Shattered
America is broken
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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Shattered is the best word I can come up with to describe my feelings this morning.
… Shattered that my hunch about this election was wrong; shattered that I live in a country where my fellow citizens could again elect Donald Trump, president of the United States; and shattered that one of the first questions by ten-year-old asked me this morning is whether his best friend, who is from Honduras, will now get deported.
There will be plenty of time for analysis once the final results are in, but suffice it to say this election wasn’t all that close.
Trump is on track to win all the swing states (with Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan still uncalled). He will win the popular vote and appears likely to top 50 percent. That would make him only the second Republican to hit that mark since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
What’s even more extraordinary about last night’s result is how poorly Kamala Harris did in Democratic strongholds. She is up 10 in New York (Biden won it by 23), 4 in New Jersey (Biden won by nearly 16 in 2020), 8 in Illinois (Biden in by 17). Perhaps most amazing is that she is winning Minnesota by 4. Biden won it by seven, but she is running with the state’s governor on her ticket! That Harris underperformed even though she significantly boosted her favorabilities from the time she entered is even more surprising. She has higher favorabilities than Trump … and it didn’t matter.
In fact (and I still find this hard to believe) she did not improve upon Biden’s numbers in a single county in America. Not one! Meanwhile, Trump improved by two points in 92 percent of counties that have counted more than 95 percent of the vote.
So much for my theory that Trump had a low ceiling. Or that the gender gap would save Democrats. Or that Ann Selzer cracked the code on polling this year. Harris did slightly worse with women than Biden; lost men by 8 points worse than him, and got hammered among Hispanic voters. In fact, Trump., who is a stone cold racist, arguably put together one of the most diverse political coalitions of any Republican president in modern American history. Go figure.
What’s particularly crazy about this outcome is that, aside from those inside the Trump campaign, virtually no one saw this coming. In the last few days, I spoke to so many people—Democrats and Republicans—to see if I was missing evidence of a late Trump surge. The consensus view, practically across the board, was that Harris had the late momentum and was likely to prevail. Reports from inside the Harris camp were that they had a sizable lead in their final polling and that undecideds were breaking toward her.
Their numbers were off by a significant percentage. How they got it so wrong, and the Trump people got it so right — and why this keeps happening every election — is a question that Democrats should ponder over the next few years.
I suspect that the best explanation for Trump’s victory is that in an era when incumbent parties around the world are, in the wake of the pandemic, getting crushed at the ballot box … it was America’s turn. Americans weren’t happy about inflation, they’re not happy about the economy (even though America arguably has the strongest economy in the world), and they took it out on the incumbent party. It might simply be the case that no matter who were the candidates, Democrats were going to pay a price for the the economic and social fallout from the pandemic.
Or maybe the pandemic aside, Americans simply thought the economy ran better when Trump was president and didn’t much care that he is a budding fascist.
I fear that there’s another depressing explanation for her loss … Americans don’t want a female president.
As for what this all means? It’s going to be bad … very, very bad.
How terrible it will be depends on whether Democrats take the House of Representatives. Right now, it’s too close to call. If Republicans control the House (they already won the Senate) it’s certainly possible they’ll pass a national abortion ban (though I’m skeptical). But restrictions on the abortion pill and IVF are likely. A draconian immigration bill sanctioning mass deportation and massive tax cuts for the wealthy, seem practically guaranteed. So too does further backsliding on dealing with climate change. And god help us if Trump follows through on his plan to put RFK Jr., in charge of public health.
As for Trump being held accountable for his various criminal acts? You can forget that … and it’s quite likely that Trump pardons all the people convicted for committing crimes on January 6.
Finally, and I write this having literally not slept at at all tonight, this is crushing for those of who believed that America was a good and empathetic country that would never reelect this horrible man. I’m sure I speak for many of you when I say “I feel broken.” I’m honestly not sure that American democracy can survive this calamity. It’s even more difficult to imagine how we come together as a nation. America feels hopelessly and irretrievably divided.
What I fear will make his victory so much worse is that it’s hard to imagine that liberals will continue to engage in politics the same way they have the past eight years. Trump has exhausted all of us. Democrats are quite likely retreat to their safe liberal cocoons and frankly who can blame them. If half the country wants to live in the nostalgic past, where women die in childbirth because they can’t get access to health care, and cruelty not empathy is the country’s defining impulse then let them. I’m not endorsing that view, but I’ll be honest it’s a lot more difficult caring about politics and policy outcomes than it was 24 hours ago.
I’ll have more to say about last night in the days to come but for now I need to get some sleep (please forgive any typos, I haven’t slept in 24 hours). Be strong. Hug your spouse or your children or your parents or your best friend. It’s gonna be a rough 4 years … we’ll need all the love and support we can get.
Comments are open if you want to share your feelings about last night. Commuity is more important than even right now.
This twitter post captured much of how I’m feeling right now.
Musical Interlude
A Black friend of mine remarked many years ago after Obama won the Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton: “Americans hate women so much that they voted for the Black guy!” I suspect that animosity toward women has been borne out again. It’s been further reinforced by a couple of columns I saw just today emphasising Tr*mp’s popularity among young white men and how they didn’t want to be lectured by a non-white woman, etc. These are all rationalisations, of course. The bottom line is this: 1) The male ego remains, among many, a very fragile thing, and 2) America hasn’t matured nearly as quickly as many of us hoped but apparently is doomed to remain in a permanent state of arrested development, a perpetual—and ultimately doomed—adolescent.
A rough four years? Trump said we’d never have to vote again. HE MEANT IT. Voting as we know is over. OVER.