It was anger that won Trump this election

Americans have had enough of being ignored, let down, patronised and left behind by the ‘elite’, and Trump managed to channel this anger to his benefit.

At a campaign rally in the state of Wisconsin just days before yesterday’s United States presidential elections, former US president and current president-elect Donald Trump registered his displeasure with a faulty microphone: “I get so angry. I’m up here seething. I’m seething. I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic.”

The situation was so enraging, in fact, that it drew the additional soundbite from Trump: “Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?”

Now, there is no doubt Trump is a very angry person; just look at, well, everything he has ever said about his ubiquitous enemies, be they Democrats, immigrants, members of “the radical left” – or microphones. And, as his self-described “magnificent victory” against his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in this election demonstrates, a whole lot of Americans are angry, too.

Despite obviously belonging to America’s financial super-elite, the billionaire Trump has wooed a wide sector of the domestic working class into viewing him as a saviour from their economic plight in a plutocratic system of which he himself is an integral part. The indignant appeal to “Make America Great Again” deliberately ignores the fact that there was never anything great about a nation predicated on mass socioeconomic inequality, where Republicans and Democrats alike perpetuate plutocracy under the guise of democracy.

Trump’s first bout as president saw him enact tax cuts for – who else? – other rich people. And yet many voters perceive him as the only candidate poised to restore dignity to folks whose financial suffering is a direct consequence of the same capitalist arrangement that enables Trump to thrive.

To be sure, anger is a convenient antidote to feelings of powerlessness, and Trump is quite capable when it comes to channelling public discontent to his benefit. Xenophobia is an ever-handy weapon in this respect, and so-called “border security” was a key issue driving this year’s vote – with Trump promising mass deportations and hawking his signature propaganda on the alleged Democratic sponsorship of an invasion of the US by disease-ridden, pet-eating criminal migrant hordes.

Naturally, there are plenty of reasons to be angry – even “seething,” to borrow Trump’s term – at the state of US affairs under the outgoing Joe Biden administration, in which Harris serves as vice president. Complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine comes to mind – and specifically, the fact that the US sees nothing wrong with sending heaps of weapons and billions of dollars in assistance to the Israeli military to slaughter Palestinians en masse while millions of Americans cannot afford housing, shelter, healthcare or food.

But, hey, that’s capitalism for you.

Meanwhile, the embrace of Trump as a figure outside the traditional system of elite politics – someone who can “knock the hell out of people backstage,” if you will – is only facilitated by patronising comments made by certain Democratic leaders. During a speech last month on behalf of Harris, for example, ex-US President Barack Obama lectured Black men that support for Trump implied a sexist rejection of Harris: “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

But there are reasons other than misogyny not to vote for California’s former “top cop.” And being scolded like children has also been known to engender anger.

In a 2022 article for the Washington, DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, economist Dean Baker took a stab at explaining “the Trumpers’ anger” – and how it had come to pass that a “large majority of non-college-educated whites (especially white men) are willing to follow Donald Trump off any cliff”.

Noting that less-educated members of the US workforce had fared poorly over the past four decades even in the face of relatively healthy economic growth, Baker observed that this was because those in charge of steering economic policy “consciously structured it in ways to benefit people like themselves and to screw workers with less education”.

That’s all par for the course in plutocracy, of course. But Baker went on to speculate that one reason the punitive arrangement was blamed on Democrats was that “the people who benefit from these policies and then directly spread the nonsense that the upward redistribution was just the natural workings of the market are overwhelmingly associated with the Democratic Party”. This was, however, not to discount the role in pernicious policy choices of the Republican Party, who “have not been any better, and are quite often worse”.

And while “the Trumpers’ anger” may have driven this year’s election, there are quite a lot of things to be angry about.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.