---

Donald Trump capitalized on Kamala Harris’s various weaknesses in one of the greatest comebacks in US political history

Donald Trump’s projected victory in Pennsylvania with 95% of the state’s vote counted assures his reelection to the presidency, marking the most remarkable political comeback in American history.

Trump faced a weaponized legal system, dubious investigations of foreign influences and two assassination attempts. Written off as a resentful has-been by much of the mainstream media, Trump returned to the campaign trail as a happy warrior and triumphed in the November 5 poll.

He also faced a weak opponent beset by a perceived poor economic performance and an unpopular foreign war. Kamala Harris, the first presidential candidate in generations selected by the party elite rather than primary elections, struggled to explain why she would do better as president than she did as vice president in Joe Biden’s outgoing administration.

What pushed Donald Trump ahead of the Republican pack during the 2016 primaries was his contemptuous dismissal of “forever wars.” After US$7 trillion in expenditures and millions of disrupted lives, American voters rejected the solid wall of the foreign policy establishment and voted for peace. The only serious opposition Trump encountered in 2016 came from another antiwar candidate, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who was likewise re-elected on November 

The Ukraine war doesn’t have the weight that the Iraq and Afghanistan deployments had because no American forces are involved. Once again, Trump owned the foreign policy vote by promising to make peace as soon as he took office.

At home, Americans are hurting after the worst bout of inflation since the 1970s, and by some measures the worst since the Civil War. The Biden administration increased federal spending to record levels, racking up a deficit of nearly 7% of GDP, unprecedented during a peacetime expansion.

Considering the cost of money, inflation peaked at 18% and is still roaring at 8%. Harris owned this result and did herself no favors by evading direct questions about it from the media.

America’s cultural revolutionaries on the Left went too far, too fast in promoting radical changes in the definition of gender. Americans are tolerant people and supported gay marriage by overwhelming margins.

But hormone replacement therapy for pre-pubescent children who imagine that they were born with the wrong sex, and male transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, outraged large parts of the public. Americans oppose transgender athletes competing in women’s sports by a margin of 3 to 1.

As a campaigner, Trump deftly navigated the cross-currents among important constituencies. Widely perceived as a stronger supporter of Israel than Harris, Trump nonetheless won the endorsement of the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, the only US city with an Arab-American majority.

Hamtramck created an uproar in 2023 by excluding LGBTQ symbols on city property. Culturally conservative Muslims may care more about a liberal school system corrupting their children than about foreign policy.

The elitism of Democratic leaders proved toxic for the Harris campaign, just as it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. President Biden’s offhand remark a week before the election to the effect that Trump voters were “garbage”— a response to a slur by a Trump-supporting comedian about Puerto Rico – went viral. This hurt Harris badly, no matter how hard Biden tried to walk it back.

Hillary Clinton’s September 2016 comment to a LGTBQ fundraiser that Trump supporters were “deplorables” became a rallying cry against elitism. A similar disaster befell Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who told a private fundraiser in 2012 that 47% of the voters didn’t really matter. He meant that that percentage didn’t pay federal income tax, but it came out as a dismissal of half the electorate and helped kill his campaign.

Despite various campaign trail proclamations, Trump’s economics are altogether unclear. When Trump talks about punitive tariffs on China or Mexico, or high tariff barriers against the rest of the world, it isn’t clear whether he is articulating a negotiating position or a fixed policy proposal.

That much can be read in the published work of close Trump advisers like Peter Navarro. Trump’s campaign rhetoric portrayed tariffs as a cure-all for America’s industrial decline but it obviously isn’t that simple.

Trump has the opportunity to create a great administration. I had my turn to recommend an agenda to Trump, under the title, “Make Peace and Rebuild America.” He has had an extraordinary comeback. The next part will be even harder.

David Paul Goldman is an American economic strategist and author.

This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.