Why Did President Trump Lose?
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TL;DR: It’s not necessarily all his fault, but his and our movement’s inability to explain limited government, individualism, and federalism to regular Americans in the midst of a crisis lost him the election, not voter fraud.
It’s Inauguration Day 2021. Not for President Trump but for arguably the most blasé, DC-centric politician in recent history. Former Vice President and longtime Senator Joe Biden, at age 78, is set to become the President of the United States tomorrow.
Not for lack of trying, though. A few weeks ago, the absolute worst America has to offer (incited by today’s absolutely rabid far-right media cultists) joined with a pinch of Antifa and the regular rabblerousers who care nothing for politics but love violence, stormed the Capitol in the name of President Trump. In the process of their riot, they did probably irreparable damage to the reputation of the legitimate causes like voter security, the America First movement, and President Trump’s time as President for decades to come.
So, as we establishment Republicans, mainstream conservatives, and the veteran center-right settle in for another disappointing Inauguration Day, we find ourselves marooned once again between oblivion and having to rebuild the Republican Party for the second time in four years. We were disappointed in 2016 when a political outsider trounced our ideologically diverse yet admittedly predictable field of Senators, Governors, and thought leaders. We mourned as his unconventional, unrefined rhetoric and obvious personal issues drove thousands away from our Party.
But then he won the general election! And we warmed up to him a little bit and then most of his presidency was actually fine if not great. From tax cuts to the lack of new foreign wars, from criminal justice reform to the greatest economy in American history, things weren’t as bad as the Lincoln Project and MSNBC told us they were going to be. So we tried to fit in and take the good with the bad hoping to welcome these energetic new voters to our movement. After three years of deregulation, huge Middle East peace deals, and historically low black unemployment, in January 2020 I would tell you that President Trump was winning the election in November by a landslide.
But, our generation has the distinct “honor” of participating in yet another era-defining event. 9/11, the War on Terror, the Great Recession, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. As this very real pandemic started ramping up and racking up casualties, Americans started to panic. I’m not talking about panic-buying toilet paper but rather politically.
And this is how President Trump lost the 2020 election.
It’s not necessarily all his fault, even though he did no favors for himself with the media and Washington politicians, but rather our movement’s inability to explain limited government, individualism, and federalism to regular Americans. And I know all of the arguments about widespread voter fraud. I am not contesting that there were legitimate irregularities this year with mail-in ballots. But what I’m trying to address is much easier to prove and much easier to fix. We need stronger voting systems and voter identification systems forever ago. If I can get a vaccine passport without violating my civil rights so also can I get a voter ID. Anyway.
I’m just tired of blaming the left for our failures to win hearts and minds. It is expected that the media is going to run with fear. Right media or left media, bad news is good news for both of their pocketbooks. So, regular people, with regular understandings of politics and how things work, begin looking for “leadership.” The problem is that leadership in political terms, has morphed to mean: spend money, hold press conferences, talk mean, take away liberties, and make huge, untenable promises of how you plan to solve this problem. Results matter very little. Take a look at America’s broken public education system. But the virtue of a strong promise of a response from our elected officials is sadly what people are looking for these days.
This desire for a government savior was highlighted in one of the debates when Vice President Biden claimed that President Trump was downplaying the virus early on. The truth, however, is that while he put on a strong face to downplay the virus in the media to help markets from tanking and even more Panic! at the Costco, the federal government did quite a bit and President Trump did what the American left’s hero, Dr. Anthony Fauci, asked. Companies were enlisted immediately to start making PPE, ventilators, and more. He kept Dr. Fauci on even though they obviously had some significant disagreements. Congress passed the first stimulus checks relatively quickly. (More would have come had Nancy Pelosi not smelled blood in the electoral waters for the President.) Operation Warp Speed turned out to be a great success and ended up keeping its ‘moonshot’ promises that the media downplayed and scoffed at for months. Those promises being not only a vaccine by the end of the year but millions (more than 2 million to be exact) vaccinated by Jan 1. And now, VP Biden has proposed a plan that people are calling bold and a decisive departure from the “mess” the Trump administration left them with even though the states have massively bungled the vaccination of their constituents, not the federal government… and is virtually the exact same as the President’s plan except for a national mask mandate.
So we elected Joe Biden to do basically what President Trump was doing but wearing a blue tie and to the tune of Lady Gaga instead of Ted Nugent. Great work, everyone.
I blame the loss in 2020 on our movement spending more time decrying the loss of institutions like universities and newspapers instead of actually building our own to win back the hearts and minds we have lost. We spend all of our time talking about how Hollywood, the media, and educational institutions are lost to the left but do virtually nothing to provide a sensible alternative to fill the void. We love slogans like Build the Wall, Stop the Steal, Make America Great Again, and Crazy Nancy but never actually talk about what any of it means for people who want to know.
Instead of proposing plans to help fight the pandemic like embracing voluntary mask-wearing and other mitigation tactics like social distancing, we focused on how masks are tools of the New World Order. Instead of focusing on how the federal response was actually good, we spent time focusing on how bad our Democrat Governor’s responses were with no alternative solutions. No one is saying we should be mask shaming at the local Target, but we embraced problems instead of solutions in a way that regular Americans just can’t level with in times of crisis. We let the left define our response and did nothing to expand our tent or even help prepare the massive Trump expansion of our movement’s tent during the crisis, let alone, in an election year.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful President Trump has brought in hundreds of thousands of new voters to our movement. But it is our job to help them understand how to channel their energy, digest news and information from DC, disassociate from the President a little, and find their political compass outside of what the President shares on social media. (Don’t worry, he will be back on Gab or Parler or his own network very soon.)
We did NONE of that for four long years.
Instead of hearing what we’re doing right, regular people only heard what we were doing wrong. Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, and every D-list celebrity you could think of had free reign over social media platforms and mainstream media to blame the President for not doing enough even though Dr. Fauci himself said we have helped save millions of lives up to this point with the efforts that have been done by the federal government.
I think one of our biggest publicity wins during the pandemic were things we had no control over: The blatantly hypocritical violations of the coronavirus lockdown measures by these “strongman” elected officials across the nation. The most egregious being California Governor Gavin Newsom, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the mayor of Denver, a Canadian official, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and many more. It’s not that I want distrust in public institutions, but these moments helped people understand that elected officials aren’t the heroes the media has made them out to be.
Trust in public institutions was terribly low this year. That probably didn’t help President Trump either. Lockdowns didn’t help stop the spread in places like California and New York. Nancy Pelosi did everything she could to stop a second stimulus from getting passed. The largest pharmaceutical company held their announcement of a vaccine until after Election Day. Layer all of these government failures on top of an election where states inexplicably sent ballots to all voters including inactive ones, and it stoked the fires of distrust and anger even further.
Not to mention the President’s terrible behavior online and at rallies after Election Day. There is a very strong argument that he is accountable for the loss of the two special elections in Georgia. I think Jake Tapper said it best when he said, “Ask yourself whom you heard Trump attack more in the last two months: Ossoff and Warnock? Or [Georgia Republican Governor] Kemp and Raffensberger?” It turns out when you tell people an election is fraudulent that they end up not voting.
So that brings us back to us mainstream Republicans. We are preparing for our second disappointing Inauguration Day in four years of a Democrat House, Democrat Senate, and Democrat President with a very young, very activist, Vice President who is also the first female ever to hold the position waiting in the wings.
So we look to pick up the pieces AGAIN.
I propose that we as a movement invest in institutions and educating both the public and our crop of new voters we have. During 2020, we lost a public that was looking for a strong man exceptionally quickly in the midst of this real crisis. We needed to explain WHY it was so important to allow the economy to stay open and viable while still fighting the spread of coronavirus. Without the WHY, we seemed like uncaring, money-chasing, business-first folks instead of pragmatists who wanted to keep low-income families from having to go to food banks. And that is solely the fault of Republicans and no one else. Democrats will always try to make us look bad. The media will never be friendly to market-based solutions. Celebrities will always choose the least resistant, popular message. It is incumbent upon us to fight back with solutions and answers instead of blaming our enemies.
We have a duty to invest in building public understanding in our trusted solutions. Instead of mass lockdowns, we have businesses taking the lead on protecting their patrons guided by sensible regulation, which Las Vegas’ Mayor Carolyn Goodman tried desperately to explain in April 2020 and was skewered for and then absolved by [NY Democrat Governor] Andrew Cuomo just a few months later. We must re-invigorate our education of the public on market forces, the beauty of capitalism and allowing things to flow in a regulated manner instead of trying to lock and seize up things we don’t like. Most crises and problems get WORSE when people try to lock them up instead of keeping them flowing in the right (for lack of a better term) direction.
But, I know it is not a winning message to admit there isn’t much we can do to STOP a pandemic.
People want to hear the incredible things you are going to do to save them from it. And THAT, is where Republicans need to focus for the coming years, not on repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act or pardoning the President’s political allies. All that said, I am genuinely sad that he lost and hope we will see the good parts of his movement and message be adopted and refined in our collective politics in the coming years.
In conclusion, we need to build trust that the federal government in Congress and the President, aren’t some magical heroes that can rush in to help us. Enterprising politicians will do everything they can to stop this notion that they can’t help you. Their re-election depends on you believing they did something for you. We must reignite federalism, which our Democrat friends happily learned under President Trump, and allow local and state authorities to take the lead on how to help their people. Even regional coalitions of states was a good model during the pandemic. The laboratories of democracy that each of the states are must be allowed to shine and thrive in times of trouble rather than a top-down federal response. Or else, we as a movement might find ourselves at President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Inauguration Day in 2032 wondering once again why our candidate failed to win the hearts and minds of a generation.
