At 78, he's the oldest man ever elected to the presidency. US Correspondent Logan Church reports on Trump's political resurrection. Video / TVNZ
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
His late campaign slogan “Trump will fix it” is similar to Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s “Fix Auckland” slogan and comes from a country song written especially for Trump.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
“Trump will fix it!” Wayne Brown must have gasped when he saw Donald Trump’sslogan in the last days of his presidential campaign. Auckland’s mayor, the original “Mr Fix-it”, should charge royalties for that.
Until 2016, no one thought Trump had a chance in the Republican Party.
Looking around the world, there’s a good argument that Trumps can succeed wherever they are. One reason for that: senior figures in the conservative establishment get over their scruples, if they have any, and enable them.
At last count, 50.4% voted for Trump and 47.9% for Harris. In electoral terms, it was a landslide. In most other contexts, 2.5% is a small difference.
Could it happen here?
Our major sports fixtures feature celebrations with haka and Tutira Mai, not fury at players who take the knee.
But the American playbook is evident in the cynically stoked view that Māori are getting more than their “fair share”, despite almost every metric pointing to the opposite. Instead of Black Lives Matter and a war over immigration, we have Treaty issues.
We are also familiar with the “drill, baby, drill” slogan favoured by Trump and Shane Jones.
It means climate action is a nice-to-have, a low-emissions economy will hurt us and to say no to fossil fuels is to betray ordinary decent folk.
These ideas are not apolitical or objectively true. They are the ideological talking points of climate denialists on the hard right.
But while they do find purchase here, Jones’ climate denialism is not mainstream.
Trump was notably popular among young men, but he also made inroads in all demographics, including those “ordinary decent folk”. One of the most powerful concepts to have come out of Trump’s victory is that they are the key people Democrats have lost touch with.
Remember, though, that 2.5%: an awful lot of ordinary decent Americans did not vote for Trump. But this time a few million more of them did.
Why would decent people vote for the most indecent candidate imaginable? Because something else was more important to them. What is it?
“They own small businesses, earn good money, and enjoy their communities, families and lives,” he wrote last week. “They live and thrive within a certain culture that they value and want to preserve.”
The hallmarks of that culture, he said, included hard work, volunteering, belonging to local clubs, going to church and believing citizens should own guns to protect themselves.
“[They] reject being told they should change, and how they should live instead. They may enjoy Taylor Swift’s songs, Oprah Winfrey’s talk shows and Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, but there’s no way they will be told what to think and how to vote by billionaire celebrities.”
The argument feels persuasive, until you scratch it a little.
Its message is that Democrats – and by extension all political parties and movements that skew left, or centre-left, or progressive, or liberal, or woke, or whatever you want to say – are doomed to irrelevance because they want to change us from who we naturally are.
This, again, is not a neutral observation. It’s a political message from the right: a demand that progressive causes be abandoned.
Here’s the counter, from the left. Progressives don’t want to change the culture just so they can annoy people or preach to them.
They want change because, despite that culture’s many virtues, it serves men better than women and whites better than people of colour. Because it upholds many other injustices and in America props up the worst gun violence in the developed world.
Progressives don’t believe that immigrants, transgender people and the media elite have caused the hardships most people now face.
They point, instead, to an economic system that closes factories and abandons whole towns. To the floods, droughts and wildfires of climate change. To the corrosive elements of social media.
Donald Trump gained support from a lot of "ordinary decent folk" in the US election, but they weren't the only people on his side. Photo / Getty Images
The problem for the Democrats is that their message has not resonated with enough of Hooton’s decent folk. Their task now is not to abandon the cause, but to reconnect with those communities. As they say in business, to work out how to get buy-in.
It’s the same task facing Labour and the Greens here.
There’s a related issue: people are angry. Not just 50.7% of American voters, but pretty much everyone everywhere.
In my view, the Covid years broke something. Call it the sense that we’re muddling along okay. That we accept progress isn’t easy but we know we’re in this together, searching for the greater good.
Now, there’s resentment. It’s like we’ve created a social licence to be fed up with each other. It doesn’t matter what your politics are or even if you have any, because it spills out of everything.
Anger at Boomers for driving up the cost of property, anger from Boomers that everyone else is angry at them. Old jobs gone, the low-wage economy, crime, systemic education failure, systemic health failure, traffic congestion, the decline of inner-city retail, corruption and cronyism in government, the climate crisis and the belief that too much is made of climate.
The “everyday indignity”, as one commentator put it, of the rising price of food. And what looks a lot like a society-wide epidemic in mental health.
The way everything governments touch takes too long and costs too much and doesn’t always fix things anyway. Which, if you squint just a little, is starting to look like another way of saying there are no answers, and the problems are not going to be fixed.
It didn’t used to be like this. Did it? Who let this happen? There must be someone to blame.
In America, it was the Democrats, who have held the presidency for 12 of the last 16 years. Those supposed agents of social progress are the leading party of the establishment.
The truer answer is that both the major parties belong to the establishment and American voters have turned, instead, to an outsider.
Why did they vote for such an indecent human being? Because they decided, he didn’t create the mess. And, they said, don’t go telling me he isn’t fit to govern. Nor are you.
That’s the deeper reason Trump won. And, of course, it could happen here.
The disillusionment is real and all governments have contributed to it.
Dame Jacinda Ardern set targets for reducing poverty and building houses, but missed them; she called climate change her generation’s nuclear-free moment and did almost nothing about it. She promised light rail but couldn’t get a spade in the ground.
Christopher Luxon says he’ll raise productivity but hasn’t said a sensible word about how. His entire coalition has signed up to “evidence-based” policies, but from tobacco to transport their “achievements” lack evidential support.
Their approach to health funding, from building new hospitals to shoring up primary care, suggests they have no idea what to do.
Whether you think any of the policies of either side are good or bad is beside the point. The record of both invites us to think: mainstream politicians can’t fix it.
So the outsiders are moving in. Minor parties – quality by definition. National has had success with outsiders already. Key and Luxon are both “natural leader” types who made a virtue of their non-political background, even though in practice they are deeply part of the establishment.
Will Labour look at this option too?
Disillusionment doesn’t belong to demagogues. It can be harnessed by politicians of integrity and purpose just as it has been by those who deal in resentment and deceit.
But if the vacuum remains, if no one’s fixing it, a demagogue will step in.
A Trump rally in the last week of the campaign. Photo / Getty Images
And sometimes they have the most beguiling allies. “Trump will fix it” comes from a song by Camille Harris, definitely no relation, part of the “America’s patriotic singers” duo Camille and Haley.
It’s cheerful, sweet as kittens, and absolutely full of it.
“If your cat’s up in a tree, just as lonely as can be, and your dog’s hiding out, cos the news has got around, our borders opened up, definitely criminals and drugs ... Trump’ll fix it.”
It’s the music of the apocalypse, dressed up in decency. You can watch it on YouTube.
