NIALL FERGUSON: The Resurrection of Donald J. Trump.
This is a bigger comeback than Grover Cleveland’s in 1892, when he became the first—and, until last night, only—American president to win a second nonconsecutive term. This is a bigger comeback than Richard Nixon’s, when he was elected president in 1968, eight years after he lost by a dubious whisker to John F. Kennedy. It’s bigger than Winston Churchill’s multiple comebacks, the biggest of which were in 1940 and 1951. It’s bigger than Charles de Gaulle’s in 1958. It’s bigger than Napoleon’s Hundred Days in 1815. In fact, I am tempted to say that the only comeback it’s not bigger than is the Resurrection.
Why? Because all of Trump’s political opponents made a vain effort to destroy him. In the words of Elon Musk—who has been a key variable in Trump’s epic comeback—Trump is the man “who they tried to kill twice, bankrupt, and imprison for eternity.” Trump faced two assassination attempts, one of which came within an inch of killing him. He was indicted in four criminal cases and convicted in one of them. He was impeached twice as president, in December 2019 (over his infamous call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky) and again in January 2021 (over the mob’s invasion of the Capitol on January 6).
In a civil case in May 2023, a Manhattan jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the journalist E. Jean Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. Last May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts relating to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. My colleague Eli Lake puts the grand total at 116 indictments. This wasn’t just lawfare; it was total lawfare.
And still he won. He totally won.
What all this goes to show is that Trump is authentically antifragile. That term originated with my brilliant friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Let me quote his definition from the book Antifragile: “Antifragility. . . is beyond robustness: It is about loving randomness and disorder and benefiting from shocks. And love of randomness is love of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to do things without understanding them—and do them well, mostly much better than by understanding them.”
Friedrich Nietzsche put it more elegantly: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” That famous aphorism, from Twilight of the Idols (1889), will provide the perfect epigraph for the first serious biography of Trump, when a younger version of me gets around to writing it.
Speaking of analogies that involve the Other World, Seth Mandel on “The Sixth Sense Election:”
“I see dead people.” One of the most famous lines from any Bruce Willis film—and certainly the single best-known line in M. Night Shyamalan’s catalogue—was also a stroke of true genius. The Sixth Sense tells you the big twist up front but bets, correctly, that you won’t be paying close enough attention to realize it. Willis’s character is a specter, a figment the whole time, no matter how real he seems.
Last night was the Sixth Sense Election. We were told, up front and in no uncertain terms, that this was the “vibes election.” We were not misled—we misled ourselves. By every metric, Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump was going to be the closest presidential election since 2000. On Election Eve, Nate Silver’s team put their data through 80,000 simulations; Harris won 40,012 times.
There were momentum swings, but the polling averages showed razor-thin margins. The momentum swings were vibe swings. They seemed real—it became conventional wisdom that a joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally would cost him Pennsylvania. We all watched the movie together.
Then came the twist: The campaign we watched wasn’t real. It was a specter, a figment all along.
It certainly felt like that each step of the way, but as with Biden in 2020 and almost with Hillary in 2016 and Gore in 2000, the power of the DNC-MSM to help get a stiff of a candidate over the finish line and eke out a win should not be dismissed. Hence all of our “don’t get cocky” reminders (which were increasingly puréed through the thesaurus as November got closer, just to spice things up).