Donald Trump is The FDR of Our Era

Sorry. It's True. He's the Most Dominant US Political Figure of this Century. What We Need to Figure Out is Why.

Brace yourself for a little hypocrisy.

I can’t stand the torrent of hot takes we’re getting on the election results. Especially since they are coming from people who were largely wrong about the election results.

Nonetheless, I have a few observations of my own that I feel, unlike the hot takes, are not premature judgments and that are not diminished by the fact that I was pretty spectacularly wrong about the election results.

My reactions are, in fact, I hope an antidote to the hot takes. So, given that fact and my overall demeanor, let’s call the cool takes.

• Try to resist coming to sweeping conclusions about what has changed for Democrats, Republicans or America from results that are a) only incrementally different from past results and b) may be related to exogenous factors (see FT in how major economy incumbents were swept out of office of office this year…continuing post COVID caused global inflation reaction.)

• It does seem clear that the influence of legacy media (and by extension advertising on legacy media) is fading fast. The over focus on advertising in traditional media of the Harris campaign did not serve it well. Also, to reach and influence “low information” voters takes longer because…wait for it…they consume influence via social media in smaller increments. Harris’ truncated campaign can be seen as a flop or, alternatively, a big success given how little time she had and the degree to which she had to come flawed thinking and strategy from some of the folks who she inherited from the Biden campaign. For more on this, listen to this great discussion I had on the election with my friends Simon Rosenberg and Tara McGowan.

• Despite the above Joe Rogan is not the new Walter Cronkite. His influence is being overstated. He has a big audience. He’s not to be minimized. But the secret to understanding new media is recognizing that most people get their information from many many diverse sources from friends and family on social media to the people they follow on social platforms to podcasts, etc. It’s decentralized. Now, Elon hijacking Twitter and turning it hard right…that probably had a bigger influence. Bigger still? Billionaires with Trumpian leanings buying/owning many of the key media outlets and social media platforms.

• While a lot of the foreign policy focus was on how Biden’s Gaza policy might impact Harris (which it did to a limited degree in places like Michigan), the ghastliness of the policy I think may have had a broader effect than is fully understood now. It was a big, visible, foreign policy mess and sent the message that quite apart from the merits of the policy that the Biden-Harris admin was not terribly effective. I know it was. You know it was. We know the facts. But the question is what factors impacted people’s feelings about them and how they were doing and I think Gaza was one and that it did not help.

• One of the Biden Admin’s real accomplishments was moving America away from the neo-liberal consensus that had dominated both parties since Reagan. It shifted the focus of economic efforts from interest rates and the banks to main street and jobs. In the end, it did so without producing a recession and it made the U.S. economy the envy of the world. Unfortunately, whereas unemployment and job creation only impact a small fraction of Americans, inflation (which was primarily driven by global factors beyond the administration’s controls…but which they also did not prioritize as an issue as neo-lib admins did) touched everyone. And they did not have a good way to communicate why their approach in the end was better for everyone (as it was.) Now, of course, Trump and his billionaire buddies are going to push hard for a return to neo-lib, even trickle down, policies and some within the Democratic economic policy community are going to blame Dem performance on the failure to address inflation. Whether this drive’s a stake into the heart of the Biden “bottom up, middle out” policy formulation remains to be seen. These questions will, in many ways, be at the center of the upcoming battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

• The question of who will lead the Dems is a big one. There is no clear answer. Will Harris maintain influence? (Some close to her think she is picking some of the wrong advisors to maintain her influence…folks that may have been responsible for decisions that hurt her during the campaign.) Biden is essential out. Hakeem Jeffries—almost certain to be Speaker within two years if mid-terms hold true to form—will play a big role. But my bet is that the real battle for the party will presage the 2028 race and be between all those in the presidential on-deck circle of the party: Whitmer, Newsom, Moore, Buttigieg, Shapiro, etc.

• Much focus of politicos will be on the mechanics of what went wrong for Harris and what worked for Trump. Almost certainly all conclusions will be overstated. As I mentioned above, it is very likely that this was a change election for the same reason almost every other major economy election this year was a change election. (We still do not full understand or appreciate what a game changer COVID was for our society.) Certainly, Dems need to focus on getting out there base and on building it through better understanding of the grievances of the working class that Trump apparently spoke to better than they did. But it will take a lot of discipline to focus on where we are going rather than where we have been. Prevailing winds will be against Trump as the incumbent in 2026. (Why? Because mid-terms tend to go against incumbents. And as Joe Scarborough smartly pointed out on Friday’s “Morning Joe” the one constant with American voters in this century is that every 2-4 years they want change enough that they shift control of Congress or the presidency or both.) Further, if Trump governs like he did last time, in 2028, Dems will have some big advantages. A likely central issue? Trump’s billionaire cronies feathering their nests and a return to accelerating inequality—his betrayal of the working class who elected him.

• Lastly, for now, if Trump serves until 2028, he will have been the dominant figure in American politics for 13 years (since he entered the 2016 race in 2015.) That is very rarified air. Perhaps you might argue Reagan was the dominant figure for that long if you count the presidential administration of his vice president, George H.W. Bush. But Reagan was out of it for those for years, so I don’t think it’s the same. The best analogy is Roosevelt. (Admittedly Trump was out of office for the middle four years of this span but you know and I do that even during that period he dominated U.S. politics both as the head of the opposition and as a guy who sucked the oxygen out of every political discussion during the period). Donald Trump is the FDR of our era. Before you stroke out thinking of the analogy, do the math and accept it because figuring out why and what that says about us is probably the single most important job in American life—not just politics, but all aspects of American life—today.