Philippa Kaur

Donald Trump was elected US president this week. Despite vastly outspending her opponent and drafting a galaxy of celebrities to her cause – Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin, Taylor Swift – Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost the Electoral College, the popular vote and all the swing states.

This has bewildered and dismayed liberals – and much of the mainstream media. In the aftermath, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders excoriated the Democratic Party machine.

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

He continued:

Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Harris ran a campaign straight out of the centrist political playbook. Sanders observed that the 60% of Americans who live pay cheque to pay cheque weren’t convinced by it.

Bernie Sanders has excoriated the Democratic Party for abandoning the working-class.
Bernie Sanders/AAP

She sought to dampen social divisions rather than accentuate them. She spoke of harmony, kindness and future prosperity, of middle-class aspiration rather than poverty and suffering. Her speeches often repeated rhetoric like her promise to be “laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class”.

This was unlikely to endear her to those for whom social mobility appears impossible.

Words of blood and thunder resonated

Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, refuted Sanders’ claims, saying:

[Joe] Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime – saved union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line.

But did those workers feel like the Democrats were speaking to them? And did they like what they heard?

Class politics needs to not only promise to redistribute wealth, but do so in a language that chimes with people’s lived experience – more effectively than Trump’s right-wing populism.

Harris’s genial, smiling optimism failed to strike a chord with voters hurting from years of inflation and declining real wages. And her use of celebrity advocates echoes writer Jeff Sparrow’s criticism of the left as “too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures” after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election loss.

Kamala Harris’ ‘galaxy of celebrities’ did not help her.
Annie Mulligan/AAP

By contrast, Trump’s words of blood and thunder hit the spot – not only in his rural and outer suburban strongholds, but among those voters in rust-belt inner cities, who had voted decisively for Biden four years earlier. The greatest threat to America, he said, was from “the enemy from within”. He defined them as: “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”

Harris’s attempt to build her campaign around social movements of gender and race failed abjectly. In particular, the appeal to women on reproductive rights, and to minority voters by preaching racial harmony resonated less than Trump’s emphasis on law and order and border control. Women voted more strongly for Harris than for Trump, but not in sufficient numbers to get her into the Oval Office. Latinos flocked to Trump despite his promises to deport undocumented immigrants.

This shows it takes more than political rhetoric to bake people into voting blocs.

Those of us who fixate on politics and the news media tend to overread the ability of public debate to set political agendas, especially during election campaigns. In fact, few voters pay much attention to politics. They rarely watch, listen to or read mainstream media and have little political content in their social media newsfeeds. Exit polls indicate Trump led with these kinds of voters.

Donald Trump’s ‘words of blood and thunder’ seem to have hit the spot with many working-class voters.
Evan Vucci/AAP

Is populism the new class?

In much of the Western world, class has receded from the political vocabulary. As manufacturing industries declined, so did the old trade unions whose base was among blue-collar workers.

In 1983, 20.1% of Americans were union members. In 2023, membership had halved to 10%. Few of those in service jobs join unions, largely because many are precariously employed.

These days, politicians in the old social democratic parties, like the Democrats in the US and Labor here in Australia, are much more likely to have come up through law and business than the union movement. In the US, ex-teacher Tim Walz was the first candidate on a Democratic Party presidential ticket without law school experience since Jimmy Carter.

Ex-teacher Tim Walz is unusual as a politician without a law or business bavkground.
Anthony Souffle/Star Tribune/AAP

The language of populism – the people versus the elites – is a smokescreen that obscures real structures of power and inequality. But it comes much more easily to the lips of Americans than that of class.

Trump’s political cunning rests in his ability to identify as one of the people, even to paint the left as the enemy of disenfranchised so-called patriots. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he told a Veteran’s Day rally last year.

He conjures up (an illusory) golden age of prosperity in a once-great monocultural America, where jobs were protected by tariffs and crime was low, helped by the reality of rising cost of living and falling real wages. There is plenty of room on this nostalgic landscape for Mister Moneybags, an old-fashioned tycoon, even one with the “morals of an alley cat”, as Joe Biden said in the debate that finished his 2024 candidacy.

The elite, by contrast, are faceless: politicians, bureaucrats, the “laptop class”, as Elon Musk calls knowledge workers, and the grey cardinals of the “deep state” (a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy).

According to Trump’s narrative, they conspire in the shadows to rob decent, hardworking folk of their livelihoods. This accords with a real geographical divide: people in cities with high incomes and valuable real estate, and those in the rust-belt with neither.

Trump voters speak the language of populism.
Brandon Dill/EPA

Australian populism

In Australia, the language of populism has deeper roots than that of class. Students of Australian history learn that national identity was based on distinguishing ourselves from the crusty traditions of the motherland: the belief that, as historian Russel Ward wrote, all Australians should be treated equally, that “Jack is as not only as good as his master … but probably a good deal better”.

The Australian Labor Party was there when this egalitarian myth was born. But as the gap between rich and poor grows here, as elsewhere, it has become less plausible than once it was.

It remains to be seen whether Anthony Albanese – whose life journey has taken him from social housing to waterfront mansion – is prepared to bring the sharp elbows of class politics, in both policy and language, to next year’s election campaign. The experience of Kamala Harris suggests he would be well advised to do so. More

Voters from Latino (immigrants from Latin America and their descendants) and Hispanic (people whose heritage is from Spanish-speaking countries) backgrounds contributed significantly to Donald Trump’s resounding victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential election.

Overall, Trump increased his share of the Latino vote to 45% nationwide, up substantially from 32% in his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

About 53% of the voters in this group supported Harris, down from the estimated 60% who voted for Biden in 2020. The shift is an outstanding political feat for the Republican candidate, especially considering Trump’s uneasy and frequently antagonistic relationship with Latino and Hispanic communities.

So why did so many Latino and Hispanic voters back Trump?

Nightmares and dreams

It might seem illogical that Trump strengthened his backing among Latino and Hispanic voters, given his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, his threat to enact mass deportations of illegal immigrants, and his frequently blatant racist remarks.

Politics, however, is not a realm of pure reason. Emotion and narrative play a role, too.

Trump’s surge among Latino and Hispanic voters can be traced back to nightmares and dreams never far from voters’ minds.

Many of these voters left the nightmare of poverty behind in their countries of origin. Their dreams are rooted in traditional (mainly masculine) stories about prosperity in the “land of the free”.

President Donald Trump, front centre, participates in a roundtable with Latino leaders.
AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

‘Love’, insults and slander

Trump has boasted about how much he “loves” Latinos and Hispanics. His actions, however, mostly disprove his words.

When Trump launched his first presidential campaign in 2015, he called Mexicans “rapists” who were “bringing drugs” and “crime” into the US.

He claimed this problem was “coming from all over South and Latin America”.

He also promised to build “a great, great wall” on the US southern border, for which Mexico was meant to pay, to stop undocumented immigrants.

In the third and last 2016 presidential debate, he labelled Latino and Hispanic men, without any nuance or evidence, as “bad hombres” who constantly smuggle drugs into the US.

During his first term in office, the Trump administration then implemented policies that specifically hurt Latino and Hispanic communities.

These included a “zero tolerance” illegal immigration approach, which separated parents from their children.

In November 2023, he argued this served as an effective deterrent, foreshadowing that this policy may return if he was re-elected.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the US.

He again vowed to crack down on immigration, promising mass deportations of some 11 million undocumented people.

At a Trump rally a week ago, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe then likened Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage.” Trump told ABC News he had not heard the remark and stopped short of denouncing it.

The rainbow of Latino and Hispanic pluralism

Why would Latino and Hispanic voters support a candidate who so candidly has shown his contempt for them?

A recent Siena poll for the New York Times provides some clues.

Over 40% among these Latino and Hispanic voters supported both Trump’s pledge to continue building a wall along the Mexico border and his deportation plans.

About 63% said they do not “feel like he is talking about me” when Trump discusses immigration.

Many Latino and Hispanic voters do not ‘feel like he is talking about me’ when Trump discusses immigration.
EPA/ALLISON DINNER

Latino and Hispanic voters are frequently clustered as a distinct ethnic and cultural group in US political surveys.

They are contrasted, for example, against “white”, “Black” or “Asian” voters.

Latinos and Hispanics, however, are diverse in national origin, class, ethnic and gender characteristics. They are not a monolith, but rather a rainbow.

There were 62.5 million Latinos and Hispanics living in the US in 2021, about 19% of the total population.

An estimated 36.2 million were eligible to vote this year, representing 15% of potential voters.

Latinos and Hispanics also make up a large share of voters in swing states such as Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Their wide variety of backgrounds, however, underscores why grouping them as a uniform bloc is flawed.

In 2021, the five largest populations in the US by national origin were:

Mexicans (37.2 million)
Puerto Ricans (5.8 million)
Salvadorans (2.5 million)
Dominicans (2.4 million)
Cubans (2.4 million).

The experience of immigration and life in the US is different for each of these groups. Their response to the political campaigns would also be different.

The myth of ‘Comrade Kamala’

It’s too early to say for sure what drove voter patterns in each community. But we can venture a few hypotheses.

Trump, for example, falsely portrayed Harris as a committed communist, such as in this post on X (which garnered over 81 million views):

For Latino immigrants coming from countries under authoritarian regimes, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, this messaging recalls memories of the situation they fled.

“I will deliver the best future for Puerto Ricans and Hispanic Americans. Kamala will deliver you poverty and crime,” Trump told his supporters at a recent rally.

Playing on the fears of a “communist” system under Harris was likely a successful strategy. The leftist regimes in many Latinos’ countries of origin are seen as a threat to their economic security.

Kamala, ‘evil woman’

Gender also played a major role in Trump’s victory. Trump appealed to young men, who fear women’s gains in equality. Latino and Hispanic men were no exception.

A viral campaign video showed Trump dancing to the famous salsa theme “Juliana”. The lyrics were modified though, simply describing Harris as “mala” (evil).

A September NBC poll showed a vast gender gap between Trump and Harris voters. While women backed the Democrats 58% to 37%, men supported Republicans 52% to 40%.

This played out specifically among Latinos in the election, too. According to exit polls by the Associated Press, 47% of Latino men supported Trump in the election, compared to 38% of Latino women.

Trump tapped into ideals of masculinity and hierarchy that, while not exclusive to Latino and Hispanic men, uphold the promise of a return to traditional gender models.

Many men are angry about losing their former privileges. They expressed their nostalgia for stereotypical male traits (and corresponding female submission) in the polls. More

As the nation prepares for a second Donald Trump presidency, some history-minded people may seek understanding in the idea that it wasn’t until Richard Nixon’s second presidential term that the serious consequences arrived.

But as a scholar of American politics, I don’t think that’s the right parallel.

Trump has already faced most of the situations that brought down Nixon – a congressional investigation and federal prosecutors’ inquiries.

Trump has survived by – consciously or not – following the example of another American president who created a political party in his own image and used it to rule almost unchecked: Andrew Jackson, whose portrait Trump hung in the Oval Office during his first term.

Unlike Nixon, Trump outlasted investigations

Richard Nixon was reelected by an Electoral College landslide in 1972 in the midst of the Watergate scandal, in which people affiliated with Nixon’s reelection campaign broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and then sought to cover up their actions. Although Nixon started off his second term with sky-high approval, his demise soon followed.

A Senate special committee investigating the Watergate break-in was established just 18 days after his inauguration in January 1973. By the summer of 1974, evidence of Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate crimes had become overwhelming. In an Aug. 7, 1974, visit to the White House, Republican congressional leaders asked the president to step down. He announced his decision to resign the following day, Aug. 8, 1974.

Trump, however, has already weathered numerous legal battles, investigations and controversies. From the Jan. 6 committee to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s probes and the Mar-a-Lago documents case, Trump’s political career has been marked by repeated confrontations with legal and political institutions – including two impeachments by the House, though both were rejected by the Senate.

The House Jan. 6 committee announced four recommended charges against Donald Trump, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

After the Republican Party’s loss in 2020 and an underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms, many within the GOP urged Trump to step aside to allow for a new generation of leaders. But Trump held firm.

Investigations stalled or were delayed, giving him breathing room through to the 2024 election. Now, with his his return to the White House, Trump will almost certainly end the federal investigations, and there’s little sign that state cases will press forward soon.

In recent years, historical revisionism – popularized by Tucker Carlson – has taken place within segments of the Republican Party. Under this view, Nixon wasn’t ousted for his involvement in Watergate but rather was the victim of a system aligned against him. But where Nixon stepped aside, Trump has fought back.

Like Jackson, Trump reshaped his party

In many ways, though, Trump more closely resembles Jackson than the scandal-plagued Nixon.

Following his narrow defeat in the controversial 1824 election, Jackson, much like Trump would two centuries later, claimed the election had been stolen.

Jackson seized on his supporters’ frustrations, reorganizing the Democratic-Republican Party, which ultimately rebranded itself as the Democratic Party, in his own image. His followers championed his cause, creating state and local Democratic parties and building a powerful grassroots movement.

As a result, the Democratic Party democratized its nomination process, moving from elite-driven congressional caucuses that chose candidates behind closed doors to well-attended party conventions. This shift allowed voters to participate directly in the candidate selection process.

The new Jacksonian Democratic Party not only aligned with his views but also introduced a wave of increased political participation. Through what became known as the “spoils system,” Jackson rewarded loyalists by appointing them to government positions, ensuring that his allies held key roles in federal and state institutions. This approach allowed Jackson to implement his agenda more effectively, while also mobilizing his supporters at all levels of government, integrating them into the workings of American politics in unprecedented numbers.

When he won election in 1828, Jackson’s efforts created a political landscape that gave him broad power, including actions that bypassed institutional checks.

For instance, Jackson’s forced removal and relocation of Native American communities from their ancestral lands – the “Trail of Tears” – illustrated the dangers inherent when a president holds extensive unilateral power.

Jackson disregarded judicial decisions and public outcry, acting with executive authority that appeared unconstrained. An 1832 Supreme Court ruling – Worcester v. Georgia – established tribal sovereignty, yet Jackson refused to enforce the ruling and the displacement of the Cherokee people continued.

His restructured party and control over appointments allowed him to act with what seemed near-total impunity. Jackson demonstrated his power by vetoing the renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States, then unilaterally directing the removal of federal deposits despite congressional support for the bank.

A short film made by the Cherokee Nation with the National Park Service tells the tale of the Trail of Tears.

Likewise, Trump has reshaped the Republican Party. His influence has been evident in Republican primary contests, where candidates aligned with Trump’s vision succeeded, and opponents – the so-called “Never Trumpers” and “RINOs” – found themselves pushed to the margins.

This transformation has not been confined to rhetoric but is visible in the composition of state legislatures and in Congress, solidifying a pro-Trump ideology that extends to party policies and priorities. This shift gives Trump a firm foundation from which he can pursue his agenda.

Furthermore, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has, in effect, become a guardian of the political revolution Trump has spearheaded, granting the executive substantial powers and legal protection.

What to look for next

But there are limits to what Trump can achieve, even with his strengthened position.

Unlike in Jackson’s era, today’s federal bureaucracy is a vast, entrenched institution, with checks in place that may challenge or obstruct executive overreach. Some of Trump’s promises – particularly around immigration policy, social welfare reform and trade – are likely to encounter resistance, not only from Democratic opposition but also from civil servants and legal processes embedded within federal agencies.

However, Trump has said he wants to substantially remake that federal bureaucracy, replacing experienced career public servants with political appointees aligned with Trump himself.

Donald Trump’s return to office likely signals an end to at least some of the yearslong investigations into his past actions and ensures his hold over the Republican Party remains intact. With a loyal base of voters and supportive institutions, Trump is positioned to further reshape the American political system. More

Like many women, I’m having a horrible flashback. It’s 6 a.m. on Nov. 9, 2016 — the day after the United States presidential election that pitted Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. I went to bed assuming Clinton had won.

I remember thinking to myself on the night of that election that there was nothing to be worried about. Americans would do the right thing and vote for the most qualified person, not the reality TV star. I came into the dining room where my partner was sitting reading the news and looked at him hopefully when he told me, still in shock: “Trump won.”

Read more:
The real reason Trump won: White fright

I was wrong eight years ago and I was wrong today about Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances of beating Trump.

I hoped the polls were wrong and the race was not as close as it appeared to be in the swing states. I believed women would come out in droves to protect their reproductive rights. I hoped and assumed that white women, in particular, would turn out for Harris en masse. That was a false hope.

Trump has been declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election after handily winning several swing states. He’s also on track to win the popular vote, something he failed to do in ’16. In fact, he has done better with almost all demographics in 2024 than he did in 2020.

Voters cast their ballots in Indianapolis on Nov. 5, 2024 in the heavily Republican state of Indiana.
(AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Tight race

It was a hard-fought battle and, according to the polls, neck and neck right up until the final days of the campaign.

In hindsight, several questions have been answered that were not so clear just a day ago. Will America vote for a Black woman? No. Will Harris be able to do what Clinton couldn’t do eight years ago? No. Will she break the Oval Office glass ceiling? No.

The fact that these questions were still in play in 2024, as Harris waged a disciplined campaign against an opponent as flawed and felonious as Trump, seems revelatory about the misogyny and racism that bedevils America.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Nov. 4, 2024, in Philadelphia.
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Gender played an outsized role in the election for several reasons. The overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022 galvanized women across the U.S., especially when the deaths of several women after being refused pregnancy or miscarriage-related health care illustrated the consequences of these extreme anti-choice positions.

Concerns about women’s reproductive rights and Trump’s casual dismissal of sexualized violence seemingly gave women, young and old, a cause to embrace.

A survey in Iowa conducted by vaunted pollster Ann Selzer showed women 65 and older were voting for Harris by a two to one margin, though Trump ended up winning the state.

TikTok videos showing Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy” comments went viral among young TikTokers who weren’t old enough to remember when the remarks originally surfaced in 2016. They spoke of their astonishment that their fathers and anyone with daughters, sisters or mothers could vote for such a person.

But it was not enough, even though exit polls suggested a majority of women cast their ballots for Harris. Women apparently preferred Harris, but not by the margins her campaign had hoped.

Trump’s allure to men

On the other side of the gender equation are men. Trump’s appeal to young men increased as their apparent fears of being overtaken by women’s gains in equality were exploited.

This is a disturbing trend. According to a September NBC poll, women backed the Democrats 58 per cent to 37 per cent, while men supported Republicans 52 per cent to 40 per cent. Research has shown that young women have become more liberal while young men have become more conservative, perhaps because they are angry at falling behind and losing their former advantages.

The candidates themselves recognized the differences in support with their choices of podcasts and media appearances. Trump spent three hours with Joe Rogan — who subsequently endorsed him — for his podcast that skews heavily towards young men while Harris went on Call Her Daddy, a podcast directed at women under 35.

In the end, the U.S. voted for what is called “hegemonic masculinity,” a cultural valorization of stereotypical male traits, and Trump’s endless and regressive belittling of women and “feminine” men won the day.

Donald Trump waves to the crowd after speaking at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Nov. 5, 2024.
(AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

The impact of white women

Another key factor in the campaign was race.

Exit polls suggested white women without college educations overwhelmingly voted for Trump, while white college-educated women cast their ballots for Harris.

Prior to the election, most white women said they backed the Republican Party, but suggestions their support for Trump was wavering now seem unfounded. Exit polls suggest Harris didn’t perform as well with women voters as Joe Biden did in 2020.

We don’t have the final numbers yet in terms of how white women in swing states ultimately cast their ballots, but they probably weren’t good. Democrats ran videos, one narrated by actress Julia Roberts, pointing out the obvious constitutional guarantee that women have the right to vote any way they wanted to — and that what happens in the ballot box should stay in the ballot box.

The backlash against these ads was illuminating, suggesting there are still many men who think their wives should vote the way their husbands do and that it’s a betrayal if they don’t — and perhaps Trump’s win suggests their wives agreed.

The loss of reproductive freedom was evidently not enough for white women to go against their race, their class interests — or possibly their husbands.

Black, Latino men

The other racial factor in the campaign was the perception of the dwindling support for Harris from Black and Latino men. Trump also increased his share of the Latino vote.

And according to a New York Times poll, while Obama was supported by 93 per cent of Black Americans in 2008 and Biden was supported by 90 per cent in 2020, support had fallen to 73 per cent for Harris in 2024.

Is this the result of sexism or internalized misogyny? Could Black men not bring themselves to vote for a Black woman?

Barack Obama’s plea to Black men certainly seems to suggest a problem with sexism within that cohort of voters.

Former U.S. president Barack Obama speaks at a campaign rally in support of Kamala Harris on Oct. 28, 2024, in Philadelphia.
(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

After the 2016 election, the American Psychological Association coined the anxiety around the election results as election stress disorder.

That stress has returned as the world now watches what will happen as Trump, with no guardrails, no checks and balances in place and billionaires by his side, attempts to remake America in his own authoritarian image. More

Trying to predict what Donald Trump will do during a second term in office is a fool’s errand.

It is all the more challenging considering Trump has prioritised winning re-election far more than discussing a detailed policy agenda. In many ways, Kamala Harris had the same strategy of maintaining an ambiguous policy agenda, though to obviously lesser success.

With that said, Trump comes back to the White House after not only four years of a prior tenure in the Oval Office, but also an additional four years since leaving office. These many years in the public eye may not tell us exactly what he will do, but they do give us an indication of his priorities.

Trump’s ambiguous policy agenda

Many point to Trump’s policy agenda as lacking both consistency and coherence.

On one hand, he has touted his Supreme Court nominees for overturning Roe v Wade. On the other, he shied away from talking about abortion on the campaign trail and encouraged fellow Republicans not to legislate conservative restrictions.

On one hand, many of his top advisors from his first term in office wrote the exceedingly conservative and controversial Project 2025 manifesto. On the other, he has distanced himself from it and the people who wrote it, saying he had never even read the document.

And on one hand, Elon Musk, one of Trump’s biggest supporters and financial backers, has claimed he could cut the size of government, government spending and even a number of federal agencies. On the other hand, most economists have said the Trump campaign’s economic agenda would dramatically expand the federal deficit more than Harris’ proposed policies.

It should be noted, however, there definitely is one area where Trump has never wavered: trade.

Trump has maintained a protectionist stance for many decades, so we can expect
consistency here. However, it remains unclear how much his Republican colleagues from rural parts of America will support such protectionist policies.

The agenda for a ‘dictator on day one’

The most well-known – and probably the most infamous – of Trump’s promises for his return to the White House was his statement about being a dictator “only on day one”.

This quote became a well-known part of the Biden and Harris campaigns’ stump speeches against Trump. It’s perhaps less well-known what exactly he would do.

He initially pledged to immediately close the border with Mexico and expand drilling for fossil fuels. On the campaign trail, he broadened his first-day priorities to also include:

firing Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has charged Trump in two federal cases

pardoning some of the rioters imprisoned after the January 6 2021 riots

beginning mass deportations for the estimated 11 million people living in the United States without legal immigration status
and ending what he has called “Green New Deal atrocities” within President Joe Biden’s framework for tackling climate change.

Trump also, in a surprise to immigration activists, said he would also “automatically” give non-citizens in the country permanent residency when they graduate from college.

What about his Cabinet?

The old adage that “personnel is policy” applies to Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

When Biden appointed Kurt Campbell to lead the White House’s Indo-Pacific efforts on the National Security Council, the move made clear that an “allies and partners” approach would define his administration’s policy in Asia.

And when Trump appointed Mike Pence to be his running mate in 2016, it made clear to traditional Republicans that Trump would have a “Republican insider” in an influential position in his administration.

Trump has made clear that Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will play sizeable roles in his administration, but it remains unclear exactly what they will do.

Musk has promised to cut government regulation and red tape and Kennedy has pledged to “Make America Healthy Again”. On a practical level, however, it’s still too early to tell what type of role the two celebrities will have – particularly given Trump cabinet appointees will require Senate confirmation.

Trump and Kennedy have grown closer in recent months.
Evan Vucci/AP

While the Republicans are going to control the Senate again, this doesn’t guarantee it will support his appointees. A slim Republican majority in the Senate in 2017 did not support all of Trump’s agenda.

The high staff turnover that defined Trump’s first term of office may once again define his second term. There was also sometimes little coherence between his appointments. For example, Trump national security advisors Michael Flynn and John Bolton had little in common beyond a shared antagonism for the Obama administration’s policies.

At the same time, deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger ultimately stayed for nearly the entirety of the Trump administration. He not only led much of Trump’s strategic policies toward Asia, but also defined the term “strategic competition”, which will likely outlast both the Biden and Trump administrations.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Ultimately, if Trump’s second term in office is anything like his first term, then the prognostication about his policy agenda and personnel appointments will continue for some time.

It’s therefore less valuable to guess what Trump will do than to focus on the long-term structural trends that would have continued regardless of who is in the White House.

After all, the Biden administration maintained or sought to expand man of the Trump administration’s efforts abroad, including his “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” policy, tariffs, and the Abraham Accords that normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states.

At home, the Biden administration built on Trump policies that included government support for domestic manufacturing, expansion of the Child Tax Credit and increasing restrictions on large technology firms.

And furthermore, even a Harris administration would have been unlikely to view China as a fair economic partner, deploy US troops to the Middle East, or oppose NATO allies increasing their defence spending.

Trump will undoubtedly remain unpredictable and unconventional, but it would be a mistake to think there are not clear areas of continuity that began before Trump and will continue long after him. More

One of the most bizarre aspects of the United States presidential election has been how difficult it’s been to determine the truth — particularly due to Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy — and if the truth even matters.

White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci walks back to the West Wing of the White House in July 2017. His advice to take Trump symbolically, not literally, likely puzzled Canadian policymakers.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

As former Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci once noted about the former president: “Don’t take him literally, take him symbolically.” This advice wasn’t very helpful.

The difficulty in determining what is true is symptomatic of the high levels of uncertainty that Canadian policymakers are confronted with regularly in their dealings with their American counterparts.

Voters in the most powerful nation on Earth — and Canada’s neighbour and largest trading partner — are choosing between two starkly different choices on the ballot, and Canada must be attentive and adaptive across a number of policy areas.

Three-part process

Scenario planning provides an effective way to address such high levels of uncertainty. The method can generate difficult and radically different descriptions of the future by way of challenging participants, requiring imaginative interventions and overcoming stability and optimism biases.

At the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance at Dalhousie University, our team used this method extensively throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, including with members of the tourism industry in early 2021. The method proved to be an effective tool for these organizations in planning for the 2021 tourism season in light of the uncertainty posed by COVID-19.

There are typically three parts to the approach, divided by sessions. The first session establishes the goals the participants wish to achieve in light of their unique challenges and timelines. Goals vary but usually address some aspect of the medium-term success of the organization. Timelines can be anything from a few months down the road to decades from now.

Motivating factors

The group then discusses drivers, which are highly impactful forces beyond their immediate control that will shape the scenarios. Two drivers are selected, often based on supply-and-demand concepts.

During the second session, participants describe four scenarios based on the two drivers, answering questions that include:

What does this scenario look like?
How would we arrive at this scenario?
What are the underlying causes of the scenario?
What are the critical failures and opportunities in this scenario?

Finally, the group names the scenario. The four scenarios are deliberately intended to be different and extreme in order to push people beyond their comfort zones.

At the third session, participants establish how they’re going to judge policies and operational changes knowing that any one of the four scenarios could materialize.

Trade, economy

In terms of scenario planning for the Canada-U.S. relationship, Canadian policymakers could consider U.S. trade policies as the first driver (liberal trade policies vs. protectionist policies) and the state of the American economy as the second driver (it either booms or it sinks into a deep recession).

Policymakers can use a two-by-two matrix to discuss potential strategies in light of the possible scenarios posed by the U.S economy and trade policies.
(MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance)

Organized as a two-by-two matrix, policymakers can explore four plausible future scenarios: either liberal or protectionist trade policies, during either an economic boom or a recession.

Within these four scenarios, policymakers can develop criteria by which to evaluate Canadian policies knowing that any one of these four scenarios could materialize.

There are important things to consider at the design stage.

To start, it can be time-consuming to organize and execute the sessions. You can run remarkably simple and helpful sessions in a day, or extremely involved ones over several months.

The number of participants is flexible. Usually it involves a small to medium-sized group, but individuals can use the two-by-two matrix to think through problems over lunch.

Who’s there matters. We tend to invite people who represent different parts of an organization or sector. That provides legitimacy to the process and satisfies a sense of fair play, and this approach can also help participants accept the conclusions and communicate them broadly.

At the same time, having representatives from each part of the organization can lead to turf wars. It can serve to reinforce existing institutional arrangements rather than challenge, change and in some cases abolish them. Bringing in guest speakers to share best practices from other jurisdictions can help to discuss difficult issues.

The Ambassador Bridge, spanning the Detroit River between Windsor and Detroit, in December 2021. The trade and economic relationship between the U.S. and Canada provides lots of material for scenario planning for Canadian policymakers.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Thornhill

Embracing diversity

Scenario planning exercises also favour elite groups — experts, company executives and clever high flyers who are skilled at imaginative thinking. Turning to these elite groups can be at odds with equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility principles.

Diverse sources of information can challenge participants to think differently and also help participants to understand the impacts of scenarios to different communities.

Participants also need to be able to speak frankly. Values may differ, and attempts by participants to avoid saying anything controversial can crowd out more nuanced thoughts.

Generally, egalitarian dynamics lead to consensus-seeking solutions. But this doesn’t always result in more radical transformations. In some respects, the four possible scenarios compel participants to consider quite different views, which can be helpful.

Diverse participants in scenario planning sessions can challenge people to think differently.
(Shutterstock)

All of this makes discussing how to judge new programs at the third session more challenging and important.

One way to address these challenges is to have a broad way to discuss and evaluate each strategy. Typically, we examine different parts of the strategy — how an organization gathers information, sets standards and changes behaviour internally — and different criteria by which to judge the strategies (efficiency, fairness and accountability and stability and learning).

An experienced moderator with some professional distance from the group can help to keep the conversation on time, on subject and challenge participants when conventional wisdom starts to creep in.

Public agencies are premised on a command-and-control dynamic, but policymakers increasingly need tools and skills that allow them to anticipate, address and communicate risks over which they have limited control.

The U.S. election and its aftermath in the weeks and months to come are a salient and consequential example. Scenario planning allows policymakers to challenge their assumptions and have difficult conversations in light of quickly changing events in order to seize opportunities and reduce vulnerabilities. More

Visual images often last in historical and popular memory. This is especially the case in presidential campaigns in the United States, which offer a vast mix of spectacle, surprise and drama.

An historian of political visual culture can no more predict which images are likely to last the test of time than we can know who will win. But we can explain why some historical images from presidential campaigns resonate.

This election season has produced the most media savvy and diverse campaign imagery of all time. Cable news, social media and artificial intelligence have created a whole new universe of image-based narratives.

In this rich visual landscape, here are three images likely to last the test of time.

1. Trump’s ‘fight!’ photo

The uncontroversial front-runner for defining image has to be Evan Vucci’s photograph of Donald Trump being led off the stage in Pennsylvania after surviving an assassination attempt in July.

Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents after being shot at during a campaign rally on July 13.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Many people, including Trump, were quick to elevate the photograph to the iconic status of Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of troops raising the flag on Iwo Jima during the second world war.

Both are photographed from below and feature the national flag above Americans working against adversity to reach a common goal. Both fit squarely into the tradition of wartime photojournalism.

Both photographs enjoyed instantaneous popularity: Trump’s image went viral and the Iwo Jima image was featured on a US postage stamp before the war’s end.

US marines raise the American flag atop Mt Suribachi, Iwo Jima, Japan, in 1943.
AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal

But their greatest similarity resides in the cultural symbolism of the images.

Both accurately represent an historical moment; a specific point in time. But the point in time has been actively selected to fit a narrative. The narratives projected are deeply held mythologised symbols of aspirational patriotism.

Read more:
Elevation, colour – and the American flag. Here’s what makes Evan Vucci’s Trump photograph so powerful

Visual literacy prompts us to think about which images were discounted in the selection of these historically powerful two. Historical legacies and the national mythologies that fuel these lean toward images of success over pictures of wartime death and suffering.

This image of Trump fits all the criteria we would typically and probably unconsciously apply when assessing if an image is likely to have long-term significance.

The baseline characteristic of iconic images is a general bipartisan understanding of what an image “says”. Regardless of whether you agree with the message being conveyed, you understand its social context, why the image is provocative, dramatic or funny (or not), as well as its historical references.

However, contemporary images are not always so straightforward to read – and in a post-truth AI world, it is harder than ever to decipher the visual culture of politics.

2. Brat summer and coconut memes

Kamala Harris’s youth and vision for the future headlined her campaign’s creation of “Kamala HQ”. The strategy adopted the bright green branding and font of Charli XCX’s smash album Brat after the pop star posted on X: “kamala IS brat”.

Social media has been a critical tool in introducing Harris to voters, especially those of voting age for the first time in 2024. The campaign’s use of social media represented young people as engaged and respected decision makers.

Read more:
‘Kamala IS brat’: how the power of pop music has influenced 60 years of US elections

Voters have had more than a century to become accustomed to photojournalism. In contrast, a lot of social media representation has arisen from community activism over the past few years. Reporting from women’s marches this past weekend showed links to the visual culture of the protests that followed Trump’s 2016 election.

Arguably, the most historically significant of this “youth vote” image category are the internet memes of coconuts and coconut trees.

In a 2023 speech, Harris quoted her mother:

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.

This moment went viral during the 2024 election, and it was not long before people started signalling their support for Harris by adding a coconut emoji to their profile or comments.

The popularity of the coconut meme by Harris supporters indicates a rejection of the derogatory use of the term “coconut” against people of colour “acting white”.

The production and reception of memes by younger voters demonstrates a media literacy and sophistication that also requires continuous fact-checking.

This point was made in Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris, which urged her followers to do their own “reliability” checking of information in their feeds after Trump and other conservative figures shared AI-generated images of Swift and her fans allegedly supporting Trump.

3. The televised debate handshake

A key image from the debate between Harris and Trump came in the first few minutes, when Harris crossed the stage to offer her hand. It was the first debate handshake in eight years.

This was a bold action given Trump’s prowling movement on the 2016 debate stage against Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and his well documented predilection for firm handshakes.

The handshake is representative of the campaign, which has been called “a referendum on gender”. It evoked the image of strong and confident leadership – a central theme as Harris spoke passionately about reproductive rights and abortion.

Televised presidential debates are one of the most keenly watched and analysed moments of the presidential election season. Image is everything.

Their importance is perhaps best indicated by Justin Sullivan’s photograph of President Joe Biden, mouth agape and looking frail beneath the word “presidential” during the June debate this year.

While they rarely lead to an outcome as extreme as a candidate exiting the race, as ended up happening with Biden, the images and soundbites they generate can resonate for decades.

Biden at the June 27 presidential debate.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

During the first ever nationally televised presidential debate in 1960, Republican candidate Richard Nixon was said to be unwell and refused to wear makeup. Compared to his opponent, Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy, he sweated profusely on stage, creating an image that was disastrous to his eventually unsuccessful campaign.

Between the staged and “gotcha” moments of every presidential campaign, debates provide a unique – and, in 2024, a singular – window into how the candidates relate to each other as humans across an ever-widening ideological divide. More

Americans who heard former President Donald Trump claim that Vice President Kamala Harris previously identified as “not Black” in a July 2024 interview may wonder why he continuously emphasized former President Barack Obama’s blackness during his first presidential campaign.

As a scholar focused on race and gender issues, I recognize that these seemingly inconsistent definitions of blackness are not inconsistent at all. They demonstrate a consistent position on whiteness.

In both cases, Trump implies that the race of his opponent is all voters need to know to determine their characters. It is an ideology that normalizes the dominance and privilege of white Americans within a racial hierarchy.

Making whiteness great again

In the American imagination, white people are often perceived as being more authentically American than other racial groups.

Additionally, Trump and some of his followers see many of America’s strides on civil rights as detrimental to white people. Trump has said that “anti-white feeling” is a significant problem in America. And Republican voters, who are overwhelmingly white, are more likely than the general population to view racism as a bigger problem for white people.

Trump has said he believes America was at its best in the 1940s and 1950s. However, Trump’s long-standing inflammatory rhetoric around race — including his recent racist comments degrading Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio — do not simply glorify a time immediately before the civil rights era. They recall an older era.

Calls to “Make America Great Again” hearken back to colonialism, when whiteness — particularly white, male power — was at its peak. The period from 1500 to the 1960s was a time when white men could exercise control over people of color by racially classifying their bodies. And they protected whiteness by passing laws that declared “one drop” of Black blood as enough to declare someone Black.

Whiteness is property, as the legal scholar Cheryl Hines has argued. It’s an asset for those who possess it. It offers benefits like white privilege and the idea of being white as moral and superior.

One-drop statutes, such as the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, attempted to scientifically define who was Black based on how much African ancestry a person had. Passed in dozens of states in the 20th century, these laws were about maintaining white purity.

More specifically, one-drop statutes reflected a fear that people who were considered white in terms of their appearance but had Black ancestry could reproduce with other white people. This, in turn, would result in the supposed degeneration of the white race.

These laws attempted to legally define Blackness.

Power and dominance

Harris and Obama, the children of immigrants, both have mixed-race backgrounds. Harris is the child of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother. Obama is the son of a Black Kenyan father and a white American mother.

However, Trump insists that Harris was “Indian all the way,” while Obama was a “Black president.” For me, this perspective reveals another aspect of Trump’s racial thinking: He appears to believe in the impenetrability and power of whiteness.

Trump sees Harris as capable of dancing back and forth between being Indian and being Black. Yet he has never implied that Obama can dance between being Black and being white.

In a society that often ties physical characteristics to racial identity, many people might find it difficult to imagine Obama as identifying as white. That’s because our society associates his skin tone and hair texture with Blackness.

However, I argue that the inability to view this hypothetical racial dance as possible for Harris and not for Obama is tied to white supremacist beliefs.

These beliefs defend whiteness as being imbued with dominance over other racial groups. This power is reflected in the ability to define the race of others, regardless of how they may identify themselves. And it is reflected in the desire to also limit who can count as white.

Trump does both of those things.

Donald Trump answers questions at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention in Chicago on July 31, 2024.
Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

A foil to white identity

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said in July at a gathering of Black journalists.

He added: “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went – she became a Black person.”

By suggesting that Harris has strategically identified as Black for political gain, Trump implies that there’s a political advantage to being Black in America.

This notion aligns with the racist belief, fueled by white racial resentment, that Black Americans are afforded privileges over whites and Asian Americans.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild has shown that many white Trump supporters believe circumstances in America have gotten worse for whites in recent decades. They believe many of the gains for people of color — affirmative action and other diversity policies — have been at the expense of the rights of white people.

Simultaneously, Trump’s comments emphasize his own whiteness by using Harris’ and Obama’s race as a foil to his white identity. Research on the construction of race in America shows that whiteness is devoid of meaning without something to define itself against.

For white people who feel many things have been taken away from them in an increasingly multiracial America, Trump is their warrior. He campaigns to protect the white population and culture of America. More