John Rees on why Trump won

Donald Trump is back. The 45th President is now also the 47th President of the United States. World leaders, heads of Nato and the EU, Keir Starmer, and particularly far-right figures like Dutch politician Geert Wilders, all hurried to congratulate Trump.

Trump didn’t actually win any more votes than he did when he lost in 2020. But the Democrats under Kamala Harris lost votes by the bucket full.

For many people watching Donald Trump’s rambling, incoherent appearances in the final weeks of the US Presidential campaign, one question is dominating their minds: how could Americans elect this man? Twice.

Perhaps the answer to that question can be found in Dearborn, Michigan.

Dearborn is home to the largest Ford car and truck plant in the world. The River Rouge plant employs 30,000 workers. The Dearborn area is also home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country. Here are Newsweek’s early projections of the Dearborn poll results: Donald Trump 47%, Kamala Harris 28%, Jill Stein, the anti-war Green candidate, 22%.

Now Jill Stein won’t be the beneficiary of discontent over the economy and Gaza everywhere. But that discontent exists everywhere. 

In Ohio, at the biggest truck stop in America, one trucker told Channel 4 news: ‘I go to the supermarket and spend $200 and come out with just three bags of shopping.’ To many Americans, Trump’s stump campaign question, ‘are you better off now than four years ago?’ only had one answer.

In the Democratic heartland states, Harris’ vote fell like a stone. In New York, it went from plus 23 to plus 12, in blue-collar New Jersey it was worse, falling from plus 16 to just plus 4, in Connecticut it fell from plus 20 to plus 8. It was the same story in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maryland, and Delaware. 

Harris could never rise above the legacy of the Biden presidency. In both economic and foreign policy terms she just looked too establishment, too elite, too rich, too much like she didn’t care.

Now Trump is very definitely rich too. Very definitely an elite billionaire. But he presents, and goes to great lengths to present, as an outsider. And that is attractive to some who are deeply disillusioned with the misery of life for working people in the US.

Of course, Trump has a committed base of far-right racists and reactionaries, but, substantial as they are, they are not large enough to win 51% of the vote.

For that, disillusioned Democrats are necessary. And the Biden/Harris administration has provided them in spades.

And this is not just a pattern in US politics. Across the globe, the populist right builds out of disappointment with the liberal centre. Unless there is a radical break with the system that produces austerity at home and war abroad, the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump cycle will repeat, and not just in the US.