ROGER KIMBALL: The three reasons Trump won.
“Why Trump won.” That is my assignment. I shall treat it as a declaration, not a question. And even though I write before the returns are in, I can give you the reasons. After all, I have been predicting that Donald Trump would win “in a landslide” at least since July.
As has become increasingly clear over the past several weeks, there are three basic reasons that Trump won.
The first two are interwoven. Kamala Harris was a horrible candidate. Trump, on the contrary, was superb.
As to Kamala, her inarticulacy was a major stumbling block. So was her choice of running mate: Tim Walz may be the left-most governor in the country. Certainly, he is the weirdest. Harris’s 60 Minutes interview was a disaster, as was her interview with Bret Baier.
Often, Harris’s mistakes were fodder for Trump’s triumphs. Harris said she had worked the fry station at McDonald’s. There was no record of that, so Trump made hay of the apparent lie. He picked a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, made French fries and handed out food at the drive-through window. A publicity coup.
Then there was the Garbage Gambit. Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” The White House tried and failed to walk back the remark. But Trump’s team came up with the splendid idea of having a garbage truck emblazoned with the campaign logo meet his plane in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They topped that by slinging a neon orange and yellow maintenance vest over the president. He emerged from the plane wearing it, conducted a brief interview from the cab of the truck and then proceeded to his rally where he explained to the adoring crowd why he was wearing the vest. Brilliant.
The media were furious in October that Trump was doing Retail Politics 101, because it simultaneously undermined all of their efforts to portray him as Orange Hitler, and because it demonstrated that Kamala couldn’t or wouldn’t do these sorts of basic campaign stunts. Biden never thought he’d get called on his plagiarism by the media in the 1980s, and curiously, in the 21st century, Kamala never thought anyone would call her on inventing a job at McDonald’s to grab some populist street cred, as the Washington Free Beacon did in late August. Even so, it’s a safe bet that numerous local Mickey D owners, particularly in California, would have been thrilled to have her spend an hour or two posing at making fries. That she couldn’t be bothered to do so speaks volumes about her overall failure as a presidential candidate.