For better or worse, he knew his most devoted and faithful voters. He played directly to their worst fears: of replacement by recent immigrants and “uppity” career women. To their deepest desires: to stand atop the American social hierarchy surrounded by their guns and their portraits of Scandinavian Jesus.
He knew also that if you’re going to lie to Americans, you’ve gotta go big. If you’re going to lie, find out what they already believe about themselves, for better or worse, and tell them that.
I think at this point, the vast majority of Americans are pretty clear about who we are. The hegemony of post-World War II America has been ruptured and changed, never to return again. China rises in the East, and Russia meddles, attacking us from within with bots on social media. We are beset by anxiety and depression and unresolved grief, suspicious of our neighbors and constantly shamed by online influencers who tell us that everything we’ve been doing is wrong. We’re constantly chasing our tails, falling into bed again each night exhausted.
As a faith leader as well as a journalist and researcher, I’m struck by the truth no one dared to utter in this election cycle: that the American god of constant economic progress might be leading us all straight to hell on earth. You can see it in the popularity of tradwife accounts and constant attempts by everyone to somehow “unplug,” though it seems impossible. We have a crisis of spirituality, hastened along by a crisis of abuse, hypocrisy and grift, from faith leaders of every stripe, many of them the same who stood alongside politicians of both parties, but especially Trump, anointing political leaders as each election cycle’s new savior.
While Trump’s electorate surely had its share of voters anxious to reset the American hierarchy with white Christian men at the top again, as well as those who saw him as some kind of demigod, I think his re-election most accurately represents a desperate recoil of a nation twisting in the wind every four years, placing its bets on superficial change while knowing that the real substantive and needed change lies underneath elections, in a severing of our institutions and leaders from the corrosive influence of unbridled billionaires’ cash.
