The Ugly American Wins: Reflections on the 2024 US Election

Last night was 2016 all over again. The shock and disbelief that a man so venal, so corrupt, so coarse could be elected president.

I woke with pain in my abdomen. Like a fist squeezing my stomach. I recognize the symptom. It was frequent and nearly constant four years ago. The tension, anger, anxiety  - what insanity will he visit on us today? Bleach as a remedy for covid? Slowing covid testing because that would document more cases? Exposing his secret service detail to covid by demanding they take him from the hospital, when he still had the disease, for a ride around so he could wave at his “fans”? 

And I remember the blessed relief when he was defeated at the polls, when I thought, at last this nightmare will end. Only for it to recur one last time, on January 6th 2021, like a mighty tsunami before the sea calms.

Last night was 2016 all over again. The shock and disbelief that a man so venal, so corrupt, so coarse could be elected president.

The recriminations began before all the results were in. News media began picking apart the campaign of a woman who had just three months to introduce herself to a public who had rarely seen or noticed her during her stint as vice president, and convince them to vote for her.

On twitter, (I refuse to call it “x”), a well-known black journalist, noting the Latino vote for Trump, announced that blacks had done their job. This was on Latinos. Followers leapt on his tweet. “Let them be deported! They’re the ones who voted for him!” Others suggested that if it were true that Arab Americans in Michigan tipped the vote against Harris there, they no longer cared what happened to Gaza.

A prominent advocate for Palestinians and Gazans relished bitter revenge. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris deserved every bit of what they got in this election for enabling the genocide, he said. Someone pointed out that a Trump presidency wouldn’t improve the situation for Gazans. He didn’t care. Harris and the Democrats would suffer. That’s what mattered now.

I deactivated my twitter and logged out of Facebook. The anger and divisiveness would only get worse. But I understand it. I feel similarly. Earlier I texted friends and relatives to say I have ZERO respect for anyone who voted for him. ZERO.

This is beyond policy differences. He’s a 34 times convicted felon, an adjudicated sex offender, a fomenter of violence and hate, who incited an attack on the capitol and riled up his followers against his vice president Mike Pence in his quest to hold onto power. More recently he repeated lies about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, despite knowing his words had instigated bomb threats.

When president, he ran the country like his own personal fiefdom; for example, withholding disaster aid for California fires until staffers showed him that citizens in that part of California had voted for him; and allowing his son-in-law Jared Kushner to withhold or restrict covid supplies for cities in blue states claiming that the national stockpile was “ours;” not something to which states were entitled.

He has dragged our public discourse into the gutter with constant name-calling and lewd behavior. At a recent rallies he called Rep Adam Schiff “pencil neck” and “watermelon head,” made fun of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s weight, mouthed “bitch” in reference to Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, repeatedly called VP Harris “stupid,” and reposted a meme on social media suggesting she had traded sexual favors for career advancement. At recent rallies he talked about Arnold Palmer’s manhood and simulated oral sex with a microphone.

So, yeah, if you voted for him, don’t come near me.

We turned off the television and went to bed once the writing was on the wall, before all the results were in. We talked quietly. Should we consider looking for part-time work? Currently, our retirement income is sufficient, but Social Security is a significant proportion of it. If it is gutted, as outlined in Project 2025, we’ll need the money. Plus, Elon Musk has proposed cutting $2 trillion from the budget and warned that things would be tough for awhile. Not for him and the other plutocrats, mind you. For people like you and me. Maybe we should cancel that winter trip we are planning and save our money instead?

A 70-year old friend texts me, bewildered and heart-broken. “I don’t understand anything anymore.” She was recovering from a hospital stay, but wore herself out anyway, door-knocking in small-town Wisconsin. So many people worked so hard.

A woman in Kansas angrily texts me. “They never should have run a woman! And she shouldn’t have talked about abortion all the time. People don’t like that.” I mention this in a women’s Signal group. One woman responds: “So Kansas has their abortion rights; they don’t care about the rest of us?!” Referring to Kansans having successfully protected abortion rights in their state.

But the fault lines are not so clear cut. The Kansas woman voted for Harris, despite her own opposition to abortion, and advocated others do so as well. She paid a price for it in her conservative community. Similar to Kansans, Missourians this election voted to restore abortion rights in their state, as well as an increase in the minimum wage and paid sick leave – but also for a president and senator who oppose those things.

I have long despaired of the fragmented political analysis of so many Americans; the inability to connect the dots, to see how different issues are related to one another. While both political parties are corporate entities, and committed to the American imperial project, the Democrats have supported a degree of responsibility to the community – Social Security, Medicare, collective bargaining rights, unions, public funding for public goods like roads and schools – as well as a commitment to equality for all demographic groups.

The Republicans edge ever closer to their goal of unfettered capitalism, a dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest economy; an individualist ethos that concentrates ever greater wealth into the hands of those powerful and greedy enough to grab it.

Patriarchy is part of the mix. You can’t have abortion rights and put into power the party that has spent decades chipping away at them; that installed right wing justices to finish the job. They’re coming for birth control next. Project 2025 calls for renaming the Department of Health the “Department of Life” and having Title X, the federal family planning program, promote “fertility awareness and holistic family planning.”

I’ll be interested to see, once this all shakes out, what role getting out the right wing male vote played in this disaster. Certainly many men did not want to vote for a woman. The firefighters union pointedly endorsed Donald Trump – despite his anti-union, anti-worker history. On twitter some attributed this to racism. No, I countered, it’s sexism. The firefighters endorsed Barack Obama; they declined to endorse both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. The Teamsters also declined to endorse Harris, though many of their locals broke rank to do so.

When it became apparent that women were outpacing men in early voting by roughly 10 percentage points, right wing male activists, such as Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, and Elon Musk, began urging men to get out the vote. Both Trump and JD Vance did three hour podcasts with Joe Rogan, who has the largest audience of any podcast in the world. Afterwards, Rogan endorsed Trump. Harris offered an hour-long interview, but he had to come to her. Rogan held fast to his requirement of a three-hour commitment in his Austin studio.

“Dr” Phil McGraw claims he spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and endorsed Trump because Harris had “snubbed” him. He later retracted his endorsement. Did Rogan similarly endorse Trump because a woman would not be brought to heel? Or would the dude bros have refused to support a woman anyway?

I feel grief-stricken. Something has died. Perhaps for the best. My idealism has always done me in. I always somehow, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, believe that most people are innately decent, that once most people see the facts of a situation, they will make the honorable choice. 

We can talk about different demographics voting different ways for different reasons, pick apart the Harris campaign while giving Trump’s egregious behavior a pass because, what else can you expect of him? Analyze the effect of right wing media - which certainly has played a role since its inception with right wing Christian radio decades ago. Voters are walled off in their separate information silos, operating from different sets of “facts.”

In the end, however, we must face the truth that many people like a strongman, a bully, an authoritarian; and respond to appeals to the worst in human nature. When, after decades of deeply polarized politics, a candidate offers a positive message of coming together, of calling for the end of belittling others, offers an outstretched hand to sit down with those that disagree with her, and it is soundly rejected by voters, we have to recognize sickness in our society. What are we going to do about it?