Ah yes, the words of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” ring through my head this morning more than ever before.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Ain’t that the truth after the 2024 Election results came in overnight and finally the race was declared (at least by the Associated Press) for former President Donald Trump, who will take office in January as the 47th President of the United States. He’ll be one of two presidents to serve non-consecutive terms, joining Grover Cleveland in the history books for that accomplishment.
I have a feeling many decades from now, a whole chapter will be devoted to the saga of Trump in American History books, and anyone out there harping to say something like “IF AMERICA STILL EXISTS IN FOUR YEARS!” then I hate to tell you that you have no understanding of how the nation really works. Which I have harped on several times before.
America is like a super tanker or the venerable Aircraft Carriers we are so well known for sending out across the oceans to project our power.
Now when you are steering a vessel that might be a few football fields long, the ship won’t turn on a dime. Course corrections are thought of in tiny increments, meant to get you to the position you need without rocking the boat too hard or causing disaster through capsizing even turning too hard and cracking the hull in two. The United States steers slowly most of the time, forced to do so because the ship has grown to such a scale that if we do too much, we break something big in the process. No one wants to break anything, they want to profit off of everything America to the highest amount.
This was the norm in my opinion until 2009, when President Obama won the office and began to try for Healthcare reforms. The ship began to take some interesting turns at the time – think Tea Party rallies over Obamacare and non-sensical government shutdowns amid an economic recovery that took longer than expected – and then drifted off the course by the time the 2016 election rolled around.
Over the past decade, our nation has instead acted in many ways like a drunken ship’s captain at the helm, changing direction wildly while somehow avoiding the rocks and shoals that threaten to send the tanker to a watery grave. We’ve gone from Obama to Trump to Biden and now back to Trump in the span of less than a decade.
Amid all this? We have no idea of what we want out of our leadership. We drift purposeless and wait for someone to give us something we can grasp onto, bringing back the exceptionalism the nation craves to feel again.
I don’t think the return of Trump will bring that about.
What I find amazing in my mind about the results is that people stopped caring that the former and soon-to-be President made outrageous and dangerous statements at times, even though they are more akin to crying wolf than actual policy. They didn’t care about his double impeachments, his felony conviction, still looming prosecutions (for the immediate moment) and the litany of reasons why anyone other than the former President would ever have a shot at a “comeback.”
If anyone should be to blame for keep the flame alive for Trump, it should be the media.
The concept of “comeback” when for more than a decade “mainstream media” news outlets have made billions in advertising revenue feeding the masses a litany of Trump news – from the 2011 Birtherism movement to the all the trouble he seemed to face in 2022, all the way through this most recent political campaign. Everything he says is treated as “breaking news” in much the same way a meme or a joke is treated as serious reasons for people to stop voting for a candidate.
The media has always presented their own narrative around the former President – before he won the first time in 2016, during his time in office, after he was in office and will try to push the same self-serving narrative of “he’s bad for the country, we have to keep your eyes glued to all the awful things happening” that really don’t impact your day-to-day lives. Keep feeding people the drama, they’ll keep gobbling it up. It ain’t difficult to do if you want to be that kind of person, and are willing to sell your soul for your thirty pieces of silver.
So we wonder why we end up with extremist duopolies entrenched in political warfare against each other in Washington, deluding themselves on the “idea that America is behind our way of thinking” no matter the issue, and glut themselves on corporate donations and promise action amid campaigns that all look like cookie cutters of each other. It is a political class that has worked to keep the real problems of the background out of the view of the voting public. We still have no solutions for health care, for ensuring the social security safety net in the future, of paying down the national debt.
Rather than hold these duopolies accountable, they went about their own campaign of attempting to derail every minor or major initiative undertaken by Trump’s previous administration, and sought to nickel and dime him to death in the aftermath. The media loves to focus on whatever horrible thing the Donald said today, and pick it apart.
He’s good at feeding that beast too while understanding his base knows what he’s doing: he’s trolling the New York Times crowd, the folks who are glued to MSNBC and convinced the world will end with The Donald having a temper tantrum. The vultures want a carcass, and so the Donald knows how to give them what they want.
He also knows what to say to the little guy, still believing the American dream that you can break out and get rich one day and never have to work a day in your life again. Being wealthy still requires labor, just not manual labor, and so that dream has always been a false prophecy for folks trying to find their way in the world from paycheck to paycheck. But he speaks to them with promises like “no more taxes on overtime” or “no taxes on tips for restaurant workers.” Promises he might keep, might not.
He makes big promises about sweeping deportation of illegal immigrants without a plan to accomplish any of it. How will that work? Who will take over the jobs many illegals do now for wages well below what Americans will accept? Do you know how to pick strawberries, tomatoes, or grow massive amounts of food? I certainly have no clue. Are we all going to pick up shovels and get out in the field all the sudden? I don’t think so.
He promises tariffs on goods coming into the country for sale (most of what we find on consumer shelves – think everything from t-shirts to tea bags) that have some connection to imports from overseas one way or another, and we don’t have the manufacturing capacity to prevent major shortages and greatly increased costs as a result of the policy.
Think about it this way: not all the hamburger meat that you consume starts out life as a steer from the Yellowstone ranch where the Dutton’s rule their little empire, if a connection to something you know about beef production is a helpful example. You know where a lot of beef comes from? Canada. Argentina. Brazil. Tariffs on imports would impact things like the cost of beef since American production can’t keep up with the demands of consumers. Things like hamburgers going up further in price at McDonalds isn’t going to go over well with consumers who Trump has now promised would see prices drop on grocery store shelves.
I read earlier about a 200% tariff proposal pushed by the former President for cars made in Mexico. Am I wrong on the math, or is that twice the value of the vehicle imported? Aren’t cars ridiculously overpriced and the manufacturing quality lessened in recent years? That’s at least my opinion based on recent vehicles I’ve owned compared to older models. Hondas built in the 1990s are still running. How are the ones built in the 2010s doing? I’d put good money that the failure rate is higher.
So will the policy work? Will it drive manufacturing back into the United States, and will companies trade better wages for workers to sell goods at a lower cost over profit-hungry investors always demanding growth on Wall Street? I don’t see the consumer winning on that front when the cost can be passed onto those who pay for the goods a business is selling.
That’s what scares people who didn’t vote for the former and soon-to-be President again: they have no clue what will come of a new term of office for Trump. As much as Americans have no real plan in mind for what they want or how they might survive a new Trump administration, he certainly has no clue on what to do next either.
So honestly?
Who knows what is next.
But has that ever really been the case when we wake up every morning?
I think we can all agree on one thing: we aren’t nearly at rock bottom with our addiction to the drama, and news media is already stroking their hands and putting on a bib to chow down on the advertising profits from what will likely be another tumultuous four years ahead.
We haven’t even gotten that far past election night and already the “analysis of what happened” is being treated like gospel truth. The pundits are spending an undue amount of time crying in their beer on CBS, ABC, The New York Times and elsewhere and blaming everything but the silent truth, which is the following: the policies and cultural issues on which Democrats ran did not engage enough of the country to continue a “blue wave” in elections.
Blame Joe Biden, lower turnout of minorities and many voters flipping to the GOP and others staying home; everything else but the fault of the party itself. They turned their back on the people they thought would put them back in office, and so they lost. The media fed into that with cancel culture and promoting stories on both sides of the political divide that were more about virtue signaling that being actual news.
Look, I care about issues ranging from the rights of minority classes to whether our children are learning history versus American exceptionalism, etc. But it will never be my main focus – which is what the Democratic party wants from everyone. The GOP hammers them for not focusing on other areas like “the traditional family” or “surges of illegal immigration.”
Democrats are seen as a party disengaged from outside the cities. I wrote a while back about this, noting that a lot of the country remains generally conservative and more concerned with the cost of everyday life instead of caring about whatever issue is getting 15 minutes in front of cable news viewers. Republicans painted the party as leftists who want to ruin the country, and that message rang true with rural and suburban voters to the tune of a swing of several million votes toward former President Trump, along with many staying home instead of holding their nose and voting for the Vice President.
It didn’t help Harris had no time to actually put together a campaign. But it should have been an open primary to begin with, and the party knows this so points the finger at “demographic shifts” or on the candidate, or on anything but the party just like the media. The finger pointing is both childish and shows a lack of self-inflection upon Democratic leadership that I believe they need in spades.
And some of the news sources I’ve been briefly listening to from around the globe? They are flabbergasted, as if they can’t believe that “America would elect Donald Trump again.” Already English-language pundits on channels like DW (the German-based foreign version of their CNN, basically) are saying that Europe will need to double down on their own security efforts, and will have problems with the next administration. Proving that all politics are now both local and global at the same time, thanks to free trade, fast travel opportunities and the internet.
So will the media continue to battle with the forthcoming President as they did in the past?
That’s one thing we can definitely be certain won’t change with the forthcoming new Trump administration coming into power. They will do something that is “against the norms” and try to push back with “popular opinion on their side” because of “ratings.”
An additional thing we can count on in a new Trump administration? Division.
Democrats will regroup, will find new ways to poke and prod at the GOP. The GOP will find new ways to poke and prod at the Dems. It goes on, and on, and on, and on.
And herein lies the real problem: the two sides can’t stop warring against each other despite the fact that people outside of the political class just want some peace and quiet. Human nature seeks stability – in food and water supply, in housing, in the work they do and in children raised to continue onward. Cultural issues will always be well down the list compared to those particular needs.
I wrote about this a while back too, but I’ll say it again: we need new parties.
Neither party objectively finds itself in a position over the past 20 years to represent the real political beliefs of everyone in the nation, and the partisan bickering as national leadership jockey for leadership election after election have left Americans as a whole feeling disengaged from the political class and seek something from leadership they aren’t getting.
We need new parties, a real competition and candidates who understand how people feel on the ground level in America. Not what lobbyists and consultants think America feels about things.
This is how I know this to be true: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went on a NYT Podcast to say essentially that this wasn’t the Democratic Party’s fault. How tone deaf is that reaction from one of the party’s longest serving leaders?
For those of you who held your nose and voted one way or another for candidates you didn’t like but decided would do a “better job” as President, I pose this one last thought to you: voting this way and expecting different results from the parties will never get our nation or you individually anywhere in your effort to change things.
Decide after this election that you can do it differently. Rally together and tell both parties “enough is enough” and create something new. It is entirely possible for centrists on both sides to find common ground and do something about the extremes of the GOP and liberals.
Stop buying into the idea that these parties care about your issues, because despite the results of Tuesday the quiet part no one say out loud is the following: the political class could care less about the results. They only care about being elites, and you keep them there through allowing the parties to continue doing the same thing they have for decades: make false promises of change, and then do whatever they want in the aftermath of being elected.
We’ll see what happens, but I don’t expect much from anyone in Washington at this point. Trump, Biden, Harris, Obama or anyone with an R or D by their name.
If anyone won this election, it was those who seek to remain in charge of things and take us in directions clearly outside of where Americans outside of the beltway want to go.
So meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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