IEarly last Wednesday morning, I was speeding down an empty highway as rain pounded the asphalt, heading to a Republican election night party in a Detroit suburb. It was one of those vision-distorting storms that blurred the lines of the road with droplets and caused streetlights to refract through the droplets that fell on the windshield. The lonely roads and treacherous weather felt like a fitting backdrop. Donald Trump was about to be declared the next president of the United States.
I walked through the double doors into a large carpeted conference hall seconds before Fox News called the race. The chatter began to die down and the crowd streamed toward the rear stage, waving large black flags that read “Build America Back Again.” A feeling of elation and relief. Mayhem and incoherence. “Lock them up! Send them back! Yes! Yes!” one woman shouted.
Trump’s second victory has been foreseeable since February 13, 2021, the day the U.S. Senate passed a resolution to acquit the disgraced former president following his second impeachment. , thereby avoiding a decision on whether to bar Trump from re-election. That possibility was made even more likely by extensive delays and the amateurish handling of various criminal prosecutions instigated to hold people accountable for various criminal acts.
However, counterfactuals alone have limitations in explaining the long Trump administration. Chaos pushes you a little further.
Early in the morning, looking around a room of men in red hats crying and hugging each other, the ideological contradictions of the growing Make America Great Again (Maga) movement were stark. A few feet away from a woman chanting the name of her Lord and Savior, a woman wearing a hijab who had previously told me that Democrats should “repent before it’s too late” said, “Arab Americans A woman was standing there wearing a red T-shirt that said, “I support Trump.” ”She was Laura Macchi, the Michigan Republican Party’s Muslim voter outreach executive who correctly predicted that the Arab-majority Detroit suburbs would swing decisively toward Mr. Trump. .
This echoes President Trump’s promise to reintroduce travel bans on several Muslim-majority countries. This is the same Trump who urges Israel to “finish the job” on the war in Gaza and blocks the resettlement of refugees from the region. “He promised to end the destruction and killing,” she said. “He’s going to end all wars.”
These high hopes are based on President Trump’s record (the National Security Council’s primary responsibility for the US chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan lies with the administration’s decisions) and the hardline conservative and pro-settlement ideologue Mike. This is in sharp contradiction to President Trump’s decision to appoint Huckabee as U.S. ambassador. Israel. But they also speak to the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures in the Middle East and the Harris campaign’s baffling decision to ignore the peace movement here in Michigan. In Michigan, he endorsed him in the Democratic primary in February, but has been largely ignored since then.
TBut Lampist confusion is found not only in contradictions, but also in adjustments. Two days before the election, I went to the weekly Republican rally in Macomb County, one of the state’s battleground counties and adjacent to the north of Detroit. This roadside “freedom rally” was a show of strength and continuity (it had been held every Sunday for four years). Hundreds of flags lined the intersection, villagers blared from large sound systems, and drummers marched frantically up and down the line as cars honked their horns in support.
I’ve lost count of how many pro-Trump rallies I’ve attended since 2016, but it’s probably over 100. Meanwhile, contempt for journalism became more widespread and more intense. In 2020, after I was witnessed hurling racist abuse at a group of young Latina women, a small group accused me of being an outside agitator intent on disrupting the event. , I vividly remember being kicked out of an informal gathering.
Later that year, at another roadside rally in Florida, Enrique Tarrio, leader of the far-right extremist group Proud Boys, threatened to turn a crowd of violent members against me for asking a question he didn’t like. did. At a rally in Pennsylvania on the Sunday before this month’s election, President Trump said he didn’t care if a gunman opened fire on the media gathered to cover his event.
Of course, most events are not physically hostile, and most participants are open and kind, but the mockery of fact-based media is always evident.
I sought out Mark Forton, chairman of the Macomb Republican Party. He stood in the warm autumn sun wearing a gray jumper with the words “American Patriots Standing Strong” written in bold letters. Like most outspoken MAGA supporters I’ve met this cycle, Mr. Forton reels off a list of predictable and demonstrable falsehoods, including that illegal aliens will vote illegally for Democrats, that crime rates will rise under the Biden administration is on the rise, and the culmination of all this is election denialism. “We know we were robbed,” he said. “Donald Trump won in 2020. Every ordinary person in Michigan knows it, except for our elected officials.”
It’s telling how little has been said about a “stolen” election since Trump’s second victory. But it is in these lies that President Trump’s chaos orchestrates itself. The same falsehoods are repeated and spewed out en masse, day after day, in a unified and powerful ecosystem of right-wing news, online content, and viral disinformation that has grown more powerful throughout this era. year. It was a “political technique” in which a large group of the people effectively voted to anoint the king, believing it would bring more freedom.
TDuring this journey, I drove thousands of miles and visited communities in six diverse states, from the borderlands of Arizona to the conservative coast of southern Louisiana to the swinging counties of Georgia and Pennsylvania. I visited. Economic insecurity was palpable in most places I’ve been, but at times it felt across ideological and political allegiances. It’s no secret that while the American economy continues to grow rapidly, wealth inequality has widened and blue-collar wages have stagnated for decades.
Harris’ campaign began with a nod to economic populism, pledging to tackle price gouging and praising her record targeting big banks in the wake of the foreclosure crisis, but quickly devolved into controversy. started to simmer down. (According to a report in The Atlantic, aides urged the campaign to stop messaging in order to win over the CEOs to their side.)
It is also surprising that, less than two weeks before the election, the vice president has announced support for only a federal minimum wage of $15 (£11.80). The policy has wide support across the country and is an issue that President Trump has repeatedly sidestepped. day. Illustrating the missed goal, voters in conservative Alaska and Missouri voted last week to implement a $15 minimum wage.
When I think about the Harris campaign’s missed opportunity to articulate even the most obvious financial hypocrisy on the other side, I am reminded of a meeting I attended in Pittsburgh last month. It was a “Get Out to Vote” event that featured appearances by prominent Harris campaign surrogates, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and an announcement by actor and singer Billy Porter. I answered the quiz and went on stage. Topics ranged from the important origins of Taylor Swift to the creator of Crayola crayons.
At the exact same time these rising Democratic stars were fawning over their celebrities, Elon Musk was 320 miles away delivering his first $1 million check to voters in the battleground state of Harrisburg. He used a small portion of his personal fortune to favor President Trump’s election by giving $1 million a day to random people who signed petitions supporting the First and Second Amendments. was. Registered Voter.
Musk, the world’s richest man, will lead a new Department of Government Efficiency as the United States looks toward a new era of oligarchy. Neither Shapiro nor Whitmer have said much about the incident since leaving the stage that night.
In the aftermath of such a shocking election, there may be a tendency to attach one’s own grievances and ideology to the explanation of why the election turned out the way it did. Having interviewed hundreds of American voters and even non-voters, I am convinced that there is no single explanation or answer.
I ended my trip in an obscure parking lot around 4 a.m. last Wednesday, as a small group of Trump supporters danced in the rain to Simon & Garfunkel’s Cecilia. It was an anti-climactic ending as the country, and the world, tilted towards an unstable future.
Oliver Laughland is the Guardian’s Southern Bureau Chief
