2024 belonged to Donald Trump. He survived multiple assassination attempts and MAGA turned him into a religious-political icon supposedly chosen by God to take back the White House. The Supreme Court declared him a de facto king who is above the law. The professional smart people and other such establishment political observers repeatedly declared that Trump’s presidential campaign was “doomed,” and that President Biden (and then Vice President Harris) would defeat him — perhaps with relative ease. Many of these same public voices also repeatedly declared that “the walls were closing in” on Trump because of his multiple criminal trials. Of course, that did not happen. On Election Day, he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The MAGA Republicans also took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. He smashed the fabled “blue wall” and increased his support among the Democratic Party’s base voters, most notably Hispanics. The Democratic Party’s leaders and consultant class are still shell-shocked by how Trump and the MAGA movement so easily ran over them.
On Monday, four years since Trump’s followers attacked the Capitol in an attempt to nullify the results of the presidential election, Trump was officially certified as the winner of the 2024 election. Kamala Harris fulfilled her ceremonial role as vice president and presided over the ceremony. The Democrats did not object or otherwise disrupt the certification of the Electoral College votes. Harris was gracious in defeat; she must have also felt humiliated. The Republicans, as is their way, behaved badly. Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., told Axios that “Seeing the attitudes of Republicans sitting across the aisle from me, smirking — this was a serious ceremony. They were acting like juveniles.”
In a new essay at Slate about Trump officially becoming the next president and the events of Jan. 6, Aymann Ismail writes, "Most people who I watched trample the Capitol must think they’ve been vindicated today, within their rights to flip the table when they didn’t get their way, destined to be remembered as heroic by history."
By the end of the nearly 30-minute session, Harris’ demeanor was hard to read. She called out the totals: 312 electoral votes for Trump, and her own 226. The Republicans in Congress cheered Trump’s win, while Democrats remained silent. I found something unsettling in their quiet acquiescence: It seemed less like a demonstration of higher principles and more like an act of submission. The political party that had helped stage and enable an insurrection didn’t learn any lessons; the one that didn’t had no real response left in the chamber.
I remain convinced that no Democrat would likely have been able to defeat Trump and his MAGA movement in this social and political moment of fake populism and global rage against the elites and the system. The chances were even more diminished because of the many tactical and strategic errors the Democrats and their surrogates and agents made during the campaign and in the years (and decades) that preceded it. Ultimately, the Democrats did not give enough people a compelling reason to vote for them, and not Donald Trump and the MAGAfied Republican Party.
Time Magazine correctly judged Donald Trump to be its 2024 Person of the Year. Here is their explanation:
For 97 years, the editors of TIME have been picking the Person of the Year: the individual who, for better or for worse, did the most to shape the world and the headlines over the past 12 months. In many years, that choice is a difficult one. In 2024, it was not.
Since he began running for President in 2015, perhaps no single individual has played a larger role in changing the course of politics and history than Trump. He shocked many by winning the White House in 2016, then led the U.S. through a chaotic term that included the first year of a pandemic as well as a period of nationwide protest, and that ended with his losing the election by 7 million votes and provoking the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The smart money wagered that we had witnessed the end of Trump.
If that moment marked Trump’s nadir, today we are witnessing his apotheosis. On the cusp of his second presidency, all of us—from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics—are living in the Age of Trump.
Sitting with TIME three weeks after the election, Trump was more subdued than when we visited him at Mar-a-Lago in March. He is happiest to be in a fight, and now that he has won, he sounded almost wistful, recognizing that he had run for office for the final time. “It’s sad in a way. It will never happen again,” Trump told us. And while he is thinking about how that chapter has ended, for Americans and for the world, it is also the beginning of a new one. Trump is once again at the center of the world, and in as strong a position as he has ever been.
Although the following observation will pain and upset the sensibilities of many people, Trump is something more: he is a great man of history. This is not a normative claim; it is an evidence-based assessment of Trump’s impact on American society and the world and its historical trajectory.
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During a conversation with me several years ago, one of Donald Trump’s biographers explained his seductive power and ability to dominate the media and politics in the following way: Trump is the main character and hero in a story that he himself is writing in real time.
I reflected on that insight as I watched Ali Abbasi's recent film “The Apprentice," which explores Donald Trump’s tutelage under the infamous political operative Roy Cohn during the 1970s and 1980s in New York. I fell asleep at some point during the film and was jarred awake when I heard someone snoring loudly. I was prepared to tell them to be quiet but then I realized I was the snoring man. I then let out a laugh as I came to the horrible realization that this is Trump’s world on the screen but we “the Americans” are all trapped in it and cannot easily escape. As David Bell presciently observed in a 2016 article in the Financial Times, “Donald Trump’s personality could assume, difficult as it is to apply these words to him, world-historical importance.”
The next four years may also belong to Donald Trump and his MAGA people and the larger antidemocracy movement. The degree to which that is true will depend on what resistance and opposition looks like and how effective it is in protecting an American democracy and civil society under assault and then revitalizing it for the future.
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