“Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.” — Kevin Kelly
Unless you’ve been a cryogenic stasis for the last five or so months, you know we are indeed in uncharted territory when it comes to the policies of the Trump administration — and none of it good for those are victims in this Age of Destruction.
Whether you’re a government worker, just an average Joe or Jane, an organization, or a foreign country that relies on the predictability of money and support from the federal government of the United States, it’s been nothing if not a never-ending crisis. All of this is by design and spelled out in an epic, Das Kapital-esque way with this 900 + page document published in 2023:

Though Trump claimed he knew nothing about Project 2025, he, of course, did. The parallels to this own agenda and policies are too exact for it to be a coincidence. Plus, having some of Project 2025 authors on the White House payroll only solidifies the reality that, yes, Project 2025 is The MAGA Manifesto; a neo-fascist plan to fundamentally change the United States from a liberal-pluralist democratic republic to an illiberal nationalist state where the standard operating procedure is summed up in this quote from the Peruvian fascist Oscar Benavides: “For my friends everything. For my enemies the law.”
How we got to where we are is the subject of Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s revealing, but ultimately, depressing book, Fight: Incident the Wildest Battle for the White House. I should add that it’s depressing if you did not vote for Trump and supported both Biden’s and Harris’s campaign for the presidency. By now, the narrative is not anything new for those who were very engaged in this election. An unpopular and old president is facing a reelection campaign that, had he been 10 to 15 younger, would have coasted to a second term with comfortable margins. Yes, inflation has eaten away at any wage gains people made since 2021. Yes, undocumented and illegal migration into the United States was alarming to those who paid attention. Yes, Russia’s war with Ukraine did not appear to be going well. Yes, Hamas brutally attacked Israeli citizens sparking a war between the State of Israel and Hamas. And yes, voters weren’t feeling the good times that the economic numbers showed. There isn’t one thing that can be pointed at as a the culprit to Biden’s bad fortunes, but the COVID-19 pandemic was certainly an aggravating factor.
Although, Allen and Parens don’t dwell on this life-changing event in human history, the after effects of the pandemic on our communities ran the gamut from mental health to education, to one’s sense of grievance toward government, toward vaccines, and even our relationships with other people. Paranoia, anger, hurt, loss, and other emotions ran high — and continued to run high in 2024 as social media amplified the rage and distrust. So much so, that people wanted something to change. They wanted to their government to go in a new, more ordered direction because life seemed so chaotic and disordered. Trust in government, trust in media, trust in education dropped to very low levels, making the political culture ripe for Donald Trump’s return to power.
It was never a sure thing that Trump would become president again, but when historians write about this period of time 25-50 years from now, they will grapple with the fact that, despite the inherent fascism of Trump and people who support him, he ran a strategically effective campaign. Some of those effective campaign strategies are highlighted by Allen and Parnes, and they include, Trump’s focus on connecting with potential voters in places that other campaigns wouldn’t waste time and money on. UFC matches, podcasts, rural areas that are sparsely populated, sending campaign postcards to mailboxes around the country, eventually embracing early voting, effective TV advertising (placed mostly on professional sporting events), and consistently telling voters what he was going to do as president. That last point was key to Harris’s failure to win a majority of electoral votes to send her to the White House.
In short, Harris never told voters what she wanted to as president. All she could muster is a continuation of the Biden administration’s agenda — and agenda, to be fair, did far more to help the United State emerge from the pandemic in an incredibly strong economic position relative to our allies. To put a fine point on it, have a look/listen to this 2022 interview with Dan Pfeiffer from Pod Save America who was talking to Sean Illing from The Gray Area:
But…people have the attention span of a goldfish sometimes, and let’s be honest, Democrats are and have been so slow to learn basic rules of promotion and advertising. I have never seen a group of people struggle to tell voters what they have done for them and what they want to accomplish on a consistent basis. Trump is a dolt on many things, but he is obsessively focused on his public image and consistent messaging. He’s no media genius. He just gets the medium he’s operating in and its audience. This is a guy who lived in the WWE, tabloid, reality TV, and Twitter worlds. They all intersect in many ways and his special skill set is that he understands how people process information in these spaces. He knows that with any successful messaging campaign it’s about time (how long you’re in the media spotlight) and frequency (how many times you say the same thing over and over in whatever medium you’re in). The message must always be simple. It must drive home one point over and over. That’s it. That’s the secret sauce. But Democrats like nuance, policy, details, discourse, and debate — which is why they often alienate voters who may like their ideas, but can’t understand exactly what they are saying.
Or, in the case of Kamala Harris, her problem with her campaign is that she did not stand for something. She was a loyal Biden solider who internalized Joe Biden’s “No daylight, kid” agreement they had when he dropped out and immediately endorsed her. She was to be the continuation of the Biden agenda whose policies would be identical to his. She didn’t tell her campaign staff any of this, which caused her to falter with the public, especially on the TV show The View where she said that she wouldn’t do anything different from Biden — despite the fact that her campaign prepped her to say what she would do differently as president.
When you don’t stand for anything different during a change election, more of the same isn’t a winning message. To be fair, Harris did tighten the race, which internal polling for the Dems showed an almost Reagan era wipeout for Biden. But whether it wasn’t enough runway to launch her campaign, or that a slim majority of voters were not ready to elect a woman of color as president, or that they really did want what Trump was selling will not be entirely known. What is known, is that Trump (a man for whom mercurial is a guiding principle) ran a disciplined campaign. It wasn’t him that somehow stayed on message for the duration, it was his campaign managers (Susie Wiles and Chris La Civita) who managed to keep him consistently on message. Were it not for all the death by a thousand cuts the Dems made during their four years in power at the executive level, Biden’s increasing fragility and inability to convey his successes in an articulate and believable manner, the outcome may have been different. But, as humorist Will Rodgers said, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Until the party stands for something and not against what is, they will continue to suffer losses at the polls. The Republicans, for all their shitty tactics (illegal and otherwise) don’t need to do much to help the party stay in the wilderness at this point. They are doing just fine all by themselves. However, if younger candidates see and understand where the party failed in the 2024 race, they might be able to fashion a new path that aligns with what voters want: to help them live better lives and solve problems that they elect people to solve. Allen and Parens have given us the results of their postmortem of the election. Now it’s time to move past failure and toward the kind of politics that’s practical, progressive, and delivers results.
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