Win on Race
Two days after 2024 election, on November 7, the New York Times published an election analysis written by Peter Baker and entitled “A Comeback That Tells Us Who We Are.” This piece attempted to put Trump’s win into a broader context than simply the votes involved. I am not a Trump supporter, largely because of his actions on January 6, 2021, but I think he deserves an honest analysis of his 2024 win; this Times article did not provide it.
The article’s substance is well summarized by one of the opening paragraphs:
“Mr. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign capitalized on resistance to electing the first woman president…and while tens of millions still voted against Mr. Trump he once again tapped into a sense among many others that the country they knew was slipping away, under siege economically, culturally and demographically.”
Did a large pro-Trump constituency come out in 2024 to vote for Trump because the rest of the country was “slipping away”? The idea is absurd as well as false. The Trump majority was made up of every group—Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and women of every race, as well as White men. There was no substantial group “slipping away.” If anything, this large majority was protesting their concern that the prosperity and economic growth which had always characterized the US economy was the thing “slipping away.”
But to the Times, if the Democratic presidential nominee was defeated, racism had to be involved, even if—as in this case—Trump’s majority consisted of all the racial groups that make up the American people as a whole.
Perhaps we should make allowances for the fact that the Times was not speaking to the American people as a whole; it was speaking to and for the Progressives within the Democratic Party—largely an educated, White and wealthy slice of the population—who see the government’s proper role today as implementing programs that will reach various Progressive goals. For this group, the multi-racial majority that re-elected Trump was in fact slipping away. They wanted a government that would address the rising and inflated costs food, gasoline, housing and other essentials that were seriously threatening their standard of living.
This inflationary economy was largely the result of President Biden signing on with the Progressives after winning the presidency in 2020. As his Vice President, he chose Kamala Harris, a Black woman who was then a Senator from California with an established record as a Progressive, and he began to support left-wing legislation that embodied the Progressive’s program.
A good example is the Inflation Reduction Act, a $400 billion piece of legislation intended to reduce the release of carbon into the atmosphere and thus reduce—in the view of the Progressives—the danger of global climate change. The Act was falsely and cynically named. It had nothing to do with taming the inflation that was hurting the middle and working classes, and everything to do with the Progressives desires to reduce global warming. By 2024, inflation from this and other Biden Administration proposals had driven the cost of food, housing and gasoline—to name a few essentials—to new heights.
Why did the Biden Administration surrender so easily to the demands of the Progressives? The primary reason was Biden’s success in building a winning coalition against Donald Trump in 2020. It’s difficult to dislodge an incumbent President, but Biden, with Harris as his running mate, had been successful in capturing the presidency by moving effectively to the political left.
Ironically, his success in defeating Trump in 2020 had not come from his left-leaning program; it was actually the result of the public’s unhappiness with Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic. This was a crisis beyond Trump’s capabilities. To deal with something as unprecedented and complex as a deadly national epidemic requires a president who is well organized and capable of calming the public’s fears. This was not within Trump’s skill set. He continuously went before the American people unprepared to outline either facts or remedies, and became argumentative and even abusive when members of the media asked reasonable but increasingly hostile questions.
However, even though Trump was out of office after 2020, the inflation created by Biden’s leftist and Progressive policies erased Trump’s failures and weaknesses from the public’s mind and this—with the inflationary economy Biden had created—drove a large majority of Americans to the polls as Trump voters in 2024.
Now that Biden’s and Harris’s Progressivism has been defeated by Trump with a broad coalition of working Americans, it remains a deadly problem for the Democratic Party. Trump’s broad-based victory cannot be challenged as limited to white voters alone, and has exposed the weakness of Progressivism as a basis for Democratic power. The Democrats will have to rebuild a national party from the center, without relying on race-based loyalties.
The next four years will tell us whether they have the leaders to carry this out.
Peter J, Wallison was General Counsel of the Treasury and White House Counsel in the Reagan Administration. He is a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute.