ANDREW NEIL: Truly we now stay in The Age Of Trump… and it could be extra lasting than many realise

It is a comeback for the ages. Donald Trump will be the first US President to serve two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, another New Yorker, in the late 19th century. But Trump’s triumph is more convincing, more consequential than that of his illustrious predecessor.

Apart from being on course to win a comfortable majority in the electoral college which picks the President – as the Mail went to press the estimate was 312 to 226 – it looks like he will win a majority of the popular vote, too, (72million to 67million) something no Republican has managed since George W. Bush’s post-9/11 victory in 2004.

Even when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, she was three million votes ahead in the popular vote.

So 2016 was no fluke, no aberration, no last gasp of old, dying white men, as so many liberal commentators claimed at the time. Rather it was a major stepping stone to the creation of a new multi-ethnic voting coalition which is now the dominant force in national US politics.

The Republicans didn’t just win back the White House on Tuesday. They also reclaimed the Senate, with a working majority. Republican appointees already dominate the Supreme Court. If the party also holds on to the House (at the time of writing that was still unclear), it will be a clean sweep of every citadel of federal government power for Trump’s Republicans.

As a senior Democratic strategist ruefully admitted to me yesterday: ‘Truly we now live in the Age of Trump.’

It is instructive to understand why this has come about and to see why it may be more lasting than many realise. To Trump’s core constituency of working-class whites, especially men, especially in rural areas and smaller towns, has now been added the same demographic from certain ethnic minorities. Hispanic men, in particular, flocked to his banner.

Four years ago, Joe Biden won that group by 23 points. This time Trump had a ten-point lead, a huge switch crucial to giving him victory in the swing states. Black males also switched to him in unprecedented numbers.

While Democratic elites obsessed about identity politics, good old-fashioned social-class politics made a comeback. Turns out blue-collar ethnic voters have the same concerns as blue-collar white voters: the cost-of-living squeeze, the chaos on the southern border which threatens their jobs and wages with wave after wave of illegal cheap labour, a patriotic sense that America is losing respect in the world.

Democrats were too busy rolling out their woke agendas to notice what was happening to a vital part of their own voter base. The Trump campaign had carte blanche to mop them up.

It is a switch in voter allegiance which still has some way to go. But you can see its potential in Florida, where it is already pronounced. Only recently a swing state, it is now solidly red thanks to a new multi-ethnic Republican coalition.

Trump squeaked it by one percentage point in 2016. On Tuesday, he romped home with a 13-point lead. He even walked it in the heavily urban county of Miami-Dade, hitherto the state’s Democratic stronghold.

It is a remarkable development, especially since, at times during the campaign, Trump came across as his own worst enemy, seemingly intent on alienating the very groups – women, Hispanics, younger voters – he needed to win. But in the end it did him no discernible harm.

Ordinary voters take Trump’s pronouncements a lot less seriously than the largely liberal-Left American commentariat. The bloviators who dominate broadcasting work themselves into a frenzy over his latest outrageous remarks, seeing incipient fascism – even Nazism – in the making.

Plain folk tend to shrug and say: ‘It’s just Donald.’ He entertains by saying crazy, sometimes stupid things. They don’t see them as a prelude to policy.

In the dying days of the campaign, Harris joined the chorus claiming Trump was a fascist and a threat to democracy. It cut through but only among people already voting Democrat. Those whose votes were still up for grabs were more concerned about their pocketbooks than Hitler.

Though the US economy has, post-pandemic, outperformed all other major market economies, the Biden-Harris years became synonymous with high prices and a squeeze on real wages, which savaged middle-income living standards.

Voters, often with rose-tinted glasses, looked back on the lower inflation Trump years with some longing. They also thought Trump had done a better job controlling illegal immigration on the southern border with Mexico. They were right. About 2.5 million illegals made it into America in the Trump years, which was bad enough. But more than ten million flooded across after the Biden administration eased controls.

The threat of this potential cheap labour was clear to Hispanics and blacks on the minimum wage. They switched to Trump in greater numbers than before. Many even supported his plans for mass deportations.

The elevation of identity politics under Biden-Harris, which played better on the college campus than the factory floor, also consolidated the new Trump coalition.

A Trump campaign ad entitled Nonsense, whose significance was underappreciated at the time, attacked Harris for backing taxpayer-funded gender transition procedures, even for criminals in prison. It ended with the tagline: ‘Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.’

At a time when Harris was pulling ahead, it brought her momentum to a grinding halt, probably the most effective political ad since the Republicans’ infamous Willie Horton ad of 1988, which accused the Democratic candidate of releasing killers from prison to kill again.

Patriotism was another vital building block in the new Trump coalition. The collapse of US authority abroad, forever imprinted on American minds by the embarrassing scuttle from Afghanistan in Biden’s first year, was also illustrated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel, its most important Middle East ally. These international humiliations also played to Trump’s ‘strongman’ image.

Harris was on the wrong end of all these issues. But Trump was still beatable by a confident, adroit Democratic candidate who could resonate with the American people. Harris was none of the above. Indeed, as the campaign progressed, Democrats were reminded why so many of them had not wanted her to be Biden’s replacement.

They thought she’d been a pretty useless vice-president. They now despaired as she proved to be a pretty useless presidential candidate.

She had nothing original to say on any of the major issues. She sought refuge in platitudes (‘When we fight, we win’) and vacuities (‘Let us turn the page’). She posed as the candidate of change. But couldn’t explain how she’d be different from Biden.

She could not shake off her role at the heart of an unpopular administration. She represented continuity. Most Americans thought the country was going in the wrong direction. They didn’t want continuity.

She was sprung on her party and the American people in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s defenestration, without having to go through the usual gruelling hoops that regularly rumble those who would be presidential candidates.

Voters told pollsters they didn’t really know her and were puzzled by what she stood for. Would she govern as a newly-minted moderate or as the defund-the-police, decriminalise-illegal-migrants, ban-fracking Harris of only a few years ago?

Her word salads, her flip-flopping, her vacuous stump speeches all contributed to her lack of authenticity, in stark contrast to Trump. His authenticity could repel as much as it attracted but nobody was in much doubt what they were getting.

In the end, Harris even underperformed among women voters, the demographic her campaign was most sure would propel her to victory, on the back of the abortion issue.

But just as pocketbook issues trumped her ‘threat to democracy’ appeals, so abortion – for all its salience to so many women – did not prove important enough to determine the votes she needed for victory.

In the days to come we will no doubt hear more from Team Trump and The Donald himself, about what a masterful campaign he ran to secure victory. And he has every right to savour the win.

But Trump owes Harris and the Democrats, perhaps best regarded as the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, a debt of gratitude for helpfully paving his way to the White House with their own incompetence.

Now the rest of us have to live with the consequences. America and its allies will have to brace themselves for the tumult and upheaval that will inevitably accompany a second Trump presidency. Once again we will wake up in trepidation of what he’s done or said while we were asleep. Whole news cycles will be consumed by some stupid remark or intention that, in the end, meant nothing, led to nothing.

Liberals will be on full alert for signs of the fascist tendencies they have so confidently smeared him with – though, in truth, Trump is too lazy and undisciplined to run a fascist regime.

Even if he could discover the focus to attempt such a transformation, the US constitution, which is made of stern stuff and has stood the test of time, will keep him in line, as it did during his first term. Above all, the international community will need to do a better job of interpreting Trump.

When he talks of huge tariffs on countries exporting to America, implies he’s ready to hang Ukraine out to dry, threatens migrants with mass deportation, demands Europe doubles defence spending or speaks fondly of dictators, we need to determine if he’s talking policy or staking out a negotiating position. His modus operandi, after all, is transactional rather than ideological, as befits an opportunistic New York property developer.

America’s allies will need to brace themselves for turbulent times. Trump has no doubt concluded that Europe is currently led by political pygmies.

He’s not wrong, the continent is largely leaderless. Europe will have to get its act together. It needs to develop more robust foreign policies to bolster its security and it cannot escape spending more on defence, even if it has already edged up military spending. Trump will insist on more.

The temptation to criticise Trump will regularly present itself in the coming months and years, but allied governments will need to resist it.

This is where Britain’s Labour Government needs to be especially disciplined, since too many of its leading lights still think they’re in student politics.

During Trump’s second term the Pacific Rim, the European theatre and the Middle East will all vie for his time. Trump’s attention span is notoriously short. He will not be able to focus on all three at once, especially since he has a formidable domestic agenda to implement, too.

The prize will go to those allies who show they’re prepared to do more for themselves even while recognising that America is the essential ally.

That’s the kind of transaction likely to win Trump’s approval.