Trump’s 2024 Victory is a Mandate to Transform America
The way is lit, the path is clear. Trump has only to follow it, with the American people firmly behind him.
Well, I wasn’t expecting that.
It’s been a week since Donald Trump obliterated Kamala Harris, and watching the Democratic blame game has been endlessly entertaining. Convinced that non-stop “Trump Nazi, Trump Fascist, Trump Dictator” rhetoric would clinch victory, Democrats were shocked when the country soundly rebuked them.
Make no mistake, that’s exactly what happened. Despite the party and media’s best attempts to avoid reality, the story of 2024 is a sound rejection of the Democratic agenda. Viewing the election results, one thing is clear: as much as Trump won, Democrats lost.
A New York Times post-election map showed the partisan shift from 2020 to 2024—a flood of red with tiny flecks of blue, as large swathes of the country not only rejected Harris but actively chose Trump.
Democrats lost ground with women, Latinos, Black voters, and suburbanites. Bedrock-blue areas either flipped, like majority-Latino districts in southern Texas, or came uncomfortably close, like Loudoun County, VA. Even sapphire-blue New York saw closer margins than ruby-red Texas, now further from flipping purple than ever.
It should have been obvious to everyone, myself included, that this wouldn’t be particularly close. So many forces worked against Harris that a rout seemed inevitable.
So how did we get here?
First, the Biden-Harris administration was drowning in negative approval ratings based on unpopular, ineffective policies. Voters were concerned about immigration and crime, sure, but as Democratic strategist James Carville put it: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Americans saw the Biden economy as stagnant, fondly recalling the days when Trump presided over a golden age of economic stability. Though former President Obama tried to claim credit for Trump’s economic success, somehow it was still Trump’s fault that Biden’s economy floundered. Voters didn’t buy it and punished the Democrats at the ballot box.
Immigration policy also played a large role in Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office. The MAGA view of illegal immigration was succinct, popular, and unapologetic. Bold proposals like ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal migrants and mass deportations will inevitably face legal challenges, but they’re a far cry from the failed open border policies of the Biden/Harris administration.
Indeed, it’s the fact that Harris refused to disassociate from her boss that really killed her campaign. When asked by The View’s Sunny Hostin what she would have done differently from President Biden, Harris claimed there wasn’t “a thing” she could think of. The moment was a perfect encapsulation of Harris’ weakness as a candidate.
Harris’ first foray into presidential politics ended in utter failure and provided the GOP with a million and half soundbites of her coming off like a deranged liberal. One extremely effective Trump ad referenced then candidate Harris’ support for giving prison inmates and illegal migrants sex-reassignment surgeries on the public dime.
A later version of the ad featured black podcast host Charlemagne tha God criticizing Harris over the policy, which many saw as a perfect inroad to reaching black voters. The ad was so effective that The New York Times reported that it “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it."
Faced with repeated attacks on her liberal record, Harris attempted to pretend she had never held those views and desperately reframe the conversation towards Trump’s supposed danger to the Republic. But after four years of Trump and four years of Biden, only one president had overseen America’s decline.
Those social issues may not have played the main role in Harris’ loss, but they sure didn’t help. Repeated failures to court male voters, favoring the wants of mentally ill men over women, and an obsession with abortion chipped away at support from various voting blocs and pushed them into the open arms of the Trump campaign.
And then, of course, we can’t forget the mainstream media. There was absolutely a sense that media outlets were in the tank for Harris from the second she was crowned the Democratic nominee. News articles went from ruing the reality Harris was going to be the candidate to proclaiming her the second coming of Christ. Those same outlets had just spent months gaslighting the American public about the mental faculties of Joe Biden in an attempt to beat Trump.
Reporting from The Federalist revealed a massive astroturfing campaign to boost Harris on social media sites like Reddit and Twitter that added to the mentality around Harris faux likeability. Put simply, she was a poor candidate foisted on the American people.
All this is to say that Trump’s victory is a clear sign from the American people that they reject the Biden/DNC/Media agenda. Voters showed up in droves to deliver Trump the White House and handed him a mandate to enact the MAGA agenda. Trump has made some exciting proposals that, if enacted, would solidify him in the conservative pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and cemented himself as the most consequential president in my lifetime.
The way is lit, the path is clear. Trump has only to follow it, with the American people firmly behind him.