Donald Trump’s resounding victory over Kamala Harris means that the former president is now president-elect, but as a fellow New Yorker from Queens, I think the next occupant of the White House has also earned another title.
The “Teflon Don” just proved that nothing Democrats — or their allies in media, pop culture, and corporate America — threw at him would stick. Trump isn’t an infamous mafia boss like John Gotti whose track record of beating court cases earned him the moniker. To the pundit class, he is way worse. They tried to paint the former president as a fascist, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian wannabe dictator. They’re still trying.
If this election taught us anything, it’s that the pundit class is too arrogant, smug, emotional, narcissistic, and incurious to understand the average American.
Democrats spent months saying Trump is a threat to democracy. They weaponized the legal system and used lawfare to keep him out of the White House. An assassin’s bullet didn’t take him down. They said his vice presidential pick was “weird.” None of it could stop the inevitable.
This isn’t to say Trump was the perfect candidate. He upset his base more than once during the campaign, from his criticism of state abortion bills to his public attacks on the conservatives behind Project 2025. Some social conservatives also didn’t like the party’s decision to give a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention to Amber Rose, the atheist, pro-abortion influencer who used to lead “slut walks” in Los Angeles. Her appearance came around the time the party decided to soften its language around key social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But through it all, the voters chose their man, despite spending the campaign being slandered as hateful bigots who wanted to strip women of their “right” to kill their babies. Democrats thought they could use race and sex as a “carrot” to draw people to a history-making campaign as well as a “stick” to knock sense into wayward voters they believe they own.
They failed to see what will go down as the most multiracial, multigenerational working-class coalition in recent Republican history.
While Harris surrogates were busy lecturing black men who thought about sitting out the election or — God forbid — voting for Trump, Latino men were causing a “red wave” to the right. In 2016, Trump received 28% of the Latino vote. In 2020, he earned 32%. According to 2024 exit polls, he won support from 46% of Latino voters, including 55% of men.
Maybe the progressives who tried to shove “Latinx” down the throats of Dominicans in the Bronx, Cubans in South Florida, and Mexicans in Texas don’t really understand those Americans and still assume all “brown” people feel “oppressed” in 2024.
Trump also earned 20% of the black male vote. In Pennsylvania, 26% of black men voted for Trump. The feminists and henpecked men who do their bidding clearly overestimated their ability to use their coordinated shame campaign to control “disobedient” black men.
It’s possible suburban soccer moms realized that people who can’t define “woman” don’t really have women’s best interests in mind. The white women progressives targeted in the final days of the campaign with ads meant to divide husbands and wives put their families over the Democratic Party. Nationally, Trump took 53% of the white female vote, including 69% in Georgia and 60% in Texas.
If this election taught us anything, it’s that the pundit class is too arrogant, smug, condescending, emotional, neurotic, narcissistic, and incurious to understand the average American. The people who make a living hurling “-ism” and “-phobia” accusations at people they don’t know have been exposed for the mediocre thinkers they are.
They don’t understand the world outside their superficial identity and oppressed-oppressor power dynamics. I recently had a conversation with a progressive woman in education who said social conservatives are only pro-life because they’re afraid of the declining white birth rate, even though roughly 40% of aborted babies in America are black. The pundit class lives in a bubble so thick that neither data nor an electoral beatdown will penetrate it.
I am cautiously optimistic about what Trump’s victory means for the social issues I care about most. A party big enough to accommodate both Caitlyn Jenner and Franklin Graham could take policy positions that scare off the disaffected liberals who voted for Trump this election and rankle the president-elect’s social conservative base.
We’ll have plenty of time to talk about the MAGA governing strategy. This election, however, was about the Teflon Don and the voters who didn’t care what craven politicians, Hollywood perverts, low-information entertainers, and media shills had to say about him. Americans sent a loud message to the elites that power belongs to the people, not the self-appointed god-kings in the culture who think they rule us.