THREE KEY FACTS
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
Will Robert Kennedy jnr really be put in charge of public health?
If he is, he says he’ll ban vaccines and Donald Trump says he’s okay with that. Presumably, this means they will shut down research funding as well.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine last year went to two researchers whose work on mRNA enabled the unprecedented rapid development of Covid vaccines. Both work at the University of – as irony would have it – Pennsylvania.
We would not have a functional world today if it wasn’t for them.
Maybe Kennedy won’t really get that job. Maybe he will but he’ll quickly join the long list of people who discover there’s no such thing as “working with Trump”.
That’s the record of Trump’s first term: you work for him, loyally, bending to every moody moment, or you’re out. Kennedy is so idiosyncratic, he’ll last about five minutes.
This is not really a good thing. We’ve got four more years of an erratic, vengeful leader of the most powerful nation on Earth – by a long stretch – who governs in the name of nothing but his own self-interest. And this time round, it’s going to be different.
For one thing, he triumphed. Won the popular vote, the Electoral College, the Senate and probably the House and he already has the Supreme Court. He’s king now. We should all go and study Henry VIII, a not-dissimilar tyrant.
There’s so much to learn from this election. Elon Musk spent a month in Philadelphia, “running the campaign”, but he didn’t waste any time on a ground game: the door-knocking, phone-calling and helping people to vote that everyone always says is critical. He raised hundreds of millions and spent it on a social media blitzkrieg. Something at which he’s a genius.
While Kamala Harris had her folks trudging the streets, Musk handed out million-dollar prizes and Trump went on Joe Rogan.
And sure, Biden should not have stood, allowing primaries to select a new candidate. Harris should have talked more about her economic plans. But Trump has the country in his thrall and maybe, in the end, nobody could have done anything about that.
“He says a lot of silly things,” I heard a Texan supporter say. What a brilliant way to sideline everything anyone might be worried about.
Some say he appealed especially to men, Latinos and white women. But actually he appealed across the board, to almost every demographic. Not because of policies or track record or the despicable stuff in his head – sorry, silly things he says. Trump goes deeper: he knows how to make people believe he champions their own aspirations.
He’s going to stop the wars. This was profoundly appealing, especially to those who know people who’ve been to war. It probably means abandoning Ukraine, and therefore Europe, and perhaps the full annihilation of Gaza and southern Lebanon, but these things don’t seem to frighten many Americans.
Why was it so tough for Harris to argue on the economy? Wages are rising faster than inflation and most other indicators suggest the US is doing better than any other economy in the world.
But a lot of Americans don’t believe it. Not just because Trump kept telling them not to. Prices are rising and traditional jobs are disappearing. The lived experience of millions of Americans is different from what economists think it is.
To put that in Virginian or Texan terms, wind farms might be creating far more jobs than mining, but if my local mine is closing down, what’s that to me?
Those of us who think this particular debate is the most critical one we face have to get much better at it.
I know, we’re the liberal elite. But this election uncovered a couple of interesting things about that. One wasn’t really new: complaints about the liberal elite are not aimed at the real elite – that’s Musk and his buddies.
What liberals - progressives, lefties, whatever you want to say - are charged with is thinking we’re better than everyone who doesn’t share our views. It doesn’t matter if that’s not true. If others think it is, game over.
Towards the end, we were warned he was a fascist. But although the warning came from a parade of reputable, not-at-all liberal people, including military types, who all knew Trump well, it was rejected out of hand.
Trump’s supporters, not just his base but the people of middle America, have had it with being told what to think. And they don’t much like the insinuation: if Trump is a fascist, does that mean they are too?
This is a dangerous time. Of course, middle America is not fascist, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t.
And there’s this. America has twice now refused to elect a woman, even though she’s been highly qualified and the alternative was the worst specimen of a man you could imagine, right down to boasting about it.
In my view, this is the deepest thing exposed by this election. Women are never good enough to qualify. Men are never bad enough to disqualify. That’s what America is.
Trump, meanwhile, now knows more about how to get the loyalty he craves. He’s burned the old Republican Party to the ground and fired almost everyone who ever worked for him. Even Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner declined to campaign for him this time. He’s gained control of all branches of government. There are no checks and balances. He’s the king.
But he is also surrounded by people with their own agendas. There’s Musk and his libertarian mates, who want a regulation-free environment for the tech sector and a pipeline of enormous government contracts, especially for space work.
There’s the Heritage Foundation with its horrifying Project 2025 agenda. There’s the religious fundamentalists with their feudal desire to subjugate women.
And yet Trump cares only about himself. So here’s the big challenge of his second term: will it be dedicated to the random glorification of the king, or will it be the purposeful monster the ideologues want?
Can those things be synthesised? There’ll be a battle of wills over tariffs and everything else, and we, the world, will all be damaged. But the bloodiest battles will be over the succession. Who’s going to take over when Trump shuffles off?
JD Vance? He’s a touch random himself, but he limpets himself to power. He’d be Musk’s perfect puppet. The battle will start soon.
Did you sit through Trump’s victory speech? The nationalist supremacy. The God-blessed specialness. He didn’t talk about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation”, but only because he didn’t need to. Leni Riefenstahl made a film in 1935 about this kind of thing. It was called Triumph of the Will.
One note of hope. The world’s most powerful person – I’d like to say that is now Elon Musk – and the world’s most influential podcaster – Joe Rogan – both live in Austin, the state capital of Texas. Both are said to have transformed the place. But while the state voted for Trump, the city said yeah, nah, and voted for Harris.
Not everyone bends to the will of kings.
The Kremlin refuses to comment on Ukrainian allegations.