Column: The events of 2020 seemed epochal. Trump’s election exposed them as aberrant.
“Don’t forget all that we accomplished,” President Biden said during his Thursday address on the election. “It’s been a historic presidency. Not because I’m president, [but] because of what we’ve done. What you’ve done. A presidency for all Americans.”
Americans say otherwise. According to the Fox News Voter Analysis, only 40 percent of voters expressed a favorable view of Biden. His unfavorable rating was a whopping 58 percent. The economy and immigration were the two most important issues. Voters preferred Trump over Vice President Harris on the economy by 24 points. They preferred Trump over Harris on immigration by a jaw-dropping 77 points.
The country shifted right on Election Day. Trump made inroads everywhere, in all corners and among critical voting blocs. He is on track to win all seven swing states. He is the first Republican in a generation to win the popular vote. He has won the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania twice, something no Republican since Ronald Reagan has accomplished. He is expected to enter office with a GOP trifecta of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The electorate identified as Republican for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Biden’s presidency is “historic” not for its accomplishments but for its ultimate outcome: Donald Trump’s reelection, the first nonconsecutive presidential terms since the 19th century, and a working-class realignment toward the GOP.
History is contingent. Small differences have huge consequences. Some 80,000 people in three states handed Trump the presidency in 2016. Some 44,000 voters in three states gave Biden the presidency four years later. If Trump had not turned his head slightly just as his would-be assassin fired at him on July 13, America would have been plunged into chaos.
Yet the 2024 election cannot be explained away as an accident. A friend calls it “1980 lite”—a low-cal version of Reagan’s romp through the Electoral College and 12-seat pickup in the Senate. Interestingly, though Trump will have fewer electoral votes than Reagan, he is set to match the Gipper’s 51 percent of the popular vote. And Republicans likely will have as many senators (53) next year as they did in 1981. As if there were any doubt, the 2024 result secures Trump’s place as an epochal figure in American history. He is the 21st century’s Andrew Jackson—who also was two for three in presidential elections.
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession inaugurated a populist era dominated by Donald Trump. Barack Obama represents the progressive, technocratic, globalist elite’s response to the financial crisis and its aftermath. Trump embodies the traditionalist, nationalist, anti-elitist antithesis of Obama. Trump entered the political arena not long after Obama’s inauguration, peddling the “birther” conspiracy theory and finding an appreciative audience among disaffected voters, independents, and parts of the Tea Party. It was Obama’s mocking of Trump at the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner that is said to have prompted his desire to run for office. They have traded blows ever since.
Obama is the only Democrat to win reelection with majorities of the vote since FDR. By the time he left the White House, however, his party was a broken shell. In 2016, Obama preferred Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden. Clinton lost. In 2024, Obama helped ease Biden out of the race for president and endorsed Harris. Harris lost. Obama’s preferred successors fell to the man he helped unleash.
In hindsight, Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 looks less like a mandate than a pandemic-induced anomaly. Obama didn’t want Biden to run in 2020 either. Yet Harris and Pete Buttigieg flopped, Bernie Sanders was too extreme, and Biden was left as the consensus candidate at the outset of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.
The pandemic lockdowns kept Biden in his basement and shielded him from the public. Democrats succumbed to the national hysteria over race and identity that followed the death of George Floyd. Biden promised to nominate a woman of color for vice president and a black woman for the Supreme Court. He worked with Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the party platform. Meanwhile, on Zoom calls and at drive-in rallies, he portrayed himself as a steady, experienced hand amid the Trump circus.
His election was a close-run thing. The unexpected GOP gains down-ballot should have given him pause. Quite the opposite happened: Biden believed in the propaganda that said he could be the next FDR. His self-regard cost him the presidency. His policies created the border crisis. His spending produced inflation. His order to retreat hastily from Afghanistan eroded American deterrence. His equity agenda and transgender policies alienated voters. And his hubris led him to run for reelection despite his age and infirmity.
As the conditions that prevailed in 2020 faded away, so did Biden’s connection to the public. Pandemic restrictions ended. The costs of the DEI craze and woke ideology began to mount. Americans lost ground as prices and interest rates went up. The last piece of 2020 still on the chessboard was Biden himself. And when the June debate exposed him as incapable of serving another term as president, he was forced from the race.
The extraordinary events of 2020 are over. On January 20, 2025, President Biden and Vice President Harris will be gone. Trump remains.
