The writing had been on the wall for hours but the tacit admission of defeat came at 5.45am our time when one of Kamala Harris’ campaign managers Cedric Richmond told the crowds assembled at her planned victory party at Howard University that Vice President Harris would not be bothering her backside turning up to say a few words to them.
The attendance disappeared pretty sharpish leaving just a few straggles of mostly black young people, presumably students, to wander about bemusedly in front of the cameras for another while. Perhaps some of them might, if they were familiar with him – and they surely are – have reflected upon Malcolm X’s advice to their grandparents and possibly great grandparents.
“The White liberal” he warned them, “is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man.” He further advised them not to any longer allow themselves to be used by the Democrats in particular as “a political football, a political pawn, an economic football, an economic pawn, a social football, a social pawn…”
For once again, the strongest support for the Democrats came in percentage terms from the very worst and most degraded part of the cities of the United States. Places like the hellhole of South Chicago which has been run as a virtual one party state for a century.
Some of the pundits I heard as I switched around different channels were barely short of placing the blame for the defeat of Harris on those members of their client groups; young black men in some numbers it seems – but particularly Hispanic voters who had dared defy their missionary minders and broken the party ticket. This left the hapless arrogant Democrats desperately hoping that perhaps the Somalians in Milwaukee or some other newer ethnic claim might save their ass and stop the eroding of the “Blue Wall.”
It was not to be. Instead, what we were witnessing was a virtual landslide by Donald Trump, who might fittingly adopt the old Irish ballad The Man They Couldn’t Hang as his theme tune. In winning he did what no other American President with the exception of Grover Cleveland in 1892 had achieved in being re-elected having failed to hold onto the White House as an incumbent.
The full scale of the victory is at the time of my writing this personal take on a shorter night than I had expected has yet to be quantified. As of 7.37am Trump was sitting on 266 electoral college votes and needing just another 4 to reach the required 270 to be elected. The bookmakers had stopped taking bets and he was 1/100 to also win the popular vote. Something that almost no one had predicted he would.
This all before projections had been made for five of the seven swing states which pundits had been assuring us would determine the winner. He had already comfortably taken two of them in Georgia and North Carolina and was on course to win Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Many had assumed that it might have all come down to the last state, Pennsylvania, which some were predicting would not deliver a final result until late on Thursday. It has also been projected to go to Trump as I write. It was long over before that but the pundits and their hosts from Dublin to Duluth were reluctant to face the truth. Their team had taken one hell of a whupping.
Some Harris boosters – which would include almost the entire mainstream media in the US and of course in this sad place of Democrat sycophants – had forecasted she would take Iowa. That quickly was revealed to have been misplaced, to say the least. There was also the assumption that the huge turnout of young people and Hispanic persons could only aid Kamala. Not so, it would seem.
The Republicans have also taken a majority in the Senate and even the odd Republican on panels was sufficiently magnanimous to allow the Democrats the fading hope of taking a majority in the House. That too is turning into a bit of a fantasy now. To control the Senate and even Congress as a whole will be a massive boost to Trump.
What he does with it is another matter. I confess to two things; firstly, that instincts alone would indicate that given the composition and nature and intent of his enemies that Donald Trump has to be preferable. Secondly, however, he has gone down in my estimation given his equivocation on abortion in particular.
(The importance of that issue to the liberals – I won’t even deign to ascribe them as being left in any meaningful or traditional sense – was indicated by the BBC panel’s evident disappointment that a proposal to radically liberalise Florida’s abortion law was defeated. What sort of “left” party in any event is beaten on economic issues by a conservative party mostly supported by the very constituency of working people who the left has abandoned?)
For all sorts of reasons then a Trump victory is to be welcomed, I think. Whatever about the man himself Trumpism does indeed represent for the greater part something that is fundamentally better than the increasingly nihilistic and destructive world view of what is represented by the American Democratic Party, and its equivalents elsewhere. In our case, that is almost every party currently represented in Leinster House.
Trump, for the second time, has an opportunity to effect meaningful change. He did so to some extent the last time despite the challenges presented by Covid, planned anarchy in the cities, and relentless attempts to in effect bring him down during his term. If nothing else, he did deliver on overturning Roe v Wade. .
Now, with clearly good people at his back and not facing the same constraints he may do better. If he so wishes. About time too, that we began to take the right sort of lead from across the Atlantic and stop pretending that the Democrats are our friends. They are not. Let us hope that their being put into their box stateside leads also to a diminution of their influence in our own country.