2 hours Ago By Sarah Baxter
Two worlds collided at Donald Trump’s victory celebration in the early hours at Mar-a-Lago. Trump entered the stage first with his family in tow. Melania was followed by Barron, their lanky 18-year-old son , who has become something of a pin-up at his university campus in New York.
Ivanka, striking as ever in a blue velvet pantsuit, lagged behind other members of the family, partly obscured from view. This pecking order felt deliberate. Ivanka was like the ghost at the feast, who had sidled back to Trumpland from the world of woke .
It was her only campaign appearance at her father’s side. It was Barron, the Gen Z whisperer, who came through for dad; Barron who told Trump his generation was up for grabs. Young men were fed up with being patronised and sidelined, he said.
On Barron’s advice, Trump gave interviews to the podcasters and YouTubers that young men (and their girlfriends) enjoy: Theo Von, Lex Fridman, Adin Ross, Logan Paul. By talking to them and to Joe Rogan , the man with the biggest megaphone in America, Trump reached tens of millions of disaffected young people. My own son, 24, warned me how big this band of bro-casters was.
In the early morning, while Trump was crushing Harris in every battleground state, we spoke on the phone. “It’s a backlash against wokeness,” he told me. “Young men feel they are getting stuffed, that they have no purpose, that they should be strong and go back to the way men used to be.
” Wokeness has been comprehensively defeated in this election. The era of Black Lives Matter, Latinx, critical race theory, pronouns and defunding the police is over — or will have to be if the Democrats are to regain power. Not even young people want to be “woke” any more.
Like blue collar workers, my son’s generation feels left behind by change. They dream of making it big by investing in crypto and emulating Elon Musk. They don’t like films that portray women as superheroes and men as villains, or schools where most teachers are female and girls perform better.
Maga — make America great again — taps into these feelings. “The way algorithms work really blindsides people,” my son added. “We live in our own bubbles.
” My older-lady, college-educated bubble was telling me women were angry about abortion, that “we’re not going back” to our grandmothers’ era and that Harris could prevail against jeering Maga supporters who called her a “bitch” and a “ho”. And sure enough, my demographic was the only one in America that voted in significant numbers for Harris. She ended up with a worse result than Hillary Clinton in 2016, losing the popular vote as well as the electoral college.
Trump, a convicted felon, has now secured his place in history as one of America’s most consequential presidents. He will be unfettered by Congress and will have Supreme Court immunity for his actions as president — the only result of all that counter-productive lawfare by Democrats. There is a grim irony in that.
It’s not good enough to cry sexism. Yes, Trump has won against a woman candidate — twice. Perhaps in the US that means he’s lucky.
But my son is right about the impact of wokeness. It has poisoned liberals and Democrats for a generation. Young people are big-hearted and open-minded, but don’t want to be lectured about their pronouns or transgender rights.
There will be no comeback for the Democrats until they absorb these lessons. Interestingly, on results night, it became clear that Harris would not be president when she shocked the pundits by seriously underperforming Joe Biden in Loudoun County, Virginia, in the Washington DC suburbs. This is where school boards insisted on installing gender-neutral bathrooms costing $11 million against the wishes of pupils and their parents, even though a girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom by a boy in a skirt.
(He changed schools and went on to reoffend.) Anti-wokeness isn’t just a guy thing. A female student said: “We express our concerns and they write us off as Right-wing crazies.
” Another girl said: “We hold our pee until we can’t,” to avoid using the new bathrooms. Young women also shifted towards Trump in this election, though not to the same extent as young men. Trump ran a twin-track campaign.
His campaign staff, notably Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, made sure the focus stayed on inflation and immigration — the two biggest election issues — while Trump kept the culture wars burning. One of his closing arguments was a promise to keep “men out of women’s sports”. Why was Trump making such a big deal about a marginal issue, liberal pundits wondered.
Yet the message packed a punch. Trump was signalling to voters that he cared about fixing America’s problems, while the Democrats were more interested in virtue-signalling. Although Harris went out of her way to avoid identity politics, it helped to define her as a radical California liberal.
Her choice of Tim Walz as her running mate confirmed this impression. Instead of being Mr Blue Collar, he was a lightweight progressive. It isn’t just young people who feel unheard.
While Harris was hoping to break the ultimate glass ceiling, Trump went about building a multiracial coalition. Hispanics have been telling liberals for years they don’t want to be called Latinx or patronised as minorities. Black people want their families to be safe, not to “defund the police”.
Critical race theory and words like intersectionality are only debated in academic ivory towers, where students amass debts while being schooled by liberals. Trump didn’t happen to win more black voters. He sought them out.
He held a rally in the South Bronx, one of New York’s most diverse communities. He agreed to be interviewed by members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago (and got pilloried for it). He built a posse of support among black sporting legends from the Eighties, such as Mike Tyson.
Kadia Goba wrote a fascinating piece for Semafor in June about Trump’s black outreach. “If I never saw Donald Trump and didn’t know he was white, I would think he was black,” Tyson told her. “The way they were treating him in the papers and in the press.
Think about that, the way they treat him in court? That’s the way they did black people.” For too long Democrats have relied on an imaginary cavalry to save them from Trump. The Mueller report into Russian interference.
The Cheneys. Various judges and generals. Nothing has worked.
They can’t change the voters, so they’ll have to change themselves. Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting and a contributing editor of The London Standard.
