Trump Is Not Magic

Tuesday’s results suggest he underperformed in 2024.

Even many of Trump’s harshest critics will argue that he has some sort of special charismatic hold on the American people. They will say he is funny, or that his career on reality television has made him good in front of the camera, or that people find his coarseness and cruelty on the stump effective. They will point to the fact that he did better in 2016, 2020, and 2024 than the GOP has done without him on the ballot, and argue that he brings something special when his name appears before voters. (Trump has made this claim himself.)

A large part of the Trump myth over the last year has centered on the 2024 election, which Trump won narrowly by about a point and a half. Pundits, however, argued that this bare victoy was something more—a massive political realignment based on Trump’s personal oomph. Trump, we were told, had had unprecedented success with the core Democratic constituencies such as the working class, the young, and (most shockingly given Trump’s racism) with non-white voters. Trump’s violent fascist populism seemed to appeal to those who should hate it most. Meanwhile, Democrats had become the party of out of touch gerontocratic elitists.

Tuesday proved all of this to be nonsense. As election analyst G. Elliott Morris explains at some length, every single demographic group on Tuesday shifted left. More, the traditional Democratic groups that Trump was supposed to have realigned shifted the most left. The young, the non-white and the working class moved towards Trump by 12 points in 2024, Morris says. But they moved back towards Democrats on Tuesday by 25 points.

There was no ideological realignment; Trump did not have a unique appeal to core Democratic constituencies. Instead, the most boring analysis looks like the right one; Trump won for the same reason out parties beat incumbents across the globe, which is to say Republicans did well in 2024 because people were angry about inflation and lingering Covid economic dislocations. Trump has (to say the least) failed to bring down prices or stabilize the economy, and now all those voters who were disenchanted with Biden are doubly disenchanted with him.

More, it seems likely that any Republican could have won in 2024, and that a more moderate and less indicted Republican might have done a good bit better. Kamela Harris and the Democrats outperformed most incumbent parties in 2024, and Harris kept swing states closer than states in which the parties did not compete. That suggests that where people heard her message and Trump’s message most loudly, they moved towards her and away from him.

This isn’t to say that Trump has no political strengths. His decades of branding as a successful businessman and fun reality television character allowed him to spout extremist rhetoric for the Republican base while still being perceived as relatively moderate by many less engaged voters. His connections with Putin and with tabloid billionaires allowed him to run a somewhat functional campaign based on dirty tricks and bullying, making up to some extent for his utter lack of discipline on the campaign trail and his shoddy campaign infrastructure. These assets were critical in allowing him to seize control of the GOP in 2016; they have helped him to continue to control it for a decade.

But do these same assets actually make him an especially competent general election candidate? After all, if Trump did worse than a generic Republican in 2024, it’s reasonable to question whether he has ever done better than a generic Republican. Hillary Clinton has long been a quite unpopular politician, and it’s always difficult for a party to win a third term—it seems likely that the 2016 election was only as close as it was because Trump was a very unpopular and flawed candidate. Similarly, in 2020, a moderately competent president could quite possibly have parleyed Covid into a rally-round-the-flag event and swept to a solid victory, instead of polarizing the country and letting victory slip away.

You can’t rerun elections; there’s no way to know for sure if Marco Rubio might have done better in 2016, or if Nikki Haley could have led Republicans 60-40 Senate last year. What we do know, though, is that Trump is, and has always been very unpopular. We know that he has not succeeded in some amazing political realignment; we have every reason to believe that his victory in 2024 was almost, or just, entirely due to factors beyond his control, and that to the extent he personally factored into the election, he hurt his party rather than helped it.

It is shameful that Americans elected this racist, fascist, nincompoop to the presidency twice. But we do not have to compound the error by convincing ourselves that he has some sort of unique, authentic rapport with Americanism, or by insisting that he is a savant when we can all see that he’s a doddering racist grandpa who doesn’t know how tariffs work. It’s time to stop treating him like he’s some sort of genius who Understands Things and start working to destroy his movement and everything—and I do mean everything— it stands for.

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