The Art of Losing: Donald Trump

Part one of a two-part series on why both parties could see a very feasible loss next week.

Approximately a week from now, our long national nightmare will be over. The results from the U.S. Presidential election will be almost entirely reported, and we will (probably) know the identity of America’s 47th president. Over a year of horse race coverage will suddenly give way to a frenzy of post-election analyses, all of which will come to miraculous conclusions: that the results vindicate whatever the author of the piece believed in the first place. If Trump wins, right-wing writers will cast it as a stunning vindication of their exact brand of conservatism; if he loses, it will represent a sober judgment that he did not embrace their beliefs hard enough. Many of those of us on the left will undoubtedly do the same, with just a few thousand votes in a couple states determining whether we say Americans demonstrated support for price caps or rejected a center-right Cheneyite warmonger. Similar self-serving analyses will be made by America’s liberals, centrists, libertarians, monarchists, and everyone in between. In the end, they will all say, the one thing to learn from the results is that there is nothing to learn from them.

It will be fun, at least for me. I always find it very amusing to see the lengths many will go to spin whatever they see as proof that they were always right all along, especially when they sung a different tune—or said nothing at all—before things became clear. But it will also present a major complication: how to provide any takes about how things went after the election without looking like a complete hack. This tendency—to come to a conclusion first and work backwards to justify it—is so pervasive in political writing that it’s hard to have much trust in the post-election takes spouted out by, well, anyone at all. No matter how rigorously you justify whatever conclusion you come to, it’s still hard to blame readers if they assume that you’re only saying what you’re saying for the sake of convenience.

To combat this, I have decided to do something different. Rather than wait until after the election to give my impressions on the Trump and Harris campaigns, I have decided to do so before any results have come in. Through this, you can be confident that my analysis of the flaws of one campaign—say, Trump’s—is not just something I’m pulling out purely because he lost, but is something I was willing to say at a time when there was a very real chance that he could win. Additionally, this will also guarantee that I will have been on record critiquing a campaign that ended up winning—something that very few analysts do in the aftermath of an election, but can often prove to be just as valuable as any analysis of the flaws of a campaign that lost. So, without further ado, let’s start with what you all want to hear first: why Donald Trump lost this election.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Reason #1: He was too fucking online.