Happy Hangover Reflections On Trump's Win

The writer is in Australia.

People of class and good breeding learn early on that gloating is unseemly and unbecoming. I suppose that makes me unseemly. And unbecoming. Because nothing was better than staying home Wednesday to watch the U.S. election returns. Yep, watching them call the election for Trump. Then for the first time in four or so years actually tuning into ‘our’ ABC national broadcaster to revel in the angst and incredulity of this monolithic, Lefty institution – thereby almost making worthwhile the taxes I am forced to pay to support this incestuous, “we cover the whole gamut of opinions from A almost to B, Greens almost to Labour” outfit. Then turning off the TV and going out with pro-Trump friends for wines and a few finishing glasses of Scotch. And then waking up this morning, slightly sore-headed, but “unburdened by what has been”. The grass seemed greener. The air cleaner. I was able to take subtle joy from the various Aussie celebrities who had uniformly come out to support Kamala and were now melting down. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.” Okay, I’m not young. But bliss more or less captures how I’m feeling.

I say I’m going to gloat because readers of the Spectator Australia will know that I have been predicting for near on two years, in print and very publicly, that Donald Trump was going to win this election and that it could be a landslide. No equivocating. No backsliding. I also have predicted for the last two months that it would be the trifecta – Presidency, Senate and House. So let me apologise right away for not seeing that it would in fact be the quadfecta (is that a word?) – Trump would also win the popular vote. I didn’t think that was possible. Oh ye of little faith!

Want to know how unusual this Trump win is? For a Republican, Trump’s Electoral College landslide is the biggest since Reagan in 1984. His popular vote win is the first for a Republican candidate since 2004 and the after-effects of 9/11. Trump’s coattails look to be delivering a Republican Senate of at least 53 but possibly up to 55 Senators. (If the last of those comes to pass it would be the most Republicans in the Senate since 1928.) Trump will also be much better off than in 2016. You see he has almost single-handedly reshaped the Republican party. The chamber-of-commerce, open-borders types (who did much to block the funding of his wall) are near-on gone from the party. Almost as gone are the Neo-Con pro-war types. Many people still just assume that the Republicans are the party of the rich. Not so. Democrats are. In this election they outspent the Republicans nearly three to one and it came from big donations much more than Trump’s campaign chest. Think back to our Voice referendum or Brexit in the U.K. and you’ll spot the similarities because Trump was massively outspent. Harris had the legacy media overwhelmingly in her corner. (Some studies showed she was getting virtually 100% positive coverage on the three main free-to-air networks and on CNN and MSNBC, though not Fox of course. The same studies showed Trump getting over 90% negative coverage.) Media aside, Kamala also had basically all of Hollywood lined up to endorse her. Big Tech was on side save for the remarkable Elon Musk. (Isn’t it an odd world where we have had to rely on a renegade, non-conformist billionaire to do the most to protect free speech – not least by being willing to overpay for Twitter and then, after firing 75% of employees with no discernible impact on operations, make it a vehicle that does not bow down before censorious government? If you support free speech you really owe Musk a debt of gratitude.) Who else? Well, the corporate world and its chequebooks clearly supported Harris. Be clear, rich people as a generalisation now vote Left. Hillary Clinton took virtually all of the hundred wealthiest counties. Boris did not win the rich constituencies in 2019. Trump won in the poor and working-class parts of the U.S., not in the über wealthy or even just wealthy parts of town. Well-off, rich whites voted for Kamala, not Trump. So the entire establishment and its media minions were all on one side, with three times more money to spend, and Trump beat them all.

Be clear. This is the greatest U.S. political comeback ever. Maybe you can put Andrew Jackson in the same league. Grover Cleveland and Richard Nixon if you want to stretch things even more. But Trump was hit with the Russia collusion scam. He was impeached twice for nothing. They tried to bankrupt him and put him in jail. Four dozen odd intelligence agents (past and present) signed a letter just before the 2020 election saying that the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the hallmarks of Russian collusion”. They did that knowing that claim was false and the laptop real. In fact, the FBI had known since 2019 that it was real and that the data on it, that compromised Hunter and his dad, were real too. Then there was the lawfare. The changing the law to allow a New York civil suit against him that had long passed the statute of limitations and then to impose an unheard of, massive amount of damages. The four criminal charges, two at the state level and two federal, were worse. The New York one on which he was convicted, the so-called ‘hush money’ or non-disclosure case, was a flat out disgrace and amounted to a patent targeting of a political opponent, Third World style. You bring in the third highest Department of Justice lawyer to work for a city District Attorney. You have the NY DA, Alvin Bragg, turn a Mickey Mouse misdemeanour into an indictable offence. (And Bragg till then had only ever done the opposite, turned indictable offences into misdemeanours, in his attempts to go as softly on crime as you’d expect of any good George Soros-funded District Attorney.) To transmogrify a misdemeanour into an indictable offence you need to point some indictable offence. Bragg opted for federal campaign finance laws. But the Biden Department of Justice had laughed the idea of such charges out of court and not brought them. And so what was a New York DA doing invoking such charges in his wholly novel legal theory that attempted to make what Trump had done – i.e., pay a woman to keep quiet about past sexual liaisons in a way that three-quarters of Hollywood and many, many rich men have done – into something indictable and supposedly serious? Then you bring the charge in Manhattan, a place that votes Democrat nine to one. You find a judge who won’t recuse himself though his daughter was a big fundraiser for the Dems – and he’d contributed modest amounts to the Dems as well. It was stitch up all the way up. And the other three cases were no better. Sure, you can call someone a felon if you are prepared to weaponise the justice system against your main political opponent. But that reeks of tinpot Third World regimes.

Anyway, Trump overcame that. He overcame attempts to take him off the ballot. There were two assassination attempts on his life, in part due to Harris, many other Democrats and a big chunk of the legacy media all describing him as a “fascist”, as “Hitler”, as a “Nazi”. (Enjoyable sidenote: after Wednesday’s win by Trump someone posted the joke meme that “Over 40% of U.S. Jews just voted for Hitler”.) Let me be clear. This was the most remarkable political comeback in U.S. history. Perhaps in the entire Anglosphere’s history.

Let me finish by pointing out the fact of supposedly conservative politicians and ex-politicians (all ‘wets’) from around the Anglosphere who went public before the election to support Kamala. They embarrassed themselves. Australia’s own George Brandis wrote one of the most embarrassing columns of the lot in the Sydney Morning Herald. He hinted that Trump might be a fascist, but was certainly a demagogue. This showed no understanding of what a fascist actually is. And as for demagoguery, recall that during Covid Trump had the perfect chance to centralise all decision-making to himself. And yet more than Trudeau in Canada and more than Morrison here (and in the de facto sort of federation in Britain, more than Boris there) he left all calls to the states. Not much of a fascist or demagogue then, was he? Worse, this is the Brandis who played a pivotal role in bringing down Tony Abbott. This is the Brandis who has appointed the worst High Court judges of any Liberal (i.e., centre-Right) Attorney General ever. (I won’t talk about the recent judgment that is activism on steroids and will make it near impossible to deal with some pretty dangerous types, brought to you by a majority Coalition-appointed top court.) This is the Brandis who overlooks everything the Democrats have done in the way of lawfare, bogus Russian collusion charges, trying to jail and bankrupt their main opponent and resorting to ridiculous name-calling just so he can do some name calling of his own. Or look at William Hague in Britain. Former Conservative Party leader. He writes a virtue-signalling column saying Harris just has to win. It oozed self-righteousness and a willingness to prefer the most Left-wing socialist, open borders proponent, identity politics pushing, big spending, big government candidate in U.S. history. Over a man with Trump’s first term record.

I don’t want to vote for a party with people like Brandis and Hague in it. Trump’s most enduring achievement is to have removed these types from today’s Republican party. That’s what these types really don’t like.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.