TOM EATON | How Donald Trump was resurrected from a political grave and ascended to the White House

This week Donald Trump crawled out of a political grave marked ‘Twice-Impeached Insurrectionist Rapist’ to sweep the US elections, and now the postmortems are stacking up faster than classified files stored in his Mar-A-Lago bathroom.

You’ll have seen many of these analyses yourself. It was populism. It wasn’t populism. Trump read the mood of the country whereas the Democrats just read The New Yorker. Harris failed to distance herself from the failures of the Biden administration. Inflation. Ukraine. Latino men. Wokeism Gone Mad ™. Even sweet baby Jesus.

Certainly, on that last point even this heathen columnist can see why some of Trump’s most religious followers believe that he is God’s instrument on earth. There must be only a small handful of people in human history who have failed so regularly, whether as a businessman, a husband, a thinker, or simply a human being, and gone as far as Trump has; and sometimes it really does feel like some Loki-like deity has reached down and given him a golden ticket.

Of course, he’s had some help from mortals, too, like Survivor creator Mark Burnett who cooked up The Apprentice and convinced millions of Americans that Trump was a good businessman rather than the laughingstock of New York, or Rupert Murdoch, who embraced Trump as his most useful idiot to turn Fox News into a money-printing business.

And then of course there have been the larger human and economic tides that he has ridden back to the White House: the US middle class being mowed down by late capitalism with its offshoring of jobs and baked-in inequality; the Democrats’ curious inability or even refusal to stay in touch with the blue collar workers who were once the lifeblood of the party; the collapse of conventional journalism thanks to big tech, increasingly replaced by political influencers waging a relentless and successful war on facts; the growing influence of the evangelical right as conservative religion grows impatient with the separation of church and state ...

The list goes on. But beyond the specifics of Trump’s resurrection and Harris’ defeat, the bottom line is that a solid majority of Americans have shown that they are willing to elect a rapist and fraud over a non-rapist and non-fraudster if they think that the rapist and fraud will serve their interests better.

They have formally and officially abandoned their last liberal pretences of morality and meritocracy and embraced pure pragmatism, and once you go that route, and throw in a dash of millenarian religion and a sprinkling of Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, you could end up in a very dark place.

There are three upsides to all this, however.

The first is that the GOP has clearly decided, almost overnight, that the US’s electoral system is not, in fact, corrupt to the core and that election results can, in fact, be trusted. If the US has another election, perhaps in four years, or eight, or whenever the virgins of the temple say that the omens are auspicious, we can now be sure that Republicans will respect the outcome.

Second, by knowingly voting for a sexual abuser and convicted felon, GOP voters have relinquished the right to condemn anyone else for breaking the law. According to their own moral logic, from now on Trump voters need to respond to all their favourite crimes, whether they be illegal border crossings or desperate backstreet abortions, with a smile and a shrug. This will make life much better, or at least quieter, in the US.

The best result, however, is that the last bit of the mask has finally fallen off. The oligarchy, hidden for so long behind Yes We Can rhetoric and compliant media, has stepped forward into the spotlight. And when it reaches out to its new power-sharing partner — the Christian nationalist right — and Project 2025 really gets going, at least none of will have to pretend to be surprised.