Donald Trump is returning to the White House, and while this will not change what most critics think of him, it should compel them to take a close look in the mirror. They lost this election as much as Mr. Trump won it.
This was no ordinary contest between two candidates from rival parties: The real choice before voters was between Mr. Trump and everyone else — not only the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and her party, but also Republicans like Liz Cheney, top military officers like Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. John Kelly (also a former chief of staff), outspoken members of the intelligence community and Nobel Prize-winning economists.
Framed this way, the presidential contest became an example of what’s known in economics as “creative destruction.” His opponents certainly fear that Mr. Trump will destroy American democracy itself.
To his supporters, however, a vote for Mr. Trump meant a vote to evict a failed leadership class from power and recreate the nation’s institutions under a new set of standards that would better serve American citizens.
Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. The names themselves are symbolic: In 2016 Mr. Trump ran against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election. This time, in a looser sense, he beat a coalition that included Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Those who see in Mr. Trump a profound rejection of Washington’s present conventions are correct. He is like an atheist defying the teachings of a church: The challenge he presents lies not so much in what he does but in the fact that he calls into question the beliefs on which authority rests. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable.
This may be exactly what voters want, and by allying herself with so many troubled and unpopular elites and institutions, Ms. Harris doomed herself. Do Americans think it’s healthy that generals who have overseen prolonged and ultimately disastrous wars are treated with such respect by Mr. Trump’s critics? A similar question could be asked about the officials in charge of the intelligence community.
Mr. Trump is no one’s idea of a policy wonk, but the role his voters want him to serve is arguably the opposite: that of an anti-wonk who demolishes Washington’s present notions of expertise. Mr. Trump’s victory is a punitive verdict on the authorities of all kinds who sought to stop him.
In economics, creative destruction occurs when a new competitor reveals just how ill-suited existing businesses are to satisfying consumer demand. Like market competition, democratic political competition leads to similar upheavals. If the disruption that Mr. Trump represents seems unusually drastic, that’s a sign that American politics has been insufficiently competitive for too long. Before Mr. Trump came along, power was in the hands of a political cartel, which, like the market cartels that Adam Smith had warned about, involved institutions that should have been in robust competition but were instead cooperating to exclude rival “products” or ideas. The cartel’s overpriced, shoddy goods failed to satisfy the public’s demands.
Perhaps Mr. Trump and the movement he brings to Washington will not meet them either. It’s worth remembering that most new companies that break up established market relationships do not last long — they only discover an opportunity that someone else later makes the most of.
The rise of Mr. Trump has brought an end to the stagnation that characterized the Barack Obama era, when a Democratic president pursued a vision only incrementally different — in everything from foreign policy to health care — from what experts in both parties had prescribed in the 1990s, while Republicans in Congress devoted themselves to mere obstruction until the G.O.P. could put another Bush or Mitt Romney in the White House to pursue their party’s variation on the same agenda.
Mr. Trump’s campaign coalition included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and other politicians with an anti-establishment message, as well as prominent businessmen like Elon Musk and podcasters like Joe Rogan. Mr. Trump may not be fully in tune with any of them, but there is a reason so many champions of what might be called “alternative politics” threw in with him against the mainstream. And Mr. Trump’s successes from 2016 to today — successes which include those defeats that failed to vanquish him or shatter his coalition — indicate that the “mainstream” has already lost popular legitimacy to a critical degree. The voters’ attitude surely extended to the federal and state indictments, which they dismissed as politics by other means.
Mr. Trump’s enemies are as certain as his supporters are that he could be a force for radical change. Yet both the pro- and anti-Trump camps are prone to exaggerate what this once and future president wishes to do and can accomplish. Even Franklin Roosevelt, with unlimited terms in office and an overwhelming popular mandate, found his power as president frustratingly limited. The Constitution is not weak, regardless of whether a Roosevelt or a Trump sits in the Oval Office.
If Mr. Trump and his coalition fail to create something better than what they have replaced, they will suffer the same fate they’ve inflicted on the fallen Bush, Clinton and Cheney dynasties. A new force for creative destruction will emerge, possibly on the American left.
To prevent that, Mr. Trump will have to become as successful a creator as he is a destroyer. At the start of his first administration he lost an opportunity to take advantage of the shock that Republicans and Democrats alike felt at this election. That was a moment when a positive message, rather than one of “American carnage,” could have elevated the new president above the fray of conventional politics.
Although his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election did not prevent him from winning yesterday, he would have been even stronger if he did not have the baggage of the Jan. 6 riot to drag him down. Sometimes following the rules is the best way to change the game, as the most transformative presidents of our past recognized.
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