As a Christian, Here’s My Take on The Trump 2.0 ‘Apocalypse’
Welcome to the Trump 2.0 'Apocalypse'.
No, I don’t mean ‘apocalypse’ as in the end of the world (although some journalists would have you believe it’s the end of the US Democracy as we know it).
Instead, I mean ‘apocalypse’ in the biblical sense: as an ‘unveiling’, a look behind the curtain as to what’s really going on. And in this case, what a Trump 2.0 victory tells us about America.
What can we learn?
1) Money can’t buy US elections (at least not US Presidential ones)
Even though Kamala Harris spent $300 million more than Donald Trump on the election ($1.9 billion vs. $1.6 billion respectively), she lost.
It shows money can’t buy Presidential elections – other things also matter. Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the fact that money can’t buy (Presidential) elections is good news for the world’s greatest democracy.
2) Podcasts are now King – and Mainstream Media is not (at least if you want to reach the younger generation)
As the Democratic party does a post-mortem on why they lost, they'll undoubtedly see Harris's refusal to be interviewed by popular podcaster Joe Rogan as a mistake. Trump did his interview with Rogan and received 40 million views on YouTube alone in a few days.
Could Harris have done with that sort of exposure with younger undecided male voters?
3) American voters knew Trump’s dubious record – yet still voted for him.
Journalist Eli Lake sums up the conundrum:
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.
We can confidently say that the overwhelming majority of voters knew his record – you would have to live in the hills without electricity to be ignorant of Trump's record. (No, wait – the Amish also voted in droves).
And yet, Americans still voted for him.
More than that, he won by a large margin (here’s looking at you, pollsters). He won the popular vote. And in nearly every contested demographic – Hispanics, suburban women, black men – voters swung toward him in double-digit percentage points. Even in a Blue State like California, more people voted for Trump now than in 2016 or 2020.
Why?
There are two main reasons given.
The first of which is from the Democratic-friendly mainstream media:
4) Many in the Mainstream media are not only anti-Trump but anti-Trump voter.
Many in the mainstream media – and on the Democrat side – happily condemn Trump voters as bigots who voted according to their bigoted views.
Former Bush Whitehouse adviser David Frum has this to say about why people are attracted to Trump:
‘[They believe] men should count more than women…And we get safe by being domineering and bullying rather than by working in cooperation with others…a certain percentage of our fellow creatures will respond to fear of strangers…Trumpism speaks to those parts of our nature.’
Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart had this to say on PBS: “I can’t help but wonder if the American people have given up on democracy.” USA Today columnist Michael J. Stern slammed a piece that dared ask the question of where Harris went wrong: “Nope, I won’t read it. Harris ran a great campaign. The story should be titled ‘where the American people went wrong.’ ”
How, one might ask, could voters fail such a simple test? As Joy Reid from MSNBC summed it up: “One side stands for freedom while the other meets the textbook definition of fascism: namely, a far-right dictatorial regime like Hitler’s Germany or Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy. But also, white-ruled South Africa before Mandela and the black majority took control. Or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela today.”
All of those places in one, that’s America today, at least according to much of the Left-leaning mainstream media. And all thanks to Trump voters.
But is that the case, or was something different going on in this election?
5) Why did voters vote for Trump? The more convincing answer is that they disliked Harris' appeal and preferred Trump's appeal.
It’s hard to believe the view that most US voters are woman-hating, Hispanic-hating bigots – not least because large numbers of women and Hispanics voted for Trump, including never-before-seen swings toward Trump by Hispanics (Trump won 55 per cent of Hispanic men and 38 per cent of Hispanic women).
And so, instead of showing contempt for Trump voters, we do better to be curious (as passages like James 1:19 exhort us).
Marxist-libertarian commentator (yes, such people exist) Brendan O’Neill shows forth his curiosity by explaining his take on why Trump won:
‘You don’t need a PhD in political studies to understand why more than 72 million people, many of them working class, took a punt on the man Kamala Harris and her media acolytes madly branded a fascist. It’s not because they’re dumb. It’s not because they fell under the spell of Trump’s demagogic trickery. It’s not because they are “low information”, as The New Yorker magazine suggested shortly before the election.
He continues:
No, Trump did not steal these voters – the Democrats lost them. It let leak its contempt for them, and so, like all right-thinking people in toxic relationships, they packed their bags and left’.
Or, as former Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders put it:
‘It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working class people would find that working class has abandoned them.’
(If you’re still curious about why working-class people are moving from the Democrats to Trump, I recommend the article ‘I Raised $50 Million for the Democrats. This week, I voted for Trump’. I also recommend the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. It is an eye-opener).
6) There was a clash of worldviews in this election – and time will tell if the clash will get worse
There was a time when both the Left and the Right shared common assumptions about humanity and reality.
But the Left – including much of the Democratic Party – has increasingly adopted many of the assumptions and beliefs of critical Theory and queer theory: Biological Males should be able to compete in women’s sports and have access to women’s changerooms. Minors should have the right to change their sex (often without parental permission). Religious freedom and freedom of speech are problematic and a pathway to bigotry.
This means that many more conservative-leaning voters felt compelled not to vote for Kamala but for Trump.
As political scientist David T. Koyzis argues:
‘Many of the battles in the political realm are shaped, not simply by the refusal of one side or another to ‘face facts’ or ‘be reasonable,’ as one typically hears, but by differing views of reality rooted in alternative worldviews.’[1]
And we saw this clash of worldviews in this election.
And yet, if the Democrats are curious enough, they might conclude that the average Hispanic voter doesn’t care to see his high school daughter competing in sporting competitions with biological males. Or being told that they’re racist because they want a secure border.
In which case, there might be a reset of worldviews on the Left…
(For more on this, I recommend Stephen McAlpine’s latest article, ‘Yes, Trump Lies To You, But The Democrats Make You Lie To Yourself).
7) In a post-Christian world, politics becomes more complicated for Christians
Until recently, Christians in the West – including Australia - have had at least one (if not two) half-decent candidates they could vote for in good conscience. Imperfect candidates, sure, but candidates you could vote for.
And so we've come to think that's 'situation normal'. But it's not. The world is far too messy a place for always having clear-cut moral – and political – choices. Sometimes, you must choose between what seems ‘bad’ and ‘worse’.
Trump's continued appeal shows us this reality.
[1] David T. Koyzis, Political Visions And Illusions – A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), 8.
Social Media Photo: By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America - Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151886913