22 Thoughts About Trump’s Win

Reflecting on the election and looking forward to what may come

Donald Trump speaks during a Get Out the Vote Rally in March in Richmond, Virginia | Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

I’m Isaac Saul, and I’m the executive editor at Tangle where I write an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.” For more political analysis like this, subscribe to Tangle here!

Former President Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States, with all major news outlets calling the race in his favor as of Wednesday morning. Trump is poised for a sweep of all seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and holds a 51%–47.5% lead in the popular vote with a large percentage of the vote in West Coast states still to be reported.

Trump appears likely to surpass his performance in the 2016 election when he won 306 Electoral College votes but lost the popular vote by roughly 2%. He is also on track to flip every swing state President Joe Biden won in 2020. In a victory speech at 2:30 am ET on Wednesday morning, Trump declared that his return to the White House would usher in a “golden age of America.”

Vice President Kamala Harris was set to address her supporters late Tuesday night from Howard University, her alma mater, but postponed her speech in the wake of mounting results as the night progressed. Harris conceded the race at 4:00pm ET the following Wednesday.

22 Thoughts

1. In 2016, Trump lost Starr County in South Texas (a 96% Latino county) by 60 points. In 2024, he won it by 16 points. That’s a 76-point swing. His numbers improved dramatically in Hispanic-majority towns in Pennsylvania. He came closer to winning New York than Harris did to winning Florida. According to exit polls, Harris won the Latino vote by just 8 points after Biden won that demographic by 32. Harris won 18 to 29-year-olds by just 13 points after Biden won them by 24. Trump’s support among black voters skyrocketed, doubling in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, Trump was +7 among voters concerned about the state of democracy. These results have totally obliterated so many lenses liberals were using to view this election through.
2. The Democratic Party has no scapegoat this time around — no Comey letter, no Russian disinformation plot, no Jill Stein, and probably not even the Electoral College (Trump looks like he’ll win the popular vote, too). They lost by wider margins than people expected in every single battleground state and won with less room to spare in blue ones. They are going to have to reckon with that between now and the next election cycle — and the party will have to have some very real and very tough conversations.
3. I’m unsure who Democrats are going to fault for their loss. Yes, the uncommitted vote kept its word, and Harris lost all the predominantly Muslim towns in Michigan. But the margins far surpassed what could be explained by any one protest-vote movement. Yes, Harris did worse with non-college white voters, but she also lost support with black voters, Hispanic voters, and even women. The party will blame the left. The left will blame the center. It will be a total mess of finger-pointing with no clear resolution or answer.
4. Trump has made a lot of promises: Mass deportations, historic wage growth, the end of the war in Gaza, the end of the war in Ukraine, no taxes on tips, no taxes on social security income, replacing Obamacare, expanding the child tax credit, and cutting federal funding for schools with critical race theory or trans-friendly curriculum — he has literally promised to “fix everything.” One of his mottos is “promises made, promises kept.” As with the border wall, these are largely promises we’ll be able to measure in pretty definitive terms. He’s thrown a lot out there to try to win over voters and now will have to fulfill a lot of promises he made to a lot of different people.
5. Trump has also promised to not do a lot of things: No abortion bans, no federal limits on IVF or birth control, no new wars, no Project 2025 agenda, no Social Security cuts, no Medicare cuts, no expanded taxes, no inflation. We’ll be able to assess those promises definitively, too.
6. Here are my biggest concerns about a second Trump presidency: He’s vindictive, aging, and unbound by any need to get re-elected. He’s easily consumed by grievance and his campaign is staffed with charlatans — and if he’s surrounded by yes men affirming his worst instincts, we could be in for some very scary times. I think some of his stated economic policies (like across-the-board tariffs) would be catastrophic for the economy, and if he attempts a mass deportation, I think we’ll see civil disobedience and violence unlike anything we saw during his first term. His brand of politics invites people to relish in the misery of others, a kind of “own the libs” and “destroy the enemy” mentality that I think is going to bring us four more years of increasingly awful divisions — and an especially bad environment for trans people or immigrants, who became the focus of his campaign’s ire. This all creates an especially dangerous social environment.
7. I’m more worried about extremism among Republicans at the state level, where radical policies are easier to advance than at the federal level with Trump. Several Republican-led states across the country have passed dangerous restrictions on abortion that have made it harder for doctors to provide adequate care to women, and other states have been pushing censorious book bans up until very recently. These kinds of infringements on freedom — of women and families to make difficult personal decisions and for what content individuals can access in libraries — concern me much more than the vast majority of Trump’s policy proposals.
8. Here’s what I’m not concerned about in a second Trump presidency: I’m not worried about democracy collapsing or Trump attempting to stay in office beyond his term or creating some kind of fascist state. We will have elections in 2026 and 2028, and they will probably be just like the one we just had — free and fair, competitive races where voters turn out and demand change from incumbents. I suspect Democrats will take back the House in 2026 (if they don’t win it back this year). Trump has reshaped the political alignment in the country, but he is not eternal, and I don’t even think other politicians can replicate his political movement. I’m not worried about us getting into a massive global war with powers like China or Iran, and I’m not worried about some kind of civil war here. I think we are in for a few months of instability before Democrats start strategizing about how to work with the Trump administration.
9. Here’s what I’m hopeful about: Trump will inherit a strong, growing economy, like he inherited a similarly stable economy in 2016. Before Covid, he managed that economy well, and we saw record wage growth and record low unemployment. That improved the lives of Americans from all walks of life. We are also well positioned for (and in need of) austerity and a reduction of government waste, which Trump has pledged to focus on. During his first term, his unpredictability resulted in relative stability in the Middle East, which we are also in desperate need of in 2025. He’s consistently shown a willingness to buck his own party if he senses a majority of Americans support a position, which means he should be receptive to the feedback loop coming from the country while he’s in office. All of this gives me hope for a successful second term
10. Let’s not start rewriting history: Harris did much better than Biden would have (or could have) done. Her performance mirrors what we are seeing globally, with incumbent leaders struggling mightily in the post-pandemic world. This isn’t all that complicated. Inflation skyrocketed, masses of people have migrated, and we’re living through major global disruptions in the Middle East and Europe. In the most basic sense, it is an incredibly difficult environment for whatever political party that is holding power to win in.
11. If you’re looking for an illustration of how hard it is to be the incumbent party right now, consider this: Compared to Biden in 2020, Harris lost support from both men and women, both Arab-American and Jewish voters, both Republican and Democratic voters, both white and non-white voters, and both college-educated and non-college-educated voters.
12. One reason Trump may have won in such a dominant fashion is that — on issues like abortion or working-class appeal that Republicans do worse on — he is the most liberal. I do not think Trump is a “pro-life” president, I don’t even think he is particularly conservative. That is what is so interesting about what he has done to the Republican Party: He’s an ultra-rich former Democrat from New York City, a moderate on abortion, a hardliner on immigration, and an anti-globalism populist. If you were to chart all of Trump’s genuine views on a Venn diagram with traditional Republican and Democratic views, I think he’d overlap nearly as much with Democrats as with Republicans. So, Democrats are now forced to rebuild, but are they going to pick some Trumpist positions to build from? Will Republicans leave some behind? It is an odd dynamic.
13. Speaking of odd dynamics: What’s going to happen over the next few months? An incumbent president is sharing the White House with a vice president who replaced him on the ticket against his wishes, and then lost. The president-elect (Trump) is returning to the White House to serve a non-consecutive second term, taking the White House back from the same person he lost it to (Biden). And, of course, Biden will now have to oversee the peaceful transfer of power to Trump after Trump refused to do the same after the 2020 election. Oh, and Vice President Kamala Harris will have to preside over the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2025, to certify Trump’s election victory.
14. In December of 2021, I predicted that Kamala Harris would not hold any political office in 2025. I can bank that prediction now. Indeed, I’m entirely unsure where she actually goes from here. It is genuinely hard to imagine her running for any office — and her career in politics might literally be over. I made that prediction in 2021 because Harris has always been a pretty underwhelming politician on the national stage, and I think the electorate sent a very clear signal last night that our country is not interested in seeing her as president.
15. Some free advice for Democrats: Maybe telling people the economy is great when prices are skyrocketing is not a great way to message on the issue. Maybe signaling to white men (a massive share of the voting population) that their very existence is inherently racist, sexist, or somehow in need of correction is not a good idea. Maybe trotting out Liz Cheney, the daughter of the architect of the U.S.’s prolonged Middle East presence, and Bill Clinton, the architect of NAFTA, as surrogates for your party is disastrously silly. Maybe not holding legitimate, open, and fair primary elections is still a bad strategy for picking your presidential candidate. Maybe decent chunks of this country are perfectly willing to accept high levels of immigration but refuse to accept a disorganized, chaotic system that provides no resistance for millions of people to enter the country illegally or through a broken asylum process.
16. Some free advice for Republicans: Political fortunes change quickly in our country, and the biggest changes often come in the wake of unbridled over-confidence.
17. Think of Bernie Sanders today. He did his best to warn the party that this wave of populist sentiment was coming. In my opinion, he had the absolute best countervailing message to the rising wave of conservative populism in 2016, but he was ridiculed and boxed out by the establishment — and in the eight years since he’s been trying desperately to wake Democrats up to the realization that Trumpism is here to stay, and that Democrats don’t have a good alternative vision. He was and is correct, and while Democrats are struggling in races across the country, he won last night by 31 points. I think a simple read on last night is not so much about any particular Democratic failures, but that voters just like a lot of what Trump is selling. Democrats might do well to pursue a Bernie-esque brand for the party going forward.
18. It’s funny how massive election fraud and “cheating in Philadelphia” just magically disappeared around 10:00pm ET last night, isn’t it? I guess Democrats just forgot to “rig” this one.
19. For all the talk of how strong the Democrats’ ground game is, Trump has once again sent a shockwave to the communications system. Democrats spent way more money and focused heavily on TV ads and well organized get-out-the-vote campaigns. Trump hit every podcast and media opportunity he could while employing a bunch of political novices in his get-out-the vote campaign. And Trump cleaned Harris’s clock. The new media is here, and the new dynamics of these campaigns are live.
20. 2028 is going to be fascinating. Trump’s party will be the incumbent with an electorate always desiring change, but they won’t have Trump. Democrats will have a new bench of leaders vying for a spot in the White House, and won’t have Trump to run against (maybe JD Vance instead?). It’s really, truly hard to imagine what will happen.
21. Three of our final newsletters about the election have now become basically meaningless footnotes: The Iowa poll was a massive miss. The “Puerto Rico is garbage” story was a total nothingburger. The Arab-American protest vote in Michigan happened, but it’s now clear that Harris was going to lose Michigan regardless. Here are a few other narratives that are now dead: JD Vance being a bad running mate, Tim Walz being a good one (Trump ate into Democrats’ lead in Minnesota), Republicans were “flooding the zone with garbage polls,” and pollsters correcting for past misses.
22. Many Americans are feeling scared and furious today. Many are elated and relieved. This election will impact some people more than others (both emotionally and practically), and we’ll all be better off if we conduct ourselves with humility and give each other some grace.

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