What's a Trump Win Really Mean?

And why are equal percentages of us (75 percent!) convinced the country is going to hell AND that our lives are going well?

Scroll down to watch or listen to a very special episode of The Reason Interview, recorded last night at a wild and wooly watch party that included folks from Reason,

The Fifth Column

,

The Free Press

, and other outlets.

My guests included Freethink’s

Kmele

, Bloomberg columnist and Manhattan Institute economist

Allison Schrager

, podcaster and author

Coleman Hughes

, my colleague

Peter Suderman

, and former congressman Peter Meijer (a Michigan Republican who voted to impeach Trump, got primaried because of that, *and* voted for Trump this year, for reasons he explains).

We started talking before it was clear whether Trump or the GOP had won (as of this writing, it’s not clear which party will control the House) but my bigger question for all the guests doesn’t hinge on whether Harris and the Democrats were sent packing.

Here’s what I find especially confusing about contemporary politics: Per Gallup, three-quarters of us believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. That’s easy to understand, right? The past four years have been rough, to say the least, and if we’re being honest, the entire 21st century has been a series of massive shocks: The contested 2000 election, 9/11, the response to 9/11 (mostly disastrous, in my view), the financial crisis, the shock of the 2016 election (not bad that Trump won per se, but the surprise of it and the bipartisan rancor that followed was huge), COVID, riots during what Kmele Foster calls the “summer of love” in 2020, war in Europe, the Hamas attacks, Joe Biden’s painfully obvious decline, etc. It’s been a tough couple of decades!

So it makes sense that most of are not satisfied with “the way things are going.”

But why then are we so good with the way our own lives are going? Gallup finds 78 percent of us report being satisfied with how our own lives are going.

This is more than a bit of a disconnect, especially when you layer in other evidence that things are much better than we normally admit. As I’ve noted elsewhere, “The Dow Jones is doing swell, and for all their bitching and moaning, younger Americans are doing better than previous generations, with Millennials and older Gen Zers accruing more wealth than Gen X. And miracles of miracles: Gen Z is outpacing Millennials when it comes to home ownership. Inflation is coming down, crime too, unemployment remains low, etc.

So the main question for my guests (and for you) is this: How does the contradiction between how we think the country writ large is doing and how we are doing express itself politically?

Last night’s election is clearly one answer: You vote out people in office who seem to be indifferent or incompetent at their jobs, or disdainful of your concerns. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their own ways seemed to discount or deflect people’s fears about inflation, say, and chaos at the border. Donald Trump (and his proxies) certainly leaned into people’s anxieties, telling us that things were terrible, the country was broken, and that only he could fix it (again). But why do we buy that, if our lives are going pretty well?

A related question that came up is this: Is the idea of restraining government spending at the federal level just gone? And if so, is there any way to bring it back. Milton Friedman insisted that the ultimate cost of government isn’t simply the taxes it charges at any given moment but the amount of spending it does—eventually that bill has to be paid. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), both Harris and Trump proposed tons of new debt. For Harris, the mid-range estimate was about $4 trillion and for Trump is was about $8 trillion. In his first term, even before COVID, Trump signed legislation adding trillions in new debt and it now seems that federal budgets will never go below $6 trillion again.

If we agree that rising levels of spending and debt are a problem (I can hear some of you asking, ‘Who’s we, kemo sabe?’), what is to be done? My guests have some interesting (and occasionally despairing) answers—right at the very start of the Trump 2.0 era.

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