It is almost universally recognized that Tuesday’s election was a decisive event in the political history of the United States. To the very end, the Democratic establishment, the dwindling detritus of never-Trump Republicans, and the 95 percent of the national political press that was rabidly hostile to President Trump, ignored the polls that showed the public severely dissatisfied with the Democrats’ open borders, reckless inflation, generation of high urban crime rates, and inability to solve adequately any foreign problem from Afghanistan to Gaza. They believed Vice President Harris would either win or lose by a whisker.

It turns out that the election was an unprecedented repudiation of the national political press, including the polling organizations attached to leftist media outlets and universities. Almost all of them were outside the margin of error and were exposed as unreliable.  The election was a cultural as well as a political watershed: the country is disgusted with woke, anti-majority, anti-American guilt and endless fault-finding. 

The country sensed that the Democrats were motivated by what the late distinguished English commentator Malcolm Muggeridge originally called “the great liberal death wish.” From opening the southern borders to millions of desperate people, including scores of thousands of violent criminals, to trying to buy votes with inflationary spending, to the deliberate atomization of American society into grumbling and agitating fragments of artificially aggrieved subgroups at the expense of national coherence and self-respect, Americans were fed up with all of it and wouldn’t take it anymore, and even evicted the permissive Los Angeles district attorney and the hopeless mayor of San Francisco.

It is the end of the post-Reagan drift of American politics: the sleazy and facile “new democracy” of the Clintons, the  incompetence of George W. Bush, and the cynical and relentless imputation to white America of racial prejudices of the Obamas; it all tanked with the failures in every major policy area of the Biden administration.

This was a senescent president and a vice president who is incapable of answering a single question, even from Oprah Winfrey after she had been paid $1 million to conduct a fawning interview. Yet right to the end, the Democrats thought they would win and the press thought it was somewhere between a narrow Democratic victory and a coin-toss cliffhanger.

The first lesson of the election is that all those whose welfare and credibility are dependent upon satisfying the public generally or accurately judging the public mood, should reacquaint themselves with the American public. The great majority of Americans think they live in what is fundamentally a good country that is on balance a benefit to the world.

The second lesson is that the country will not tolerate the perversion of the criminal justice system and the intelligence agencies to launch false accusations against a presidential candidate or the spurious recourse to the impeachment process where there is no justification for it, or a barrage of unfounded criminal and civil allegations against a leader of the opposition at the outset of an election campaign.

American voters are accustomed to hearing their politicians accused of communist proclivities with more or less accuracy, but when one presidential candidate accuses the other of being a fascist, with all that implies, and a former presidential candidate assimilates the Republican candidate to Hitler, all Americans should be reassured that the country reacts negatively.         

Unlike the reception given Trump’s victory eight years ago, when it was widely stated that he must have stolen the election, with the collusion of the Russian government, and was an intolerable extremist, charlatan, and a mountebank who was not a legitimate president, all are aware that he has now surmounted the greatest assault of illegal skullduggery that any American presidential candidate has ever faced, and has won the popular vote against an almost solid wall of media hostility and preponderant financial resources.

It is certainly time that Trump was not only recognized for his perseverance and his physical courage in speaking to huge crowds all around the country despite assassination attempts and knowledge of the existence of other assassination plots. He has also shown himself a transformative leader and ingenious political operator on the scale, if not the comparable elegance, of a Roosevelt or Reagan. 

It is time to recognize, as he embarks on his unambiguous mandate for comprehensive change, the scope of Trump’s achievement. He developed the technique of making himself electable as president by the achievement of celebrity, even though much of the publicity and attention that he received that made him one of the most famous people in the country, was unflattering.

Trump was almost alone in perceiving that the post-Reagan bipartisan political establishment was cantilevering itself steadily more precariously over a chasm of moderate and lower income Americans who felt ignored by their government and belittled by the political elites. He thus became the first person never to have sought or held any public office or military command to be elected president.                               

Once elected, he attacked the Democratic hold on the working class and ethnic minorities by adapting the capitalism of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan to the assistance of those groups by using the tax system to incentivize job creation among them.

He has made the Republicans the party of strong but not irrational patriotism, more effective assistance to the disadvantaged, the party of law enforcement and crime reduction and of a foreign policy that has kicked the Western alliance from a gang of freeloaders into a serious assembly of countries that will define its collective interest and assure that it has the means to defend that interest, but will otherwise be very cautious about committing armed forces to areas that are not strategically vital.

This is not extreme and is somewhat similar to Reagan’s course-correction of 40 years ago, which essentially consisted of tax cuts and a defense buildup and brought prolonged prosperity and the victorious end of the Cold War. These next four years are likely to be successful, and to move the public policy goal posts accordingly and cause the Democrats to resurrect themselves as a centrist party.

The Trump Republicans have also become an eclectic and interesting group with new arrivals such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and the former Sandersite, Tulsi Gabbard, and a general air of spontaneity exemplified by candidate Trump serving French fries at McDonald’s and riding in a garbage truck.

Trump has probably confirmed one more distinction: despite a heavy turnout, the total popular vote appears to have declined approximately 4 million from the 2020 totals. That number could reflect a reduction in the number of unsolicited mail-in ballots sent out during the 2020 election, raising concerns about ballot harvesting by the Democrats and the casting of unverifiable votes, particularly in the swing states. We will never know for sure, and we may never know why the press has worked so feverishly to deny the fact, but Trump is probably, apart from Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only person to have won three consecutive American presidential elections. He is now a historic figure.