Political Polarization and Electoral Dynamics

“Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” Such is the assessment of Peter Wehner — a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, and an outspoken critic of Trump himself — in the aftermath of the former president’s thundering re-election victory.

It was not an electoral college landslide of the order of Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1996. But it was sufficiently decisive as to command a reckoning. Perhaps most obviously, his victory relegates the Biden presidency to a kind of hiatus within what may well prove to be Trump’s twelve-year dominance of American politics.

The fact that Trump survived all the forces arrayed against him — political, legal, economic, cultural, popular — reinforces the power of his “persecution” narrative, and will likely only deepen Americans’ disdain for democratic institutions. One of the live questions of this election is whether Trump’s resurgence will encourage the would-be-antidemocratic leaders of other nations to follow his playbook.