So…where to begin?
How about with a disclaimer: waiting nearly four weeks to write again wasn’t part of some grand master plan—an “absence makes the heart grow fonder” ploy. No. Through the end of the year, I am, first and foremost, a lawyer, then a writer. Though I have been reading, listening, and thinking about the election results and what is or might be to come, I’ve mostly been lawing. Come the second week of January 2025, there will much writing and talking. Any lawing will be incidental. Until then, I’ll do my best.
Now, to business.
Where to begin?
Nearly four weeks have passed since former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. We have confirmation of the final electoral vote tally, 312 to 226, and a better handle on the final popular vote, which currently sits at 76,917,134 to 74,441,602, or 50.0% to 48.4%.
Trump has announced some of the Cabinet and other nominations he intends to formalize following his inauguration. Some nominees, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior and chair of a to-be-formed National Energy Council, are more traditional, and seem likely to sail through the confirmation process without major objection. Other nominees, like environmental lawyer-turned-FDA gadfly and former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Fox News personality and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, are less traditional, and their respective confirmation processes are probably going to be about as easy and comfortable as buttoning up a pair of burlap and porcupine quill skinny jeans after a particularly indulgent Thanksgiving.
But, instead of talking about them (yet), let’s go to the movies.
“Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.”
So saith the great Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave as he exhorts his fellow cardinals to elect a “pope who doubts.” I liked the line enough that I nearly walked out of the theater to write it down (truthfully, I only remembered the first sentence, but hey—thank you, Internet).
“If there was only certainty, and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”
I do not think that Cardinal Lawrence, in emphasizing the importance of doubt, intends to diminish the power of certainty—far from it. I would argue that each, without the other, is weaker for it: without certainty or conviction, it is difficult to lead, to inspire; but without doubt, it is difficult to understand, to tolerate, to change course, and, ultimately, to unify.
I’m not sure there is a better time for constructive doubt than in the aftermath of an election.
For the Democrats among us, how certain are you that you understand why 76.9 million Americans voted for Trump? To give a sense of perspective, if we assume an average height of 5’7.2” (figure 5’10”ish for the men, somewhere near 5’5”ish for the women), and figure out a way to get everyone to lie down head to toe, and also figure out how to keep the people lying on water from (a) getting eaten by sharks, (b) drowning, or (c) inspiring new religions, 76.9 million people would take you around the Earth 3.28 times.
For the Republicans, how certain are you that you understand why 74.4 million Americans voted for Harris? If we assume the same height for the average voter, and inhuman strength, bone density, and balance for almost all of them, we could make a tower that would get you a third of the way to the Moon (some among you just internally responded “the closest we’ve ever been”).
Point is, whatever you believe, there are millions upon millions upon some additional millions of people—Americans—that disagree with you, that believe you are wrong and that your views are, frankly, a little dangerous. They might have an explanation for why you voted the way you did, but is it consistent with your own explanation?
Is it reasonable to conclude that the millions of people who disagree with you are simply stupid, uninformed, ill-informed, or evil? Some of them, sure—70+ million people gives you a lot of bites at the bad apple—but all of them? Probably not. Now, is it possible to conclude as such, and to announce that conclusion to the world on any number of social media platforms? Of course. This is America, after all.
But it’s probably not right, and it’s even less likely to be helpful. How many of them do you know? I personally know Republicans in Utah and Georgia that could count the open liberals they know on one hand. I know Democrats in New York City that have never knowingly spoken with a true social conservative. And even for those fortunate/unfortunate enough to have to deal with some ideological diversity, with how many people of the opposite persuasion can you comfortably talk about politics?
All of that leads to a more fundamental question: how much of what you are certain about isn’t really true? How many of your base assumptions haven’t really been tested? Do you think your party’s policies are good because they’re…your party’s?
To show how even highly intelligent, highly educated people that think about politics all day run into some of the same misconceptions as the rest of us, let’s go through an example from a recent episode of Pod Save America. Pod Save America is a self-proclaimed progressive liberal podcast hosted, individually or together, by Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Dan Pfeiffer, all former Obama aides. The PSA gentlemen began their company, the cheekily-named Crooked Media, and flagship podcast in 2017 with the goal of building a counter to conservative talk radio. They are true believers in the Democratic cause, and their podcast attracts millions of regular listeners.
Last week, Pfeiffer interviewed four heads of the Harris/Walz campaign—Jen O’Malley Dillon, campaign manager; Quentin Fulks, deputy campaign manager; Stephanie Cutter, messaging and communications; and David Plouffe, consultant—regarding the challenges they faced and the reasoning behind the campaign’s choices. The environment was generally friendly for the campaign’s first post-election interview, and though Pfeiffer asked substantive questions, it was a conversation, not an interrogation.
Here’s the thing: it is tempting, after you have played a somewhat direct role in losing an election (it’s different for rank and file voters), to ascribe your loss and your opponent’s win to factors entirely outside anyone’s control; what could be done was done, and the outcome was, in retrospect, effectively predetermined. Your loss wasn’t your fault. Conversely, after winning, the fun is all in pointing out where you went right and your opponent went wrong—if they had been less dumb, and you less smart, maybe we would be looking at a different outcome.
And that’s more or less exactly how the conversation went: that voters shifted less to Trump in battleground states (around 3 percentage points versus an 8 percentage point shift nationally) was an indication that the campaign’s efforts worked, but that there wasn’t enough time, or that global headwinds were too strong for Harris to fully close the gap. Going on Joe Rogan’s podcast wouldn’t have made a difference (both sides apparently wanted the conversation to happen, but the hoped-for timing didn’t work for Rogan and Harris didn’t want to give up battleground campaigning so soon before the election); neither would have a better answer from Harris when asked on The View what she would do differently from President Biden.
Unsurprisingly, given how many Democrats are in heads-should-roll mode, the reaction to the interview has not been positive: at no point did any of O’Malley Dillon, Fulks, Cutter, or Plouffe explicitly say it was a winnable race, that they or their candidate had failed. Though the reaction to that probably wouldn’t have been positive either (heads-should-roll mode doesn’t really discriminate), the interview would have been more constructive and helpful both for the participants and willing listeners if Pfeiffer and the campaign leaders acted as if they could have won and really engaged with what they may have done wrong and what alternatives could have led to a win. They did consider where Democrats should go moving forward, but their suggestions were really for the party, not for themselves.
I could write a hundred reactions to the interview (“yeah, maybe if you had a decade,” you reply), but I want to limit my focus at this point to something rather small—something Fulks said beginning at the 1:23:40 mark of the interview (I’m going to paraphrase/clarify a bit):
“Republicans don’t make Trump apologize. We don’t have to mimic it, but I think that there are a lot of times where, if you're in the Democratic Party and you step out of line, you get punished for it. You get punished for it by your own party. Republicans do not do that. We put out an ad with a cuss word in it, and the amount of feedback that we got from people within the party was insane. It's a thing where we have to respond to that. Obviously, we take that stuff seriously. We reach out to the people that have concerns. That takes time from us. They're getting calls from people like Jen, people like myself apologizing for this so that we're keeping our coalition together.
Meanwhile, Trump is putting these Republicans in the worst (or what would seem to be the worst) possible political light, and they support it because at the end of of the day, they understand that [not supporting it] weakens Trump. And this may sound like a shot across the bow, but it should be. Democrats are eating our own to a very high degree.
And until that stops, we're not going to be able to address a lot of the things that just need to be said. And for the masculinity piece of it, men don't like people that apologize. I don't know what age bracket, but it's called like ‘standing on business.’ If you say something, you mean it. Trump does not apologize. If he says something, he means it, and his party stands behind him, and they don't make him backtrack it.”
For the sake of argument, let’s concede a narrowly construed version of Fulks’ point: in the Year of Our Lord 2024, the Republican Party makes few public demands or criticisms of the man who has now been its standard bearer since at least May 3, 2016, the day then-chairman of the Republican National Committee Reince Priebus declared Trump the party’s presumptive nominee for the presidency.
But I don’t think that point really means all that much if we ignore the context: Republicans did ask Trump to apologize. Kind of a lot, in fact. To pick one early example, in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape release, numerous prominent Republicans, including some who have since left the party entirely, others who remain or became outspoken Trump critics, some who supported him then and still do today, and, perhaps most interestingly, some who did not back him then but now do, called on him to drop out of the presidential race entirely. It’s not like it was just then-and-soon-to-again-be-private-citizen Mitt Romney—among many others, Senator John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, and Senator Mike Lee, then a critic but now one of Trump’s most prominent Senate supporters, explicitly called on him to cede the podium to his running mate, then-Governor Mike Pence. That was less than one month before the election!
And that was far from the last time Republicans called on Trump to apologize. Charlottesville. Stormy Daniels. Ukraine. The aftermath of the 2020 election, up to and including January 6th. Even conceding for the benefit of Republican readers that some Democrats have been in a general state of tizzy ever since Trump came down the fabled escalator, we’re not talking about Democrats: with each fresh controversy, elected Republicans made genuinely critical remarks in public and private. Some left the party, no longer willing to be associated with Trump’s party despite still generally supporting his policies. There are obviously plenty of Trump critics who have done a gentle somersault left and find themselves now openly supporting Democratic policy priorities, but there are many others who would gladly sign on to just about the entire Republican Party platform, but refuse to support Trump.
Whether or not Trump deserved or deserves his critics’ approbation isn’t the point—the point is that he was criticized by members of his own party. His 2016 primary opponents didn’t all endorse him. He faced challenges in this last cycle’s primaries from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (as of May 2023, I was convinced he was going to be the next president—no offense to DeSantis, but he apparently suffers from some sort of severe charisma block anytime he leaves the state of Florida; we’ll see if he gets that figured out by 2028), former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence (awkward), new DOGE co-head Vivek Ramaswamy, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, North Dakota Governor and now-nominee to head the Department of the Interior Doug Burgum, and Senator Tim Scott, among others.
So, what happened? Well, Trump didn’t do a ton of apologizing, and then he won. He won in 2016 (granted, yes, he lost the popular vote by more than he won it this year), lost in 2020 but retained his control of the party, and then won the 2024 primaries in a landslide despite attending the debates from his couch via social media. He then convincingly won this year’s general election. If he had lost in 2016, lost in 2020, and lost again this year, we wouldn’t be having this conversation: Democrats would be praying he maintained his dominance over the party, not praying for the opposite.
But he won. And, to quote the great Zach Lowe, in my opinion the country’s best non-working sportswriter (whom ESPN recently fired—a decision I hope they come to deeply regret), winning means never having to say you’re sorry. Perhaps Trump is showing something a bit further—that not apologizing—“standing on business,” to borrow from Fulks—actually increases your chances of winning.
To tie a bow on it, I think Fulks has the order of operations backwards: Republicans didn’t stop asking Trump to apologize because they recognized they were hurting his electoral chances; they stopped because he didn’t apologize, and because he won despite—or because of—his non-apologies.
If Democrats want different factions of the party to stop asking their candidate, whoever it may be, to apologize, it won’t happen because representatives of each faction gather together in a big room, perhaps filled with smoke (in 2024, would that be vape haze?), and sign an Edict of No Asking for Apologies Except From Republicans—it will happen because a candidate comes along and just doesn’t apologize, then wins.
Apologies, of course, probably aren’t really the point: maybe the real point is strength, and the perception of strength. Maybe apologies are part of that, but I don’t think they’re all of it.
There is much more to say, but I’ll end for today with this: whatever you might think of Trump, he ran on policies that he brought to the Republican Party, not the other way around; and whatever you might think of Harris, she has faithfully supported current Democratic Party priorities since her election to the Senate. Strong arguments can be made in favor of the Harris approach, and there’s credible polling that suggests that her individual policies are actually more popular than Trump’s, but what do you think the results would be if you were to ask, in a vacuum (and perhaps of recently arrived extraterrestrials to minimize bias), which candidate leads, and which one follows?
To be continued.
Random Fact
I am from Utah and I now live here again. Utah is, among other things, one of the country’s premier ski destinations. But which states have the most resorts? I googled it fully expecting the answer to be Utah or Colorado, and boy was I wrong:
With 52 ski resorts as of November 2022, we have my previous home of New York.
In second, with 39, we have Michigan. The highest elevation in the entire state is 1,979 feet above sea level (and the lowest is 571, so we’re not really getting the benefit of the full 2,000).
In third, with 33, we have Wisconsin, which has elevation stats almost identical to those of Michigan.
Finally, in fourth, with 32, we have Colorado, a state with actual mountains (although, unfortunately, Colorado is also home to the Colorado Rockies, one of America’s least-liked baseball teams (by America, I mostly mean myself)).
Utah is twelfth, with 15.
Quality over quantity, I now say.
Random Recommendation
I know musicals, and movie musicals especially, aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved Wicked. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande can really, really, really sing.
Also, if you’ve been waiting your whole life to see sharks in the Colosseum, fear not: Gladiator II is here. Does the plot make sense, per se? Does the writing call to mind the great scripts of Good Will Hunting or the Dead Poets Society? Well, no, but if you’ve been waiting your whole life to see sharks in the Colosseum, or to see a gladiator ride a rhino, or to see Paul Mescal fight a baboon, this is no time to quibble.
For the rest of you, it would probably be more cost-effective and enjoyable to just watch the original twice.
Subscriber Update
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Peter Sage Petersage@substack.com