While a very large number of people throughout the world are celebrating what they believe is the end of the Trump phenomenon, the fact is this president, who has been so widely reviled as freakish, corrupt, accidental, illegitimate, and a virtually total failure, has received nearly 72 million votes to remain as president, even though he fell short of Joe Biden’s total. Whatever happens, Trump has reoriented the Republican Party from country-club altruists, to which it reverted after the Reagan era, to a political organization soundly based in the lower-middle and working classes and among the principal minorities.
It is a considerable achievement that Trump has reduced poverty and generated sharp gains in the income of the lowest 20 percent of income-earners while reinforcing the capitalist credentials of the Republicans. The notion that the changes he has wrought in his party and his policies have been rejected is rubbish; they were effectively ratified in the congressional and state elections and in the huge increase that he gained in the Republican presidential vote. If Trump has really lost, it has been to a vast and fervent coalition that included virtually the entire national media, the administrative state, the financial establishment, Big Tech acting as media censors, Hollywood in all its garish and opinionated fatuity, China’s self-interested American friends, and a near unanimity of academic and ostensibly intellectual opinion, and that does not erase or even significantly diminish his achievement.
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