Why The Politics Of 2024 Were So Personal

A review of '2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America' by Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Tyler Pager

Contrary to the public perceptions of hard-nosed politics and a foregone conclusion, “the true story of the 2024 campaign is not so impersonal, and the outcome was not so predetermined,” write the authors of this book. Donald Trump “was not going to run until the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago” in 2022, Republican donor Doug Deason tells us. “He was pissed, he was stunned, he then was going to run and he was going to clean house at the DOJ.”

Trump took the legal onslaught personally, and it became his reason to run again. “Another longtime aide said the former president saw the campaign as ‘running for his freedom.’” Each indictment only made his support grow, while the verdict in his trial for falsifying business records in regards to the Stormy Daniels payoff became the turning point, the moment when Republican electeds embraced him in public again. All attempts to destroy Trump had only made him stronger.

Joe Biden was also setting out to prove something. According to the authors, the “bunker mentality” of Team Biden was related to the chip on the candidate’s shoulder. “For decades they were treated like the B team, a stepping stone to a more prestigious job with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Washington never believed in them.” But after Democrats held their own in the 2022 midterms, Biden believed in himself, and so did the team, so Team Biden set out “to defy their skeptics again.”

Kamala Harris also had a chip on her shoulder. Seen as a disappointment until Biden’s disastrous debate performance, she had no time to put together her own campaign, while her own people never took charge of the Biden campaign that was rebranded as her own. Harris had spent the previous year practicing her public speaking skills and wanted to prove herself. But her image would be dominated by words she had spoken in 2019, just before the peak of wokeness in American politics. Ideological pigeons were coming home to roost as the electorate soured on identitarianism and cancel culture.

What the authors make clear, but do not argue as a thesis, is that Trump had the better team. His people were better-grounded in reality, more in touch with the zeitgeist, and they developed a better strategy to motivate the real voters that were available. The year 2024 was a catastrophe for Democrats, a total embarrassment of their party and a public repudiation of their platform, because they had made it personal for Trump, who had the better team, and because Democrats had overstimated the value of their own brand so profoundly.

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