OPINION: The world is bigger than your wallet
Photo via: Oleg Yunakov, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Opinion Editor Danny Murnin, a senior studying Journalism, reflects on the results of the 2024 presidential election.
As polls closed across the country on Tuesday night, there was a general consensus that Americans would once again have to wait days to find out who our next president would be. As it turns out, we didn’t have to.
Before 6 a.m. on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump was declared president-elect after winning the swing states of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also won Michigan and appears poised to win Arizona and Nevada as well at the time of publication.
It is a remarkable political comeback for a man who was a widely unpopular president, comfortably lost the 2020 Presidential Election, incited an insurrection against the government through his false claims that the election was stolen from him, got convicted of 34 felonies and survived two assassination attempts.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that he won. Vice President Kamala Harris was always going to have an uphill climb after entering the race with less than four months to go. Voters believe - by a 36-point margin - that the country is on the wrong track and President Joe Biden’s approval rating is 15 points underwater. What really did Harris in, however, was voter sentiments on the economy. Exit polls of the race made clear that the economy was at the top of voters’ minds and they weren’t happy with it, which heavily benefited Trump.
I’m disappointed in my country because I truly thought that we were better than this. I always thought Trump’s victory in 2016 was an aberration. There were some late headlines favorable to him, he lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College by a hair because Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton failed to campaign properly in three key states. This is different, however. Trump and the Republican Party now have a mandate to enact their disastrous Project 2025 agenda that will be deadly in one way or another for just about everyone.
There isn’t any aberration here. The American people voted for mass deportation, the rolling back of rights for women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, further harm to the environment, an isolationist foreign policy that will crush our global reputation and taking a dagger to public health.
Still, I don’t believe the majority of Trump voters voted for him for any of these reasons. Yes, nativism, homophobia, sexism and skepticism of basic science are all present to some degree in the ranks of ardent Trump supporters, but that isn’t why he won. Unfortunately, I actually personally wish this was why he won because the real reason he won is much scarier.
Trump will assume office in January 2025 because the American people decided that their wallets are bigger than the world. Attitudes and views among Trump supporters on issues like mass deportation, aid to Ukraine, LGBTQ+ rights, vaccines and abortion can and have been changed for the better by strong messaging and having those hard conversations, and I’m confident that can continue. But voting for a candidate you might personally find fairly distasteful because you think he will help you make more money is emblematic of a far deeper problem that has been building for years.
I’m honestly not sure that the American people as a whole are willing to do hard things that might cause inconvenience for them. This has always been an issue among citizens of every nation around the world to some degree, but it became a particular American issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. We saw it in the mass resistance to doing basic things like resisting wearing a mask indoors and refusing to take an extremely safe vaccine. These things were an inconvenience for a lot of people but they were proven to help, and because so many people simply refused to, the pandemic went on a lot longer than it needed to.
There’s a similar dynamic at play now. I know for a fact that many Trump supporters aren’t comfortable with the Republican Party’s draconian views on abortion, their hate toward immigrants and their move toward isolationism, among other things. So why aren’t those deal breakers for them?
The truth is that the economy is actually extremely strong right now and only getting better. Unemployment is very low, and gas prices and inflation have fallen sharply. But it is true that during the first half of Biden’s term, the economy wasn’t so great, and that perception has remained stuck in voters’ heads and outweighed any concerns they may have over Trump’s rhetoric or extreme policies.
Trump will have four years as president and then we will be done with him for good. The horrors that Americans have unleashed by electing him cannot yet be fully understood but they will only go as far as January 2029. In the meantime, those of us who voted for Kamala have to reconcile with the fact that most of our fellow Americans are simply just selfish. America has always been the greatest country in the world because of its people’s willingness to put their country above themselves, but the opposite happened on Tuesday.
This makes me think of an iconic quote from former President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, “ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country."
Our country is only as good as we make it. I’m not giving up hope that people on the other side will realize that the actions of who is president is not what makes this country great or less great. It is us and our actions.
