In the most expensive election in American history, Republicans flipped the Senate, likely tightened their grip on the House of Representatives and returned Donald Trump to the White House.
The so-called “red wave” predicted for the 2022 mid-term elections rolled in two years later, and the MAGA movement is now the dominant force in American politics.
Trump has an unprecedented mandate to reshape American life and politics, and is the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004. He intends to be an activist and transformative president. Now Americans and the rest of the world must brace for the global fallout in Ukraine, Russia, China, Israel and Iran.
According to the latest tabulations, more than 71 million of Trump’s followers stayed loyal to the MAGA movement despite his criminal convictions and indictments, hate speech and fire hose of lies.
Trump won the presidency with the help of blue-collar, middle-class voters in the vital centre of the political spectrum, and in open defiance of the political establishment and most political power brokers.
What does Trump’s comeback mean for his unique brand of nationalist authoritarianism?
Trump’s victory shows just how weak and lacklustre the centre has become in comparison to surging extremism. The silent majority that once rallied to support Ronald Reagan’s popular agenda, for example, is now a seemingly amoral majority indifferent to Trump’s felonies and his apocalyptic vision for the country.
It’s now clear that the undecided centre is smaller than ever. Voters on the left were dismayed about Kamala Harris’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel. Some planned not to vote or to vote for third-party candidates.
What’s more, Republicans have been courting working class and racialised voters for years, and their messaging is paying off. Chipping away small numbers of Black and Latino voters is adding up to real gains.
The Republican machine has grasped an essential truth: parties must redefine their centre of gravity with the shifting of the Overton window of political acceptability, which holds that the centre is not fixed forever; it is simply a gauge of the new extremes.
After a decade of the upheaval Trump has fuelled, mainstreaming extremism has become a proven formula for winning elections. The most basic question emphasised by the Trump-Harris showdown was: Can cautious centrism defeat paranoid populism?
In America in 2024, it could not.
After 1945, the centre referred to the vast number of voters who rejected communism and fascism while embracing the welfare state and full-employment capitalism.
This middle “or third way” – sought by politicians from Tony Blair to Barack Obama – won repeated elections. But today, the centre has been eclipsed by loyalty to a charismatic leader.
When the extremes cease to be red lines, reasonable parties can only intermittently eke out a win. That means extremist movements grow ever stronger. What will happen in four years is anyone’s guess. But even after Trump is gone, he will live on atop the conservative pantheon, having risen to even greater esteem among his supporters than Reagan or Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator who became a conservative standard-bearer for a generation.
The American election turned on negative voting. The only real question was whose fear would carry the day?
Democrats feared the loss of reproductive freedoms for women. Republicans feared immigration conspiracy theories such as “the great replacement” theory.
Republicans made border security a successful culture war issue, and it will unquestionably loom even larger in future elections. Gallup has shown that 55% of Americans now want immigration levels drastically reduced, a significant rise from 41% just last year.
The United States is not alone. What began as anger over Syrian refugees in Germany has metastasised into an enormous anti-immigrant backlash across Europe. Anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise in Canada too despite it being one of the most welcoming nations in terms of immigration.
Future Republican contenders will almost certainly be avowed opponents of immigration given Trump’s stunning comeback. He leveraged the issue at a time when immigrants and border security have become powerful symbols of the enormous changes brought about by globalisation.
Zygmunt Bauman, the late eminent Polish sociologist, has described the technological advancement that defines global capitalism as “liquid modernity”.
He argues that constant change rewards the wealthy and the hyper-mobile. The blue-collar middle class is not worse off in absolute terms, but they’re falling behind as the billionaire class surges ahead and governments fail to protect the traditional institutions of the welfare state.
For Trump voters, the “enemy within” was the most potent narrative for the MAGA coalition. Xenophobia was on full display during the closing days of the campaign when a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally referred to Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”.
The full force of liquid modernity continues to degrade the institutions of advanced societies and to reward rule-breakers. It’s not hyperbole to suggest this election could transform both America and the post-war liberal international order.
One primary takeaway from this election is that an even darker, more apocalyptic form of the MAGA movement has taken hold. At a recent rally, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, joined Trump on stage in a black MAGA cap, declaring: “I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark MAGA.”
In Trump’s warped view, an electoral loss would have been proof of cheating, but a win is a triumph of the will. In America today, conspiracy theories seemingly attract votes.
It’s hard to underestimate the impact of Trump’s toxicity on American civic life. With his new mandate, Trump has a green light to implement most, if not all, of his most extreme policies, from tariffs to cementing an absolutist approach to presidential power.
Trump has already promised to prosecute “to the fullest extent of the law” his political enemies. He has threatened to use American troops to round up 15 million undocumented immigrants. It is his stated intent to exercise enormous presidential privilege by pardoning the “patriots” who stormed the capital in January 2021 “on Day One”.
It is far from certain that the American constitutional order will survive intact.
Daniel Drache is Professor Emeritus, Department of Politics, York University, Canada.
Marc D Froese is Professor of Political Science and Founding Director, International Studies Program, Burman University.