Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, gestures during a campaign rally at Santander Arena, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in Reading, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
There is no shortage of disgust over Donald Trump’s victory for the White House, but it was anything but surprising.
For four years after he was elected in 2016, Trump regularly made headlines for his endless trail of gaffes, gaslighting and gasbagging.
Trump was impeached twice and talked a lot, almost endlessly. As president, however, he did virtually nothing. Mexico never paid for the wall, which cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $15 billion in 2020. He talked down the “Chinese flu” until he could no longer deny that it was a global pandemic caused by the COVID virus.
Ultimately, he lost his re-election campaign to an older, insignificant, retired senator and vice president who offered Americans little more than a healthy and relatively fair alternative to Trump.
Trump’s finale was the January 6 insurrection. A bipartisan congressional committee condemned Trump for orchestrating the stunning attack on the government.
Yet he prevailed.
He became almost as influential when, as president, he led a shadow GOP government from his home in Florida. And all the while, he racked up a litany of criminal charges and convictions, long enough to put him behind bars for the rest of his life.
Although Trump is a textbook example of a narcissistic personality disorder and unapologetically claims every day that his political success is all about him, that is actually not the case.
It’s about the people who voted for him because of what they think he can do, even if he can’t.
It’s actually about hope, or false hope.
There is no doubt that propaganda machines like Fox News and Twitter-X owner Elon Musk make it easier for con artists like Trump to make false promises based on lies. But on Election Day, many people voted for Trump, hoping he could do what they cared about most: lower prices and get rid of immigrants.
Biden didn’t do that. It’s not the “economy”, stupid. It’s the price of gasoline and half-empty bags of chips.
Most voters don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, that all this talk of “inflation” is not about addressing today’s cost of living. They don’t care that the pandemic has essentially destroyed the national – and global – economy, and the result has been a massive increase in the price of just about everything.
They just want it to go away.
And while Democrats and pundits are correct in their assessment of a solid US economy and relief from future inflation, they continue to talk about the one thing people only care about: their personal finances.
Trump has promised all kinds of things he says he can do to “make America affordable again.”
Smart and educated people know he is lying. The last president to seriously try to drive down prices was Richard Nixon, and it was a disaster. Windfall taxes have produced mixed results for generations and have cowed Republicans since Jimmy Carter tried it in 1980.
In free markets like the United States, we live in a legalized game of profiteering, a game in which the government has had little success. Consumers have far more power than the government to lower prices, and we give up that power every time we stop at a gas station.
Trump is a fraud. American history is filled with stories of people who attracted believers and fools by telling them what they wanted to hear.
I believe people really care that Trump is a racist and populist grifter, but we are talking about the price of almost everything here.
If Trump had lost his primary to Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor would be measuring the curtains in the Oval Office after making the same false promises.
Most American voters simply don’t want to deal with climate change, the complexities of gender dysphoria, and the real or imagined threats of immigration.
Two years from now, if Trump is still blaming Biden, the weather, the French and the Constitution for the fact that things are much as they are now, voters will look for something else again.
American voters are no more loyal than Trump.
For now, real journalism has never been more important. Americans may be selfish and inattentive, but they are not stupid. Our job of exposing Trump’s lies and disinformation will not turn the voters who passionately support Trump. But for the voters who cast their ballots with him, hoping the price of gas will drop by at least a dollar a gallon, fact-based journalism will help them realize the scam they fell for last week and to understand.
Of all the quotes from human history brought up in the past week to provide context about Trump’s persistence, this one from Thomas Jefferson rings the truest after this and every election.
“The government you choose is the government you deserve.”
That’s how democracy works.
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