In the aftermath of Trump’s victory in November, there has been a lot of anguished analyses by Democrats and pundits as to the reasons why Kamala Harris and the Democrats did not win. These have ranged from taking comfort in the fact that although they lost the Senate, they did not lose ground in the House of Representatives to pointing out that Trump’s margin of victory in the popular vote was not that large (about 1.5%). There have been suggestions that Harris’s loss was due to young people not voting in large enough numbers, that the Hispanic vote did not support Democrats as much as they have done in the past, to women voters not turning out in sufficient numbers to compensate for losses elsewhere. These kinds of analyses have suggested that tactical changes in the campaign, such as tailoring messages more towards the groups that dropped away, may have made the difference.

These analyses rarely tend to be definitive in their conclusions and to a large extent I have not paid too much attention to them. I have been trying to understand a more basic question.

There is no question that on objective grounds Trump is terrible both as a person and as a president. I am not going to make the case for that assertion, seeing it as self-evident. His awfulness has increased with time and yet his vote totals have also increased. What has concerned me is that Trump received over 77.2 million votes in November, more than the 74.2 million he got in 2020 and much more than the 63.0 million he got in 2016. His vote as a percentage of the total population has also gone up, from 19.3% in 2016 to 22.1% in 2020, to 22.6% in 2024. This quite extraordinary.

An argument that is often proffered is that Trump supporters are low-information voters who have been fooled by him. I am not persuaded by this. One could argue that his win in 2016 was due to this factor and was a kind of fluke, that he was then an unknown quantity that voters who wanted change were willing to take a chance on as opposed to the known and familiar Hillary Clinton, whom they saw as a continuation of politics as usual.

But he is now a very well-known quantity and what we know is not good. I think even many of his supporters know that he is an awful person, that he lies incessantly, and yet large numbers of them were willing to overlook his many faults, both personal and political, and put him back into office by even larger numbers than before. This is the proverbial elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, not so much the slight shifts in voting patterns by this or that subgroup.

Do I have a definitive answer as to why this happened? No. I have been trying without success to understand it and what I have is at best a guess.

I started with the assumption that the people who voted for Trump were not doing so because they were stupid or duped, at least not entirely. That kind of explanation is often too facile and self-serving, because it absolves one’s own side from any deep criticism. I also dismissed tactical issues like the ones described above. I think that Trump voters were consciously and deliberately voting for him because he represented something that they agreed with and wanted. But what was that something?

My vague thoughts on this became crystallized by what seems like an unrelated event and that was the widespread gleeful reaction to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson that I discussed yesterday. It. struck me as revealing a deep anger against the private profit-seeking health insurance companies that make a metaphorical killing by denying as much care as they can, thus resulting in actual deaths and suffering and even financial ruin for those at the receiving end. But I think that reaction represents more than anger at the health insurance system alone but is a more widespread and inchoate rage.

There seems to be. sense among people that the ‘system’ (not clearly defined) is against ordinary people (themselves) and that they are being cheated somehow of what is rightfully theirs. I think Trump was able to connect with these people because he was always venting his own grievances, claiming that he was the victim of the ‘deep state’ and that it was unfairly rigged against him. In his case, this was palpably false. He has been the beneficiary of privilege his entire life starting from birth and that has continued all the way to the present. All the breaks have gone his way.

But when people hear him saying that the system is rigged against them and that they are losing out as a result, that seems to have struck a chord. In macroeconomic terms, Americans are doing quite well. Unemployment is low, inflation is down, real wages are growing faster than inflation, the stock market is booming, and the per capita GDP is healthy. An average American is doing well compared to people in most other countries.

But that American is not comparing his lot with that of a peasant farmer in Sudan and being thankful for all that they have got. Especially in affluent countries, people are often subject to what I call ‘neighbor envy’ simply because the standard of living is generally high. You can see around you people who seem to have nicer houses, more luxurious cars, go on more expensive vacations, and so on, and think that the reason that you have not got those things is because somehow the system is rigged against you. So when Trump says that the system is completely broken and needs to be torn down, enough people think that he is speaking for them so they vote for him, even though the only grievances he cares about are those that affect him personally. By contrast, Harris and the Democrats seem to be speaking for those who think the system is generally fine but needs to be improved at the margins.

Of course, when Trump says that the system is rigged, he is careful not to identify accurately who exactly is doing the rigging and benefitting from it. Bernie Sanders makes the same critique that the system is rigged against ordinary people but his target is the capitalist system itself that has enabled obscene levels of wealth inequality. By contrast, Trump points the finger at government agencies and policies that seek to improve the lot of the poor and at marginalized groups such as immigrants, and at foreign countries. He does not attack the capitalist system that is what is really rigged against ordinary people and has enabled corporations and wealthy people to make huge amounts of money at the expense of everyone else. Indeed, his picks to staff his new administration, especially when it comes to those that impact the financial world, seem to consist largely of people from that same group of exploiters and you can be sure that they will dismantle all the regulations that put at least some curbs on their unbridled greed. Meanwhile, he has appointed kooks and fire-breathing rabid extremists to those positions that will deal with social issues, thus making sure that those will dominate the headlines while the real work of making the rich richer will go on behind all the scenes.

I think the public’s anger against a system that they think is rigged against them, as was manifested by the celebration of the killing of the UnitedHeathcare CEO, is justified. But they are the victims of a sleight-of-hand. Their attention will be diverted away from those policies that benefit the wealthy and harm ordinary people towards those policies that seek to roll back all of the advances in economic fairness and social justice that have been won with great difficulty over the past few decades, by being falsely persuaded that it was those policies that were keeping them back. Thus they will support the deportation of immigrants, tariffs, and scientific protections provided by the various agencies, even though none of those things will benefit them, and in fact will harm them.

Will there come a time when people will realize that they have been conned? I don’t think that will happen for some time for the simple reason that most Americans are doing quite well, at least economically, and so a slow decline won’t register for some time. It will take a serious downturn in people’s personal fortunes, perhaps caused by a recession or even a depression, to make them realize that they have been had.