lol - now the actual Times is imitating New York Times Pitchbot on purpose
— Will Bunch (@willbunch.bsky.social) January 19, 2025 at 6:54 AM
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But he has a point. Trump and his party did barely win the election:
In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points.... by any historical measure, it was a squeaker....And yet the GOP victory isn't being discussed that way:
Down-ballot, Republicans’ 2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression; in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.
Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement....Why? I think in part it's because the mainstream press, after 45 years of Republican ref-working, has learned to love bashing the Democrats. I also think Democratic self-hatred is deeply ingrained -- in Washington, Democrats love bashing themselves.
The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.
But Klein thinks something else is going on:
This is partially because he’s surrounded by some of America’s most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.Also:
Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”But what Klein doesn't do is ask the question in reverse: Trump seems zeitgeisty. So why did he and the GOP barely win the election?
I think Elon Musk, crypto, anti-wokeness, and a proud toxic masculinity really are zeitgeisty now. Trumnp and Trumpist podcasters and CEOs have energy and self-confidence, while liberal leaders now seem as old-fashioned as The Lawrence Welk Show did in the late 1960s. But I'm old enough to remember 1972, when some people hoped that the 1960s counterculture was so ascendant that it could elect a president. Instead, George McGovern lost 49 states.
The lesson to be learned from this is that what's zeitgeisty doesn't always reflect the views of the entire culture. Nixon was right: there was a "silent majority" that wasn't quite ready to embrace the full worldview of the '60s counterculture.
Nixon won big in 1972 and Harris lost narrowly in 2024, but that's a difference of degree. Neither zeitgest shift represented an overwhelming majority of the American public.
There's a large percentage of the country -- maybe even a silent majority -- that doesn't want crypto, that wants women as well as men to thrive outside the kitchen, that doesn't swoon over Elon Musk the way eight-year-old boys swoon over sports stars. (As I told you yesterday, half of the respondents to the latest Wall Street Journal poll think it's a bad idea for Musk to serve as a Trump adviser, while only 39% think it's a good idea. Seventy-five million Americans just voted for a female presidential candidate, the third-highest vote total for any presidential candidate in U.S. history. And as for crypto, 63% of Americans aren't confident that it's safe and reliable, according to a Pew poll conducted last February.)
No one in politics seems ready to rally the voters who reject the Trump zeitgeist, but that might not be true in a year or three years. If it's still possible for an opposition party to function in America then, candidates who reject trendy Trumpism might prevail.
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