Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024.
On the last day of vamping about opinions before the election became a fact, in a roundtable discussion among New York Times pundits, the respectable conservative David Brooks tried to turn to history to understand what might be coming. "Mostly I just worry about Trump's general incompetence," Brooks wrote. "We got lucky during his term, because there were no existential or complicated threats, until the pandemic."
Brooks wasn't trying to be a Trumper. He built his career on Ronald Reagan's promise that America would be a Shining City on a Hill, only now to witness a Republican campaign declaring that America was the "garbage can for the world." Still, despite what he took to be his best intentions, he was delivering the essence of the message that carried the MAGA movement to victory in 2024: There were no existential or complicated threats, until the pandemic.
The story wasn't true even on its own terms—the ice caps were melting in the years 2017 through 2019, strife and chaos radiated out of the White House daily, mass murder was rampant, American life expectancy was shortening—but also on the far side of that "until" were more than a million dead people, people dying on waiting-room floors, dead bodies stacked in freezer trucks and shoveled into mass graves. One amazing fact about the 2024 presidential campaign was that not even once, as the political media earnestly pressed Kamala Harris about whether she was sincere in supporting Pennsylvania's fracking industry, did anyone ask Donald Trump what he would do if, as president in 2025, he were to learn about an outbreak of some new and deadly disease.
But the Biden administration and the press long ago established a consensus that there is nothing more that can be done about COVID, and that somehow got projected backward to the beginning of 2020, so that the most lethal and catastrophic failure of the Trump administration was erased from the record. There was never anything that could have been done about COVID; the fact that the president did nothing when the virus arrived, then spent weeks denying and downplaying the severity of what was happening, became a matter of simple misfortune, ruining an otherwise successful presidency.
With that, three years of corrupt flailing and one year of bottomless horror were transmuted, in the opinion polling, into that ineffable lost era of American greatness that Trump had been promising to bring back all along. A majority of the voting public replaced their own memories of what life had been like four and five and six years ago with a retrospective fantasy of easy times under the confident, patriotic, deal-making president. Meanwhile every newscast—not just the partisan Fox and Sinclair empires, but straight-down-the-middle CNN and regular radio—filled living rooms and waiting rooms and Ubers with the endless refrain that regular Americans were being crucified by inflation under Joe Biden, that daily life was miserable and getting worse, that crime and migration were uncontrolled crises.
It was futile to say all of this was bullshit—the bounceback inflation went hand-in-hand with the strongest sustained employment in generations, crime was down, the border emergency was not an emergency—but it's vital to remember that it was, in fact, bullshit. For decades of American politics, the basic dynamic has been that Democrats manage the country and the economy well enough to make people feel fairly materially secure, which gives Republicans the opportunity to whip people up about emotional nonsense and cultural resentments, which wins Republicans power, which Republicans use to cut taxes and wreck the economy, which gets Democrats brought in again to clean up the mess. Only now, instead of just the economic growth chart and the federal budget deficit, people were rallying around reversing the recent upturn in the national life expectancy figures.
The results of actually electing Trump are going to be fractally disastrous, making every detail of every aspect of living in the country worse. Every single piece of what's coming would be its own standalone atrocity: hundreds of new lunatic federal judges, RFK Jr. in charge of food and drugs, career-saving pardons for NYC mayor Eric Adams, whatever awaits Volodymyr Zelensky. Barring a late miracle in the House, a Trump Congress will join the Trump Supreme Court to obliterate whatever abortion-rights measures voters desperately passed in their own states. Millions of people, including legal residents and American citizens, are going to be hunted, seized, locked up, and deported.
But the Trump campaign won by casting aside material reality altogether. The confounding thing for anyone who would second-guess the Democratic effort is that even on the plane of seemingly essential election operations, Trump won with nothing. He was out-organized, outspent, and outhustled on the ground by the Harris campaign, by every known indicator of what's supposed to shift the balance in close elections. By the end Team Trump didn't even have the physical figure of a plausible president to put forward, just a mumbling, miserable-eyed husk wearing a safety vest in the name of a convoluted riff on an ethnic insult, bronzered up to look like Al Jolson.
Nevertheless, nearly every demographic group, nearly everywhere in the country, rode the gusts being pulled toward this vacuum. Even if they still voted for Harris, their margins moved in Trump's direction, drawn by the fake promise of rescue from their imaginary fears and grievances. The second thing I saw on my phone this morning, after the Washington Post headline about Trump's victory, was a quote from Bernie Moreno, who had just flipped an Ohio seat in the Senate from Democratic to Republican:
"We're tired of being treated like second-class citizens in our own country," Moreno told supporters in his victory speech. "We're tired of leaders that think we're garbage, and we're tired of being treated like garbage."
None of this referred to anything that exists. It was a discourse about discourse about discourse, a complaint mashed together out of references to other complaints. It was a winning message in a country where Elon Musk is suddenly the only media baron who matters, where Twitter is quite abruptly and actually operating as real life. America is a meme stock now. The only fundamental is that there are no fundamentals—until 330 million people discover, at high speed, where the true limits may be.
