Had one not gone by the pollsters and the relentless projection by the mainstream American and European media over the last year, there should not have been any surprise over Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, getting elected again to become the country’s 47th occupant of the White House.
The ferocity of the hostility of the intelligentsia in general and the media in particular towards Trump clouded the reality that elections in most parts of the world in 2024 went against the incumbent government.
By that anti-incumbency yardstick, the incumbent Democratic Party and its candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, were most likely to lose.
Let us see some of the election results this year in major democracies of the world.
Last month, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in parliamentary elections.
The opposition Labour Party defeated the governing Conservative Party in the United Kingdom in July.
Germany’s ruling Social Democrats lost provincial polls last month, which affected the coalition partner Free Democrat party. The latter quit the government and made Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government a minority one.
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For the first time in Austria’s democratic history, the populist far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) came first in the national election in October, beating the two parties that founded and long dominated Austria, the Christian conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democrats (SPÖ).
In France, there is now a minority government. In the June and July elections to the National Assembly, the ruling party lost the majority, and the far-right National Rally Party, led by Marine Le Pen, did spectacularly well.
In fact, in the subsequent elections to the European Parliament, far-right parties made notable gains. Parties with anti-immigrant agendas are having electoral success against the incumbent governments all over Europe, whether in Belgium, France, Portugal, Germany, or Finland.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s far-right Freedom Party, which opposes immigration, won the November 2023 election on a campaign that tied affordable housing to immigration restrictions.
The African National Congress party, the prominent political party in South Africa since post-apartheid elections, lost its majority for the first time in June. Its support dropped from 57 percent in 2019 to 40 percent of the vote this year.
South Korea’s opposition Democratic Party won a majority in the National Assembly in April, causing a big jolt to President Yoon Suk Yeol’s People Power Party.
Even in India, though Prime Minister Narendra Modi led his coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, to a third consecutive victory in June, his own Bharatiya Janata Party lost its majority in the Parliament for the first time in 10 years. Though Modi’s coalition government just managed to retain power, unlike his previous two terms, he is now critically dependent on two coalition partner parties for his survival.
If anything, all the above examples suggest that it is a bad time to run for re-election just about anywhere. The American intelligentsia, in general, and the leading media outlets, in particular, tended to ignore this and told us that Vice President Kamala Harris’s election was a foregone conclusion. They overlooked the global trend that voters now consider new choices to address their concerns.
As the election results indicated, the majority of Americans considered rising inflation and ever-increasing illegal immigration to be the main issues on which the Democrats had nothing new to offer, but Trump-led Republicans promised harder options to “fix” them.
It is now apparent that notwithstanding their utmost efforts, the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and NPR could not convince the Americans why they should vote for Kamala Harris instead of a “monster,” “Nazi Hitler,” and a “convicted felon” Trump.
The mainstream American media had agreed with Harris that Americans were mistaken about inflation and that nothing was wrong with immigration and border security. Incidentally, she had proposed a “pathway to citizenship” for the untold millions of illegal immigrants.
The mainstream U.S. media just failed to persuade the voters. In a way, the mainstream media was so biased and one-sided in this election that some discerning critics are right when they say the results “put a nail into their coffin.” The credibility of the American media has never been as low as it is now.
In a way, it seems the nature of the Democratic Party has also changed. Going by the results, this election showed that the Democratic Party, a liberal party that traditionally was like an umbrella, accommodating people of different hues and views, is now dominated by what critics say “ elites” from universities, affluent suburbs, and “hipster urban cores” ( upper-middle-class white young adults who gentrify urban areas), media persons and ever-expanding government workforce.
They tend to believe in “the neo-Marxism, gender extremism, and Critical Race Theory,” which ordinary Americans consider to be “ pernicious ideologies” that have, in the words of columnist Jeff Minick, “thoroughly abetted and increased racism and spoiled the relationships between men and women. Admittance to the big tent of real diversity has nothing to do with race, religion, or sex. Instead, it is the home of that old-fashioned idea of liberty and justice for all.”
Strange it may seem, but the election results in the U.S. showed that the Democratic party, hitherto considered to be a party of the common man, polled maximum votes from the areas where America’s educated and, more importantly, “richest” lived.
It was not thus surprising that the big money bankrolled Harris and her campaign. If Trump had the support of one Elon Musk, Harris had behind her the likes of Laurene Jobs (widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs), LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, George Soros, and above all, Bill Gates (Microsoft).
Along with their core supporters in the business, media, think tanks, and universities, the current leadership of the Democratic Party may be championing the left-sounding causes, but it is, as what columnist Roger Kimball calls ‘the Syndicate’ that is obsessed with power at any cost.
These “elites” and their financial backers believe that their values and interests must matter in the country. They not only demonize their opponents in every possible way but also try to harass them in any way they can.
Trump’s action or role in not facilitating a peaceful transfer of power to President Biden was undoubtedly unbecoming of him and deserved legal scrutiny, but the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration have witnessed the excessive use of America’s legal system to exact political retribution.
Democrats repeatedly used spurious and, at times, fraudulent readings of laws to get revenge on Donald Trump and those who had the temerity to publicly support him.
“Progressive” prosecutors went after Trump, hitting him with charges of fraud, election subversion, and obstruction, including 116 felony charges. All these legal cases seemed to have one political message, and that was “Trump, the enemy of the American people, must be sent to jail.”
In retrospect, if the election results are any indication, every prosecution bid generated sympathy and support for Trump from the American people. Every trial or hearing seemed to boost Trump in the polls.
As cases piled up in Washington, New York, Florida, and Georgia, the effort seemed to move more toward political acclamation than isolation for Trump. Ultimately, the “convict” Trump for the “elites” emerged as common Americans’ choice. His electoral victory implied a thorough rejection of lawfare.
While “elites” are said to have consolidated their hold over the Democratic party by taking it away from the common Americans, the old Republican party of the rich and conservatives seem to have undergone changes too.
As Trump’s victory shows, the Republican Party is now truly a “ big tent,” accommodating Blacks (especially males), Hispanics, independents, and even “old” Democrats like Elon Musk (he had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020), Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr.
In fact, the “Elites” who control and support the Democratic party today remind one of those in India whom Prime Minister Narendra Modi has termed “the Khan Market Gang.”
Relentless and blind critics of Modi, these people are also India’s foremost intellectual and bureaucratic elites for whom the Congress party, which is the principal opposition but ruled India for nearly seven decades, should the country’s eternal rulers and its ecosystem must dominate the country’s cultural, administrative and business spheres.
They also are great supporters of neo-Marxism, gender extremism, and identity politics. They are committed to making “Hitler” Modi’s governance as difficult as possible.
Seen that way, Trump, like Modi, has to withstand the wrath of America’s “Khan Market Gang” throughout his Presidency over the next four years.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
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