How Trump Won

What just happened? 

Donald Trump ended his first term in disgrace, hit with a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The 2022 midterm candidates he endorsed—Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Kari Lake—all went down in flames. In 2023, he was declared guilty of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil case. This past May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts for improperly reporting hush money payments. Overall, he has faced 116 indictments. Even now, the New York State attorney general is trying to punish the Trump Organization with nearly $500 million in fines, claiming that he unlawfully inflated the value of his properties. 

And yet here he is: America’s 47th president. 

How did he do it? Trump led an insurgency of oddball outsiders against an insular band of out-of-touch elites. Kamala Harris had Beyoncé, Harvard economists, The New York Times, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. Trump had Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr., Joe Rogan, and the Teamster rank and file. In a year when Americans were angry, this misfit coalition was a tribune for their rage. 

Why were Americans so angry?

The reasons were clear if you were willing to tune out cable news.

For starters, their president, Joe Biden, had misinterpreted a narrow victory in 2020 as a mandate to make sweeping policy changes to everything from the border—some 10 million people crossed over illegally during Biden’s administration—to the national debt, which is more than $35 trillion. All the while, his Democratic Party advanced outlandish and radical social policies, such as support for biological men to compete in women’s sports, taxing unrealized capital gains, and colluding with social media companies to ban alleged health misinformation. He also insisted for most of his presidency that the very real inflation consumers experienced was fleeting and not serious. 

They were mad, too, because a corporate media that carried water for the Democrats became the party’s press secretaries in the home stretch of the election. CBS edited the vice president’s word salad when it aired an interview with her on 60 Minutes. The major networks also accused Trump of calling for the execution by firing squad of Liz Cheney in the last days of the campaign, which was a gross distortion of what he said. 

And while the Democrats hammered away at Trump’s penchant for lying, voters could see that the Democrats lied too. Not least about Biden’s health. 

Meanwhile, Trump—the king of the meme—demonstrated a mastery of the political image, creating iconic visuals that defined him as a champion for half the country. Four iconic photographs help explain his improbable journey to victory on November 6, 2024. 

The first is his mug shot from August 24, 2023, taken inside an Atlanta jail. His eyebrows arch and his face tightens in a defiant scowl. For almost any other politician a mug shot is a career-ending event. For Trump it became part of his legend. His supporters began taking mug shots of their own and posting them online. With that one image, Trump turned the tables on the prosecution. To his supporters, he was not the outlaw that threatened the republic. He was the victim of a ruling party who used the legal system to knock out their most potent opponent. 

The second photo shows Trump punching the air triumphantly, ear and face bloodied, after a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania, nearly assassinated him on July 13. Like his mug shot, that picture reinforced Trump’s central message: that he could not be defeated by his haters. 

In an October 20 photo, where he donned a McDonald’s apron and served customers at a drive-through, Trump not only taunted Harris’s claim that she once worked for the fast-food chain, he conveyed his fidelity to working-class Americans. Even though he has lived his life as a billionaire, that image said he was just like the working stiffs who once voted in droves for the Democrats.

And the fourth photo? It was taken on October 30, less than a week before Election Day. Dressed in a bright orange work vest, Trump leaned out of the passenger side of a garbage truck while addressing a media scrum. He was taking advantage of a blunder by President Joe Biden, who called Trump’s supporters “garbage.” At that moment, Trump reminded his supporters that Democrats attack him because they hate you. 

Trump’s mastery of political imagery stands in sharp contrast to Vice President Kamala Harris, who kept making gaffes when she needed to demonstrate basic competence. One such howler came at a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, eight days before Election Day. As the crowd chanted “Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la!” the vice president implored her fans: “Now I want each of you to shout your own name. Do that.” The cheers stopped. Then Harris offered an awkward laugh and, like a comic having to explain a joke that didn’t land, she said, “’cause it’s about all of us.” 

In one stumble, you have a synopsis of what went wrong for the Harris-Walz ticket in 2024. Here was a friendly audience, raring to go, in a must-win state, brought to stunned silence because the candidate apparently hadn’t thought through a throwaway line at a rally. In the home stretch of the election, Harris couldn’t close the deal even as the media graded her on a curve. 

In some ways, the Democratic Party should have seen all of this coming. In the perilous four weeks between Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the selection of Harris to replace him on the ticket, a number of Democratic insiders publicly proposed an abbreviated primary campaign to avoid anointing the vice president. Harris was seen by many Democrats as a liability. At the beginning of the summer she had a 37.9 approval rating, along with a reputation for being terrible to her staff and pathetic when it came to thinking on her feet. 

A key part of her strategy was a disciplined avoidance of the media. Harris didn’t do her first solo television interview as her party’s nominee until five weeks after her selection on September 13. And until October, she largely avoided saying what she would do if she won the White House. 

That turned out to be a good strategy. Because once Harris started to open her mouth, she reverted to form. Consider her October 8 appearance on The View, when she was asked the most obvious question of a vice president serving in an unpopular administration: What would you have done differently than President Biden? Her response: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” 

Trump opened his mouth. He spouted a lot of bullshit. But he also offered positions that spoke to the concerns of Americans, on issues like immigration and inflation. 

And then there’s his get-out-the-vote campaign. Four years ago, he warned his supporters not to trust mail-in ballots, urging them to flood the polls on Election Day—a risky strategy during the Covid lockdowns. This year, his top surrogates have been hammering supporters to vote as early as possible. His campaign also entrusted its operation to Turning Point USA and more importantly, Elon Musk’s America PAC. Musk hired Phil Cox and Generra Peck, two campaign veterans who helped Ron DeSantis win the Florida governor’s mansion by a landslide in 2022. 

But, at the end of the day, the biggest sign Trump would win was that even Harris started adopting his talking points. When asked about her previous comments that Trump’s pledge to build a border wall was a “medieval vanity project,” Harris chastised Trump for not accomplishing his goal. “I want to strengthen our border,” she said at a CNN town hall last month. 

Eight years ago, Trump was called a nativist for promising to build a border wall. Now, his Democratic opponent was attacking him for not following through. Whether she knew it then or not, all of us are living in Donald Trump’s world now. 

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Read his latest piece on Donald Trump: “The Art of the Bullshitter.”

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