Mencken’s vision
H.L. Mencken.
Public domain photo
When I asked a friend in the north of England what people there think of our recent election, he did not hold back.
“The chief reaction here generally is one of utter incredulity,” he wrote. “There’s a sense of bewilderment at the number of people, apart from his most rabid supporters, who could actually vote for the creature, allied to a sense of wonder at a political and legal system which could allow it to happen.”
That seems to be a familiar reaction within the United States as well — that is, among those who trusted too much that the people would not re-elect someone with as garish a personal and political history as Donald Trump.
Some have reposted on social media how the Baltimore Sun’s famously caustic columnist, H. L. Mencken, seemed to have predicted it 104 years ago, in a column savaging both major party presidential nominees in the 1920 election
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron,” he wrote.
Does that apply to the present?
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Trump is, it’s true, spectacularly and willfully ignorant of essential history, and it would be flattery to call his unscripted speeches banal, but he is too shrewd and cunning to be a moron.
Trump’s particular genius in “the little arts of popularity,” as Alexander Hamilton described demagoguery 237 years ago, is the answer to those asking how he won.
He played to the voters’ distress over legitimate grievances, such as food prices that haven’t come down as inflation eased, and the flagrant disregard at the border for our immigration laws. He also skillfully applied the lesson of American history that bigotry has often been the stock and trade of a certain class of populists like George Wallace.
For Trump, transphobia has served the same purpose. His ads declaring that “Kamala is for they-them, President Trump is for you” were devastating.
Conspiracy theories, nativism and anti-science are hardly new American phenomena. The first American third party, the Anti-Masonic Party, actually nominated a presidential candidate who carried one state, Vermont, in 1832. An anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement called the Know Nothings elected 43 members of the 1855 Congress before self-destructing over slavery. Turning inward after World War I, Congress passed blatantly bigoted immigration quotas.
Recognizing this vulnerability in the American nature, Trump won re-election simply by persuading the voters that he cared more about them than Kamala Harris did. That is the long and short of it.
There are legitimate, serious grievances. Food prices have been profiteered, but Trump’s tariffs will make them worse and add thousands of dollars to the prices of popular cars partly manufactured in China or Mexico.
“Elites” do have too much power, but the ones who abuse it are the billionaires who now control more wealth than half the population and assume they own the president-elect. Hollowed-out factories are real, not imaginary, and the gig economy has nothing to offer the workers left behind. We over-emphasize college; as David Brooks writes in The Atlantic, “Schools should prepare people to build things, not just to think things.”
Four years ago, during Trump’s first term, Condoleezza Rice, the former Republican secretary of state, expressed a warning: “We forgot,” she said, “that while globalization had tremendous macro benefits, it left a lot of people behind. They are desperate and feel disrespected. It’s not surprising, then, that a populist can come along and say, ‘Those people never had your interest at heart,’ and they believe it.”
Punitive tariffs won’t fix that. They’ll reignite inflation instead and could easily collapse the economy, much like the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 made the Great Depression significantly worse.
Puffed up by his imaginary “landslide,” Trump recognizes no guardrails. The people must look to the Congress, especially the Senate, to provide one.
When I wrote Thom Tillis to urge him to judge Trump’s nominees warily — this was before other Republicans forced the ghastly Matt Gaetz to bow out — the senator’s answer was less than reassuring.
North Carolina’s senior senator is afraid of being primaried from further right in 2026. He replied that the voters had sent “a clear message” and that he looks forward to “confirming his nominees as quickly as possible.”
Electing Trump to make everything right is like beginning a home repair with a wrecking ball.
But here it comes.
