We Got Our Hopes Up And Forgot That America Is Still America

U.S. flags are seen on the ground as people left the election night event for Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on November 6, 2024. | Source: ANGELA WEISS / Getty

When it was first announced that President Joe Biden would not seek reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris would be stepping up, my initial thoughts were that she had a much better shot at beating Donald Trump than Biden — who was never a particularly popular president, was getting killed in the polls, and was looking old and frail every time he was in front of a camera — but her presidency was still a long shot. I mean, come on, it was roughly five months before the general election and Trump had been running his campaign for two years (actually, since his loss in 2020 when it comes down to it). Harris wasn’t popular enough to make it through the Democratic primary during her first run for president and it’s not like she won any popularity points serving as Biden’s VP.

But then the unexpected happened. The announcement of Harris’ candidacy was met with a massive surge of excitement. She immediately began gaining on Trump in the polls, even surpassing him at one point. Trump and the MAGA world became transparently afraid of her, and even when the polls evened out and Harris and Trump were neck-and-neck, it just appeared that the tide had changed. Harris was gaining popularity and Trump was managing to look increasingly buffoonish. It really began to look like Harris might just pull off a miracle.

What we forgot is that the America Trump wants to “make great again” is actually the same old America that America has always been.

America isn’t just a racist country; it’s a racist, sexist, xenophobic, pseudo-patriotic, bully-adoring and ignorant country. Trump ran on all of that and won while we keep wanting so desperately to believe America has turned a progressive corner.

The exit polls are clear on one thing: Trump won because whiteness and patriarchy won.

For all of the MAGA talk about Black people flocking to Trump, the president-elect just barely did better with Black voters than he did in 2020. Eighty-six percent of Black voters voted for Harris, just one percentage point lower than Biden’s turnout and just two points lower than what John Kerry got from us when he lost to George W. Bush in 2004, giving Bush his second term. (Trump did improve with Latino voters, which is a damn shame considering all the dehumanizing he did of Latino migrants — but hey, not my culture so it’s not for me to analyze.) At 55%, white people, once again, represented the only racial demographic where the majority voted for the Republican ticket, and that’s why Trump was able to put the depths of his bigotry on full display and still win.

Racism and xenophobia won.

Trump and JD Vance repeatedly denigrated an entire ethnic group with debunked lies about pet-eating, HIV-spreading Haitians — and they still won. Trump echoed the scientific racism of the eugenics movement when he suggested that Black and Latino migrants had “bad genes” that predisposed them to commit murder — and he still won. Trump repeatedly compared migrants to Hannibal Lecter, and called them “animals” who are “not human” —  and he still won. Trump repeatedly took swipes at Harris’ racial identity, and then that became a trending narrative in white conservative America despite the conservatives’ claim that they don’t play identity politics. That narrative won. 

And I know what some people are thinking: Well, what about Barack Obama?

Well, I don’t know. It’s arguable that Obama’s two-term presidency was simply an anomaly. I remember when I first heard that a Black senator from Chicago I had never heard of who has a foreign-sounding name that is far too similar to “Osama” would be running for president. I thought: “There’s just no way.” Then Obama won soundly — twice. 

But there was never any illusion that America had truly changed. Obama might have been America’s first Black president, but he was also the first president who was obligated to prove he was president, even after he was sworn in as president. Obama felt compelled to show two forms of his birth certificate to combat lies that he was ineligible to be president because he wasn’t white enough, Christian enough or American enough to be president. The white conservatives who argue his election proves America isn’t racist never supported his presidency, and they were the same people who kept the birther movement alive for his entire eight years in office. And, at the end of the day, the fiercest cheerleader for the birther lie became president directly after Obama, and now he’s been elected again after running on the same white nationalist ideology.

Racism and sexism won.

In retrospect, we were pretty naive to believe that a Black woman could succeed where a white woman failed. Hilary Clinton may have lost to Trump in 2016, but she didn’t lose because white America was calling her a “DEI hire” despite her political resume being choc full of elected positions that can’t be attained through any diversity initiative. Clinton was a woman, but she was still white.

Harris served as a district attorney, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator and a vice president. If she had gotten elected, she would have been the first president in U.S. history to serve in all three branches of government. Yet, popular white opinion said she was unqualified to be president while Trump, who had no political experience before his first term, was supremely qualified. Trump called Harris “dumb as a rock,” “lazy as hell,” “slow,” a “low-IQ person,” and more despite her resume — and America bought it because it’s easy to apply that kind of characterization to Black women. 

Despite her resume, popular white opinion held that Harris “slept her way to the top,” which was apparently based on a single brief relationship she had with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown three decades ago. Meanwhile, the p**sy-grabber-in-chief is an accused rapist who paid hush money to a prostitute and is rumored and/or proven to have cheated on every single woman he has ever married — and all of that amounted to a complete non-factor during his latest run for the presidency. 

Ignorance and pseudo-patriotism won.

For me, the most frustrating thing about Trump’s win is that he was, once again, able to lie and bully his way to the top.

In 2020, a sitting president of the United States responded to losing his bid for reelection by throwing an extended and very public temper tantrum and embarking on possibly the most transparent propaganda campaign in modern politics. Dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and the Supreme Court joined the former head of election cybersecurity, Trump’s own attorney general and the Department of Justice in saying clearly and unmistakably that there was no evidence of a rigged election. There were 147 Republican legislators who voted to overturn a legal election based on Trump’s big, obvious, thoroughly debunked lie. On Jan. 6, 2021, hundreds, maybe thousands of so-called patriots abandoned their purported principles and rioted at the U.S. Capitol on behalf of a man who tried to upend the nation’s electoral process by propagandizing democracy. So-called patriots advocated and still advocate for what should logically be viewed as the anti-American vote.

Four years later, Trump has lied about how many migrants have crossed the southern border. He has lied about violent crime in America being on the rise, while crime data says the opposite is true. He has lied about how bad the economy was under the Biden administration in comparison to his own presidency. And he continued to lie about the 2020 election results even after all of the turmoil that lie caused in the first place. There is likely no president in modern history who has been fact-checked and found to be lying more often than Trump. But he told the right lies, which is to say, the white lies.

Lies, bullying and bigotry — that’s what Trump ran and won on. And there is nothing about America’s history or present that should have led us to expect a different outcome in 2024. You know what they say about “the more things change.”

We have to fight for the America we want from a place of understanding of what America still currently is. That’s realism, not hopelessness.

Keep fighting, y’all. That’s all we can do.

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