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On November 8, 2024, three days after the election, The New York Times ran the headline: “President-Elect Spun His Own Grievances Into Political Gold.” Trump had, once again, managed to defy the laws of gravity: he had overcome seemingly fatal political vulnerabilities—four criminal indictments, three expensive lawsuits, conviction on thirty-four felony counts, and endless reckless tangents in his speeches. So crude and self-indulgent was Trump on the campaign trail, that aides wondered “if he were engaged in an absurdist experiment to test how much aberrant behavior voters would tolerate.” The answer: an untold amount. Trump's victory, Times's reporters claimed, “came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half” the electorate.1
In the years since Trump came down the golden escalator and began to reshape American politics, pundits have been puzzled by his massive appeal. As Elizabeth Breunig, writing in The Atlantic, noted: “They have perhaps sensed … that Trump's support came from some place underneath conscious and rational political analysis.” Trump, she added, “is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside their usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them.”2 In similar vein, Eric Reinhart, in Jacobin, insisted that progressives must move “beyond naïve Marxisms that ignore sources of aggression and solidarity other than property relations.” They must “take the reality of … racism and sadomasochism as enduring political feelings.”3 Six years earlier, Gary Greenberg, in The Guardian, had interpreted Trump's deepest appeal as his unspoken promise, “to undo the Enlightenment, to free us from the burdens of living rationally…. [I]n a collective ejaculation of rage and resentment, a near-majority of the electorate went with its gut and rejected not a candidate [Hillary Clinton] or