Revealed: The real reason that Trump won | Will Bunch Newsletter

Mother Nature threw inch after inch of wet, heavy snow on Washington, D.C. Monday, but this Jan. 6 hellstorm wasn’t enough to derail the certification of Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, including President Joe Biden, hailed the peaceful transfer of power vote as a win for democracy. But the reality is that the man who attempted a coup against the United States never stopped, and our weakness allowed him to regain power. Don’t pretend the bitter truth of Jan. 6, 2021 is anything else.

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Monday brought a pivot point in America’s 248-year history disguised as a soporific non-event. It took about 40 boring minutes for a joint session of Congress to count the 2024 Electoral College vote, and Donald Trump was confirmed as the nation’s 47th president, two weeks ahead of his inauguration. The inevitable result was pronounced at about 1:40 p.m. — four years to the exact date and hour that a few thousand insurrection-minded rioters broke police lines and spilled into the Capitol, hellbent on installing Trump through violent anarchy.

“Democracy must be upheld by the people,” Vice President Kamala Harris — dealt the double ignominy of pounding the gavel on her own election defeat —told reporters as she walked through the Rotunda where pro-Trump rabble rousers had waved a Confederate flag and even defecated on the marble floors 48 months ago.

The reality is more complicated. The Nov. 5 election, despite a few minor glitches (and Russian bomb threats), was free and fair, and Trump received the most votes, both from the people and from the Electoral College. Monday was a fait accompli, yet it also finished the job that Trump and his goons started on Jan. 6, 2021.

It took four years of relentless propaganda, aggressive lawfare against a wishy-washy Democratic Justice Department, and Orwellian denial from political elites to throw an attempted coup down the memory hole and achieve what the 2021 insurrectionists failed to do with their flagpoles and bear spray. In the end, Jan. 6, 2025 raised more questions than it answered.

Are we truly a democracy when there’s no justice for the crime of attempting to overthrow the American government? And why did Democrats pump the brakes for too much of President Joe Biden’s four years, wrongly assuming that voters wouldn’t return a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted — and finally convicted on 34 state felony counts — ex-president to the Oval Office? But, just as important, why couldn’t Democrats convince a plurality of voters that their flawed democracy is preferable to pledges of dictatorship and revenge?

The answer to that ultimate question — and thus why Harris presided over a Trump victory Monday and not her own — is largely revealed in a stunning new analysis of the 2024 election vote count published last week by the liberal strategist Michael Podhorzer, former political director at the AFL-CIO organized-labor federation.

Podhorzer titled his analysis of the 155 million votes tallied in November “Why Trump ‘Won’” — the quotation marks around “Won” coming because it’s clear that the election was less a public endorsement of Trump and more an apathetic rejection of what Team Harris and the Democrats offered, cast by millions who voted with their feet to stay home.

Podhorzer argued convincingly in an essay on Medium that “the results are best understood as a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not an embrace of Trump or MAGA.” This political analyst then brings the receipts, showing that the “red shift” of precincts towards Trump wasn’t because the tainted GOP nominee gained support, but rather the result of the drop in Democratic, or anti-Trump, turnout from the surge that Biden saw in 2020.

In arguing that the 2024 electorate turned “couchward,” Podhorzer crunched the final numbers to show that as many as 19 million Americans who voted for Biden four years ago didn’t cast ballots this fall, especially in deep-blue precincts in cities like Philadelphia. Framed differently, he finds that 15 million fewer Americans cast ballots against Trump than they did in the COVID-19-soaked 2020 contest.

He argues that’s because many voters didn’t feel a second Trump presidency posed a threat to them — and that the mixed signals from the Democrats' half-hearted pursuit of Trump’s crimes and a tepid both-sides media bear a lot of blame.

"America has an anti-MAGA majority, but not necessarily a pro-Democratic one,“ Podhorzer wrote. ”In 2020 (and 2022, in part), alarm about Trump and MAGA was enough to overcome the cynicism and alienation of mostly younger voters who desperately want bigger systemic change, but who oppose the MAGA agenda. This time, their cynicism won out."

This grim outcome was actually the thing I’d fretted about in this newsletter back in mid-October, exactly three weeks before Election Day, when I asked, “Is Kamala Harris going after the wrong voters?” Clearly, she was. There’s little sign that her mid-fall shift in strategy — playing up her endorsements from former Rep. Liz Cheney and other Republicans, hoping to flip educated suburban GOPers — moved the needle much.

What happened instead was that core Democrats — young people, Black and brown working-class folks in big cities, and others — wondered why Team Harris, after a promising start that turned August’s Chicago convention into an anti-Trump rave, stopped talking about the things that mattered to them, desperately.

In the closing days of the race, Harris found time to campaign with Cheney, hold a Wall Street fundraiser, and even make peace with the crypto dude-bros, but she said little to nothing about climate change, insane big-city rents, finishing the job on college debt, or how she’d stop the heartbreaking images of dead children in Gaza.

Not to mention Americans' frustration with Big Insurance and their health care bills.

Thus, the stunning reaction on social media to the early December assassination of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, which stirred both a surprising level of sympathy for his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, but more importantly sparked the national debate over insurance denials that should have happened in the 2024 race.

A political movement that came down much harder on the runaway influence of millionaires and billionaires in America today (see “Musk, Elon”) and promised a more equitable society with dollars to address an urban housing crisis or eliminate student debt could have gotten millions of “couchward” voters to leap to their feet.

And yet the Democratic Party under Biden, and then Harris, could not do this. Instead, the vice president devoted far too much energy in raising a haul of $1.5 billion for ads that ran on 6 p.m. newscasts that these alienated voters would never watch. Here in Philly, which was an epicenter of the party’s meltdown as Pennsylvania slipped again to Trump, rebel Democrats staged an insurgency from a Dunkin Donuts in a frantic, failed effort to reach Black and Latino voters ignored by Team Harris.

“We desperately need an ideological and political tactics insurgency within the Democratic Party,” Oliver Willis, a longtime scribe on the left, posted on Bluesky. “Because despite massive losses the party has made clear it has no interest in changing or adapting.”

Indeed, I’ve argued for an approach very loosely based on the 2009-10 Tea Party that both nudged and ultimately boosted the GOP from the far right. Democrats who won’t reinvent the party as a movement against the billionaire donor class need to be culled in the primaries and replaced with a truly pro-worker majority. With millions of untapped voters, the future for Democrats, and America, can start now.

Question: Is there any hope that President Biden will make the call to publish the Equal Rights Amendment before 1/20? — DrBlueSkyLLC (@drblueskyllc.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: It’s understandable that both activists and most Democratic senators — after a man running on misogynistic backlash has defeated a more qualified woman presidential candidate for the second time — are pointing to Virginia’s 2020 vote to ratify the 1972 ERA as a rationale to proclaim the women’s rights measure as the 28th Amendment and the law of the land. The Virginia vote was indeed the 38th time a state has voted to ratify, but there are two huge problems. Congress was explicit in setting a time limit (first seven years, extended to 10, or 1982) on ratification, and five of the bare-minimum 38 states have since passed resolutions to rescind their ratification. What’s more, the ever-cautious Biden has shown little during his four years to suggest he’d make such a bold act. The war for women’s equality will be fought on other battlegrounds.

I received an array of interesting responses to last week’s New Year’s question about what people plan to do differently in 2025. Some of you are thinking about new strategies to attain the progressive America that didn’t come during the Biden era, including Stephen Rourke who will stop funding the Democratic Party and “limit my political donations to outside groups dedicated to getting out the progressive vote and bringing the next generation of leaders into office.” Cheryl Smith is taking the radical step of ditching her smartphone, explaining that “my best act in this hard-to-understand election outcome is to bow out of the information highway full of political blather and disinformation.”

📮 This week’s question: The 119th Congress is sworn in, and the first job is confirming Team Trump’s whackadoodle slate of cabinet nominations. Which nominee do you see as most dangerous and thus most important for a coalition of Democrats and sane Republicans to vote down? Please email me your answer and put “Trump cabinet” in the subject line.

It feels like ancient history but it was just 2017 — in the shadow of Donald Trump’s first election victory — that Steven Spielberg filmed The Post, about the glory days of Washington’s newspaper, its legendary team of editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham, and its government-defying 1971 decision to publish the leaked Pentagon Papers. The director aimed for a morality play about the role of a free press, as critic Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com called it, “a stealth portrait of the media’s responsibility in the age of Trump, and in any age.”

One place that portrait apparently failed to resonate was in the newsroom of today’s Washington Post. With Trump poised to take the oath for a second time, one of the nation’s leading news orgs is in an ethical, spiritual and economic free fall. An astonishing 300,000 subscribers cancelled after publisher Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest person who rescued the Post in 2013 and pledged to protect the Graham legacy, intervened to spike his staff’s editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, weeks before pledging $1 million towards Trump’s inauguration.

That seemed like rock-bottom — until the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, shocked the journalism world by quitting when her bosses refused to publish her rendering mocking Big Tech moguls, including Bezos, lining up to pay tribute to Trump. “I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness’,” Telnaes wrote. Meanwhile, star journalists like Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey also ditched the Post for other outlets, and now the paper has announced significant layoffs, which presumably is at least partly due to all those angry subscription cancellers.

What I find striking — beyond the willingness of Amazon founder Bezos to kowtow to a dictator, to protect his business empire — is how poorly the Post’s newsroom leaders understand today’s world in which much of the legacy media is thrashing about. Semafor reported Monday that a top editor who quietly quit after the Bezos endorsement outrage also wrote that the Post’s British, Rupert-Murdoch-trained CEO Will Lewis asked a reporter “what the Post could do to attract Trump supporters.”

Aside from the ethical breach of suggesting news coverage could be altered to woo one side’s partisans, the Lewis comment also portrays the stubbornly naive belief that 77 million Trump voters can be magically won back to a traditional media that they hate. That’s because the MAGA right scorns the kind of accountability journalism that was the Post at its 1971 best. On the other side of the coin, most of the 300,000 readers that the Post lost (while not gaining any Trump-voting subscribers) don’t desire biased or slanted reporting. They just want a newsroom that cares as much about fighting for democracy as they do, and are utterly befuddled why this isn’t happening.

The courage of Telnaes — quitting her job on moral grounds when no one is hiring editorial cartoonists — is a reminder of how many everyday journalists continue to take this mission seriously. The confused cowardice of the Post’s leadership is a warning of how hard that is becoming in an era of oligarch owners and declining public trust in newsrooms. Much like the Democratic Party (see above), the future of U.S. democracy depends on our ability to quickly build vital new structures inside of a hollow, broken shell.

How did it feel, to paraphrase the great, not-late Bob Dylan, just 24 hours after Donald Trump’s mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, on this date four years ago? I was already writing my second column about the insurrection, praying this was the rock-bottom at the end of a Trump era, not the middle. I wrote: “On Wednesday, America totaled the Ford 150 but thankfully we’ve walked away from the wreckage, limping but still alive. Let’s pray that the real road to America’s recovery started with an Epiphany — January 6, 2021." Spoiler alert: We were not on the road to recovery. Read the rest: “America hit rock bottom on January 6, 2021. Will there be an epiphany?”

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.