Kishore Mahbubani: Who got Trump elected? The liberals did!
Former Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani says that American liberals have, in recent decades, made three strategic mistakes which led to the election of Donald Trump.
On Friday, 8 November 2024, I read the international edition of The New York Times (NYT) from cover to cover as it had many articles trying to explain why Donald Trump got elected. I wanted to find out whether NYT, despite its clear dislike of Donald Trump, would be fair and objective in trying to explain why Trump got elected. Or would it be blinded by its ideological blinkers? The honest answer is the latter.
Here’s one paragraph from page one that supports the statement I just made. “As a result, for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overthrow a previous election, called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact ‘retribution’ against his adversaries.”
What’s the message of this paragraph? It’s clear. The American people made the wrong choice.
Several articles went on to try to explain why the American people had made the wrong choice. Indeed, the editorial of NYT made this message explicit with the title: “America Makes a Perilous Choice”.
I read this editorial carefully to see whether it would acknowledge whether the liberals, like the editorial writers of the NYT, were in any way responsible for the election of Donald Trump. Sadly, no such explicit acknowledgement was forthcoming. Yet when future historians write about the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, they will certainly discuss, if not emphasise, the role of the liberals in electing Trump.
... the bottom 50% of the American population, who were supposed to be protected by the liberal notions of “equality”, have suffered instead a stagnation in their living standards for the past few decades.
Missteps of the liberals
Here I have to pause and try to define the term “liberals”. In today’s world, I had to turn to ChatGPT for a quick answer. It responded by saying, “Liberals are individuals who advocate for liberalism, a political and moral philosophy emphasising individual freedom, equality and tolerance.”
More importantly, the members of this tribe know each other very well. This is also the tribe that has been governing America for the past few decades. And they also feel that they have a right to govern America. Sadly, they don’t acknowledge the mistakes they have made in their governance.
The main argument of this essay is that American liberals (like the editorial writers of NYT) have, in recent decades, made three strategic mistakes which led to the election of Donald Trump.
The first mistake was to forget that “liberalism” rested on two pillars, “freedom” and “equality”. Contemporary American liberals have forgotten the wisdom of the founding fathers of liberalism, such as the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasised both “freedom” and “equality” as the basis for governance in society in his seminal work, The Social Contract.
The main reason why Trump got elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2024 was that the bottom 50% of the American population, who were supposed to be protected by the liberal notions of “equality”, have suffered instead a stagnation in their living standards for the past few decades.
... America has functionally become a “plutocracy”, a society that supports the rich and ignores the poor. This is why we have the paradoxical result of poor Americans voting for a billionaire, Donald Trump.
The most influential recent American liberal philosopher was John Rawls (1921-2002). I met him personally once. Indeed, I did my master’s thesis on his famous book, A Theory of Justice. One of the strongest arguments of this book is that any increase in the wealth of the most affluent members of a society can only be justified if the least affluent also benefit. Rawls wrote in his A Theory of Justice: “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.”
Over the past few decades, the opposite has happened in America. The rich have got richer. The poor have got poorer. At the beginning of 1992, after the end of the Cold War, the top 0.1% held 8.9% of household wealth in the US, while the bottom 50% held 3.8%. In 2024, the top 0.1% held 13.6% of household wealth, while the share of the bottom 50% had gone down to 2.5%.
Poor Americans putting their lot in with billionaire Trump
I devoted an entire chapter of my book, Has China Won? to explain why America has functionally become a “plutocracy”, a society that supports the rich and ignores the poor. This is why we have the paradoxical result of poor Americans voting for a billionaire, Donald Trump. Why? They wanted to vote for someone who would kick the liberal Washington DC establishment in the butt.
Here, another paradoxical aspect of the 2024 election was that the more venom and contempt that this liberal establishment poured on Donald Trump, the more they convinced the poor Americans, especially the white working class, to vote for Trump.
Hillary Clinton helped Trump enormously in 2016, by calling Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables”. In the runup to the 2024 elections, Biden termed Trump supporters as “garbage”. This flood of liberal contempt for Trump helped him get the support of the working classes, including significant numbers of African Americans and Latinos, who were acutely dissatisfied with the established liberal elites of America.
The second strategic mistake that the liberals made was failing to respond effectively to Trump’s tactic of making identity politics a central part of his campaign. Trump and his Republican colleagues used anti-trans rhetoric as an effective political tool to energise voters, including by making unsubstantiated claims that children are being sent for gender reassignment surgeries at school without parental consent. US$150 million of anti-trans advertisements were run during the 2024 election cycle, using slogans such as: “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.”
... in one dimension, Donald Trump is morally superior to American liberals, unthinkable as this might seem. It is immoral to fight wars. It’s moral to prevent wars.
CNN noted that the anti-LGBTQ ads “outpaced nearly every other topic Republicans have put in advertisements trying to sway the public during a critical closing stretch of the race — ahead of crime, inflation and immigration, and behind only taxation,” with the Trump campaign and allied outside groups spending a third of their broadcast TV ad expenditures on such ads.
The renowned Peter Singer wrote a column of the impact of the transgender issue on Trump’s election. In it, he said, “According to an analysis conducted by Future Forward, a leading pro-Harris political action committee, watching that ad moved 2.7% of viewers in favor of Trump (who won the popular vote by 2%).” Trump had tapped into a deep vein of resentment which the liberals had failed to notice or address.
Trump more than moral to the war-weary
The third strategic mistake made by the American liberals was to support more and more wars. The elite American liberal class, including the editorial writers of the NYT, have no doubt that they are morally superior to Donald Trump. This is why they don’t hesitate to be condescending to Donald Trump. Yet, in one dimension, Donald Trump is morally superior to American liberals, unthinkable as this might seem. It is immoral to fight wars. It’s moral to prevent wars.
Donald Trump has represented himself as the peace candidate, and even said during his victory speech, “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” Donald Trump is absolutely right to advocate for America to stop fighting wars. As a Republican politician, it was very brave for him to say that the Iraq war of 2003 was a disaster.
He said during the 2015 GOP debate, “We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East. We’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity, the people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilised, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!”
Yet, to succeed in dealing with him, we have to throw into the garbage can all garbage written about him from the American liberals. They don’t understand him. We can try to do so.
In making this statement, Trump is more than moral. If the liberal Americans had heeded Trump’s advice, they could have saved the trillions (yes, trillions) of dollars that America has wasted on so many wars. The Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that from 2001 to 2022, the US federal government spent over 8 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
The researchers note that this figure “omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.” They estimate that the US will pay another US$6.5 trillion in interest on its war borrowing by the 2050s.
Paradoxically, if the influential liberal ruling class had heeded Trump’s advice and spent all this money on helping the American working class and building world-class physical infrastructure to make Americans feel proud of their country, Trump wouldn’t have been elected.
Working with Trump wherever we can
But he has been elected. The whole world, including ASEAN and Singapore, will have to deal with him. It will be difficult. Yet, to succeed in dealing with him, we have to throw into the garbage can all garbage written about him from the American liberals. They don’t understand him. We can try to do so.
At the end of the day, Trump isn’t mad. He can be erratic and mercurial. But he’s pushing for some rational goals of helping his fellow Americans. He wants to “Make America Great Again”. This is reasonable. We should work with Trump wherever we can.
And all the Asian countries, including especially ASEAN, China, and India, should propose win-win deals that could help the US, especially the American working classes who voted for Trump. This can be done. Indeed, this is a massive opportunity for Asian countries. Let the Europeans pour their usual moral contempt on him. We should work with Trump instead, regardless of whether we like or dislike him personally.
The Chinese version of this article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “马凯硕：谁让特朗普当选？自由派!”
