By admin 
Two worlds collided during Donald Trump’s victory celebration in the early hours at Mar-a-Lago. Trump took the stage first with his family in tow. Melania was followed by Barron, their lanky 18-year-old sonwho has become something of a pin-up on his college campus in New York. Ivanka, striking as ever in a blue velvet pantsuit, was left behind with the other members of the family, partially hidden from view. This pecking order felt intentional.
Ivanka was like the ghost at the party, who had returned to Trumpland from the world of Trumpland woke up. It was her only campaign appearance alongside her father.
It was Barron, the Gen Z whisperer, stopping by for Dad; Barron telling Trump his generation was his for the taking. Young men were fed up with being patronized and sidelined, he said. On Barron’s advice, Trump gave interviews to the podcasters and YouTubers that young men (and their girlfriends) enjoy: Theo Von, Lex Fridman, Adin Ross, Logan Paul. By talking to them and with them Joe Roganthe man with America’s biggest megaphone, Trump reached tens of millions of disaffected young people.
The era of Black Lives Matter, Latinx, critical race theory, pronouns, and defunding the police is over
My own son, 24, warned me how big this group of bro-casters was. In the early morning, as Trump crushed Harris in every battleground state, we spoke on the phone. “It’s a resistance to wokeness,” he told me. “Young men feel like they are full, that they have no purpose, that they need to be strong and get back to the way men used to be.” Wokeness has been completely defeated in this election. The era of Black Lives Matter, Latinx, critical race theory, pronouns, and defunding the police is over — or will have to be if Democrats want to regain power. Even young people don’t want to ‘wake up’ anymore.
Like workers, my son’s generation feels left behind by the changes. They dream of making it big by investing in crypto and emulating Elon Musk. They don’t like movies that portray women as superheroes and men as villains, or schools where most teachers are women and girls perform better. Maga – make America great again – plays on these feelings.
“The way algorithms work really blinds people,” my son added. “We live in our own bubbles.” My older, university-educated bubble told me that women were angry about abortion, that “we are not going back” to the era of our grandmothers and that Harris could prevail against jeering Maga supporters who called her a “bitch” and a ” called ‘bitch’. “whoa”. And indeed, my target audience was the only one in America who voted for Harris in significant numbers. She finished with a worse result than Hillary Clinton in 2016, losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Trump, a convicted felon, has now secured his place in history as one of America’s most influential presidents. He will be unfettered by Congress and will enjoy Supreme Court immunity for his actions as president – the only result of all the Democrats’ counterproductive legal practices. There is a grim irony in that.
It’s not good enough to express sexism. Yes, Trump has won twice against a female candidate. Maybe in the US that means he’s lucky. But my son is right about the impact of being awake. It has poisoned liberals and Democrats for a generation. Young people are big-hearted and open-minded, but don’t want to be lectured about their pronouns or transgender rights. There will be no comeback for Democrats until they absorb these lessons.
Interestingly, it became clear on results night that Harris would not become president when she shocked the pundits by severely underperforming Joe Biden in Loudoun County, Virginia, in the suburbs of Washington DC. Here, school officials pushed to install $11 million worth of gender-neutral bathrooms, against the wishes of students and their parents, even though a girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom by a boy in a skirt. (He changed schools and committed another mistake.)
Even young people don’t want to ‘wake up’ anymore
Anti-wokeness isn’t just for men. One student said: “We express our concerns and they write us off as right-wing lunatics.” Another girl said, “We’re holding our pee until we can’t anymore,” to avoid using the new bathrooms. Young women also moved towards Trump in these elections, although not to the same extent as young men.
Trump ran a two-track campaign. His campaign aides, especially Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, kept the focus on inflation and immigration — the two biggest election issues — while Trump kept the culture wars burning. One of his closing arguments was a promise to “ban men from women’s sports.” Why was Trump so concerned about a marginal issue, liberal experts wondered.
Still, the message was a blow. Trump signaled to voters that he wanted to solve America’s problems, while Democrats were more interested in virtue signaling. Although Harris went out of her way to avoid identity politics, it helped define her as a radical liberal from California. Her choice of Tim Walz as running mate confirmed this impression. Instead of being Mr. Blue Collar, he was a lightweight progressive.
It is not only young people who do not feel heard. While Harris hoped to break the ultimate glass ceiling, Trump built a multiracial coalition. Hispanics have been telling liberals for years that they don’t want to be called Latinx or patronized as minorities. Black people want their families to be safe, not “defund the police.” Critical race theory and words like intersectionality are only debated in ivory towers, where students accrue debt while being educated by liberals. Musa al-Gharbi, my colleague at Stony Brook University, has just published We Have Never Been Woke, a brilliant, rare academic book on all this.
Trump has not won more black voters by chance. He looked them up. He held a rally in the South Bronx, one of New York’s most diverse communities. He agreed to be interviewed by members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago (and was pilloried for doing so). He built a strong following among black sports legends of the 1980s such as Mike Tyson. Kadia Goba wrote a fascinating piece for Semafor in June about Trump’s black outreach. “If I never saw Donald Trump and didn’t know he was white, I would think he was black,” Tyson told her. “The way they treated him in the papers and in the press. Think about that, the way they treat him in court? That’s the way they treated black people.”
For too long, Democrats have relied on an imaginary cavalry to save them from Trump. The Mueller report on Russian interference. The Cheneys. Various judges and generals. Nothing has worked. They can’t change the voters, so they have to change themselves.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting and editor of The London Standard