2024 election

Every election has winners and losers that extend beyond the politicians themselves, but in this particularly unique situation, the sheer number of outside individuals, movements and institutions who can be categorized as winning or losing based on last night’s sweeping result for Donald Trump and Republicans is astounding.  Winner: the bro army and its defenders. The decision to lean so hard into appealing to the American manosphere, with its testosterone-fueled UFC events and a litany of podcasts hosted by comedians with mass appeal to young men, ran the risk of turning off female voters or seeming to only prioritize the frat vote. But it proved absolutely correct — and not just the Joe Rogan interview, though that was a key step in the journey.

For most of American history, elections took a long time. Many of the gaps that still exist today between when counts begin, when certification happens, when electors meet and when the next winner is sworn in exist as a vestige of a past where lengthy travel and slow word of mouth meant people just did not know what had happened for quite some time. Election results happened at a distance. This created its own set of problems in the application of authority, but now we are dealing with something of a different nature: a demand for immediacy that throws patience aside and views every delay as suspicious. It’s one reason that we used to speak to each other in paragraphs, then in lines and phrases — now we can only manage memes.

Donald Trump’s podcast bonanza just paid off with the biggest win possible: a formal endorsement from Joe Rogan, whose massive audience has been coveted by both Trump and Kamala Harris in the final days of the election. In Rogan’s latest episode, with top Trump surrogate and X CEO Elon Musk, the two talked for almost three hours in Rogan’s Austin studio — standard fare for his show, which was apparently too much for the sitting vice president, whose team would only agree to an hour-long interview on the road, which never occurred. But the most important takeaway came when Rogan posted the episode, along with his commentary. “If it wasn't for [Musk] we'd be fucked,” Rogan wrote.

Nobody ever talks about this anymore, but there was a time when Democrats were floating Kamala Harris as a potential Supreme Court pick. Shortly after the death of Antonin Scalia, the Los Angeles Times published an article about how she may be on Barack Obama’s shortlist. Speculation reached a “fever pitch,” they reported. Harris said she was flattered by the consideration, even as she declined the opportunity. That’s a footnote in American history that’s worth revisiting, now that Election Day is almost here. Imagine the kind of people who would tell us, with a straight face, that Kamala Harris should replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. On the one hand, you have one of the leading legal minds in all of American history.

The latest wisdom from our tottering, angry president was to call Donald Trump’s supporters “garbage.” He was responding to the inexcusable “joke” by a warm-up comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, stepped all over what should have been Trump’s big story: his triumphant rally. Biden stepped all over what should have been Kamala Harris’s: her effective closing speech on the Ellipse, in front of the White House.  These disparaging references are loathsome, whatever their political impact. They cheapen our public life. But they are also political mistakes.

Who has better lawyers: Donald Trump or the Syndicate? The fate of the election, and hence the fate of the country, may well come down to the answer to that question.  By “the Syndicate” (what I sometimes call “the Committee”), I of course mean the shadowy board of overseers that controls the Democratic Party and, by extension, the administrative apparatus that governs us. No one knows exactly who sits on this board. I suspect that even those who, in retrospect, we can see have occupied senior positions in its ranks are often uncertain about their place in the hierarchy.  Elsewhere, I have invoked C.S. Lewis’s idea of “The Inner Ring” to explain the dynamics of this phenomenon.

Washington, DC Vice President Kamala Harris made her last stand at the scene of her opponent Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 address to his supporters: the Ellipse south of the White House on Washington’s National Mall. Her argument was reminiscent of her predecessor as the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden: eschewing the nebulous “joy” that had characterized her anointing at the Democratic National Convention, Harris opted to intone about the grave threat a second Trump term would pose to America and western democracy. But can that approach work two presidential elections in a row? Attendees waved the Stars and Stripes, with backdrops reading “FREEDOM” and “USA” adorning the riders.

Dearborn, Michigan Leave Detroit and drive down Michigan Avenue, past the liquor stores, abandoned houses and weed-strewn fields; eventually you’ll hit Dearborn. You’ve undoubtedly read a lot about Dearborn these past few months, the Michigan city whose voters could sink Harris’s chances at the White House.   As you’ve been told, around 60 percent of Dearborn’s citizens are of Arab descent — it’s home to the largest mosque in the country and has the largest population of Muslims per capita in the United States. Overall, in Dearborn and in surrounding cities in Metro Detroit, the Arab-American community numbers over 200,000 people.