– Are you listening to Trump?
I had just staggered out of the newsroom on Wednesday morning and boarded my local Kaffebrenneriet. I sat with the phone to my ear and listened to Donald Trump’s victory speech. From the next table comes the question. The first person I have a conversation with after last night’s shock election is a young woman from Colorado. She has a small child with her.
We are talking about the shadow of the election, about the difficult economy, about tonight’s road choices that will only make it even more difficult for those who are struggling in the United States. About money power’s tightening grip on the United States. She smiles bravely, talks about how wonderful she thinks Norway and life in Fredrikstad are. About the Norwegian kindergarten. About the people back home who are so terrified of socialism.
– We will be here for three years, but I asked my husband this morning if we shouldn’t stay for four?
What kind of America will the little family return to? Where is the USA in the fall of 2028, where are we, where is the world? The following day, the questions far outnumber the answers.
Has America now become so reactionary that a woman couldn’t win?
The United States has chosen its path, and it has chosen Donald Trump as its new leader. It’s just to congratulate. With an undoubted victory. Not based on cheating or threats. After all, a victory for democracy. At the same time, one can only wish the woman from Colorado and all other Americans the best of luck. They’re going to need it.
For the night watchmen on the night of Wednesday, it looked promising for a while that the US would steer clear of Trump’s return. But already the first election day survey made it clear that the average American – 72 percent of them – is angry or displeased. When this is the mindset of the voters, it is difficult to win elections.
A couple of hours in the Norwegian gray light, Kamala Harris did well in the swing states, and she led the way in decisive Pennsylvania. There were surprises going on in Virginia, in Iowa and she had a hold on Georgia. Even as the numbers began to turn, there was hope. Because during the 2020 election, when Joe Biden came from behind on election night and turned it all around? Slowly but surely it became clear that it would not work for Kamala Harris.
Trump is more popular now than ever before, and for the first time has won the most votes. He is destined to win all the seven much talked about seesaw states. The red Republicans will also gain the majority in the Senate, while the Democrats have a small glimmer of hope in the possibility of winning back the majority in the House of Representatives. But the United States has to some extent said nothing. It has been a protest election. Americans are angry and disaffected. And they have gone with open eyes to the man who has been charged with attempted coup d’état on 6 January 2021.
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It was déjà vu, it was 2016 all over again. CNN legend John King once again stood in front of his interactive map, looking for voices that could change the picture. Without finding them. Unreality was back. What you just couldn’t believe the US would do, they did – again. One feels the same confused numbness. It’s a shock, I have to admit. And thoughts inevitably turn to which way the United States is going and what it will mean for us.
What will it mean for the climate work, for Nato? For democracy? And not least for Ukraine, which is completely dependent on the USA’s extraordinary support. The answers will come. It is clear to me that we are now taking a long step into the unknown and potentially dangerous with Trump 2.0.
The summary analyzes are too early to do, of course. But the vote numbers suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris may have had too bad a time. She certainly became associated with a very unpopular president. One of the questions that will of course be asked in the coming weeks is whether it was right for the Democrats to go for Biden’s vice president as a candidate? Did she have a real chance to win?
While Harris and the Democrats tried to turn the election into a referendum for or against Trump, America voted for Joe Biden. And the voters have signaled with belligerent types that Harris, who has stood by his side for almost four years, has no confidence in continuing. She failed to establish herself as a credible alternative. She never came out of the president’s shadow.
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Despite Trump’s age, undemocratic tendencies, unpredictability and burdened history, the US was more willing to take a chance on him than on another round with Biden’s companion Harris. That says a lot about the dissatisfaction.
Harris is blamed for the economy. It didn’t help with key figures that say the US is doing well, that inflation is low, unemployment the same, when people can’t afford to buy food and think they remember that life was better during the Trump years. Make America Great Again? Yes, why not.
As vice president, Harris was also a large part of the Biden administration’s handling of the border and immigration issues. She did not escape responsibility for this.
Nor did Kamala Harris become the first female president. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost. There is reason to ask whether the United States has now become so reactionary that a woman could not win. Figures suggest that black men and the Latino communities have turned their backs on the Democrats. Were macho men and value-conservative Catholics who decided this? Next to the Ukrainians, it is the women of the United States that we can now light a candle for.
A final reflection that cannot be escaped in the moment of shock is the rapidly aging and weakened President Joe Biden’s clinging to power. The surrounding apparatus that kept him away from the public, covered up his frailty and with it suited his own positions. Until it was actually too late.
The time from the end of July to Tuesday 5 November was not enough for Harris. And maybe she wasn’t even the right candidate. But the president did not give his party any other choice. Harris was the obvious choice, but we will never know what and who would have come out of a nominating process with American withdrawal. Where the best candidate, with the best arguments, challenged through countless debates and primaries, had been left as the winner – and challenger to Trump.
The verdict of history could be brutal for Joe Biden.