Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential elections began with his opponents telling a massive lie. It involved an assassination attempt against him. It continued, until the last minute, with the most savage lynching of a candidate by the press, cultural elites, and a political party ever seen in American electoral history. His voters were called “trash” by the President himself. His candidacy was labeled as a “counterrevolution.” The nation’s intellectuals, celebrities, and political scientists have been repeating for four years, with increasingly aggressive anger, that Trump is a Nazi-fascist whose master plan is to establish a dictatorship in the United States.
However, as George Orwell—a thinker essential in today’s psychotic world—teaches: no matter how strongly you deny the truth, it will continue to exist regardless of what you say. Rarely has the truth been so denied as in the recently wrapped up presidential race in the United States. Newsrooms, research institutes, and universities turned into fierce electoral committees for the Democratic Party candidate, Kamala Harris. They created a private reality, portraying Trump as a mad King Kong poised to destroy their country and possibly the rest of the world. They insisted he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, win. It was all for nothing. The truth, once again, prevailed throughout.
It showed that Trump trounced Kamala, securing 312 electoral votes against her 226. He also held the majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, indicating that the people wanted not just Trump but also his package of proposals. The Democrats and Kamala concocted the fiction that they would win the presidential election by supporting abortion. Does that make sense? Obviously, it backfired, as did their illusion that illegal immigration should be discussed, not prohibited, or that reducing police funding was a good idea. Central to their defeat was the doctrine claiming that the worst problem in the United States is “systemic racism,” or society’s resistance to injecting hormones into children to “expand their choice” of gender, or other delusions proposed by today’s shrunk left.
“We made history tonight,” Trump declared in his victory speech. “We overcame obstacles no one imagined possible.” Absolutely. Trump’s triumph was more than a personal achievement; it was a signal that the majority, as they are, not as the elites want them to be, can make history. After years of transferring authority, money, and power to unelected castes who control the state apparatus, the people proved they can indeed reverse this essentially totalitarian trend. Contrary to what Democrats claim, such castes are the true fascists, the ones who want to rule people’s lives because they believe they are right. It is the individuals, when free to vote in fair elections, who are the true defenders of liberty, civil rights, and democracy.
This is making history live and in real-time. Trump’s victory was the greatest demonstration that the common citizen has grown tired of the irrational decisions that the bureaucratic, financial, and intellectual elite constantly impose on them. Because of this, they can fire (“You’re fired,” as Trump used to say in The Apprentice) those who treat them like robots waiting for instructions. They are also perfectly capable of electing someone who seems to make more sense to them. History’s course is then defined by the majority’s will—not by small groups who appoint themselves as the only ones entitled to know everything.
Donald Trump’s voters, who not only comfortably won the electoral college but also secured the majority of the popular vote, delivered a resounding “enough.” Enough of this attempt to determine what you should eat, how much carbon you’re allowed to emit, what you can say (and especially what you cannot), and for whom you must vote. Enough of being called “fascist” for disagreeing with them. Enough of being told day and night that you must pay more taxes, distribute your earnings to those living on the streets, or accept being robbed up to the limit of $900. Enough of respecting those who say you’re racist just for being born white, or sexist for liking beautiful women, or Nazi for wanting crime to be punished.
The Americans are not the first to do this. The same happened in Argentina just over a year ago with the election of Javier Milei—who was globally accused of being a mental case for deeming freedom a fundamental human value. A similar movement occurred here in Brazil in the last municipal elections when Lula and the far left took the worst beating of their lives. But the United States is the United States. We are just Brazil. Lula, Janja, and minister Haddad take themselves awfully seriously, but it doesn’t fly—they keep saying we’re the “tenth” largest economy in the world, or even the “ninth.” It’s nonsense.
The brutal fact is that Microsoft’s market value, by itself, is at least 50% larger than the entire Brazilian GDP. Not to mention Apple or NVIDIA right behind, or Google or Amazon—each worth a Brazil. Trump’s free choice to lead this powerhouse, the largest in the world, means that it’s the American people, not a “Committee for Public Salvation,” who truly call the shots in the country. He showed that they no longer want the government imposed by the media, the fat cats of regulatory agencies, or the phalanxes of climate change activists. Not only do they reject it, but also are perfectly capable of placing an opposing government in office.
Trump promised a new “golden era” for the United States, proposed reclaiming control over the country’s borders, and said he would govern “for everyone”—hardly things that could be considered a Nazi manifesto. It might be so. It might not. But the central issue isn’t whether Trump’s plans, if he does have one, will succeed. It isn’t even about whether he is what people think he is. The most important aspect of this historical turn is that the people of the world’s most powerful nation have proven they can be governed by who they want, not by the woke dictatorships of progressivism or brute force.
It’s all that China and Russia lack—the moral superiority of a nation that chooses its leaders by the free will of the majority. Though also powerful, they are moral dwarfs. The loud and clear signal Trump’s election sends to the world is that the reports of the death of “Western-style democracy,” as Mark Twain famously said about reports of his own death, were highly exaggerated. The United States is back—this is the fact that can be observed in broad daylight. It’s obvious the government won’t be turned into a “fascist” dictatorship as claimed by the left, the global media, and the political science hotshots. On the contrary, the country will return to being the world’s greatest power, and not because of Trump.
He undoubtedly represents the will of the majority of Americans. But the leading star of the movie was the voter who placed Trump back in the White House. It wasn’t communicators, Harvard professors, or Kamala’s billions of dollars—more than twice Trump spent. It wasn’t Me Too, Black Lives Matter, or similar groups. It wasn’t, like in Brazil, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) with its “missions accomplished” motto—as there is no such thing as a TSE in the U.S., and election officials’ single duty is to count votes. This, precisely, is the size of the problem for The New York Times editorials and the left in general. It’s useless to claim that Trump is a monster who will end democracy and destroy the world, since, once again, it is the people who decide—and most of them don’t believe he’ll do so, just as they don’t believe 2 + 2 = 7. These people cannot be canceled.
Bad news for the “progressives”: what they promised won’t happen. There can be no coup in a country with a real Senate, a real House, and a real Supreme Court, which isn’t the same in Brazil. In the U.S., the Armed Forces aren’t a private security company for those in power. The 50 States are truly federated states that decide how their citizens should live—not this Brazilian farce where governors can’t even go to the bathroom without the Supreme Court’s permission. Trump’s election reminds the world of a clear rule: it’s the people who choose to tolerate governments for as long as they please. They can elect Joe Biden and the left. They can kick them out and put Trump back in office. That had been forgotten. Now, it’s effective again. This is the second American revolution.
The U.S. elections were permeated with possibly the biggest concoction of lies to smother facts ever seen in contemporary history. The truth is lies lost the battle. The offensive began with the insane proposition that Joe Biden was in full control of his mental faculties and would deliver a second government of extraordinary quality. Panic set in when the charade could no longer hold up. It was a horror story. Democrats threw their giant into the street shamelessly and came up with Kamala Harris as an instant candidate and heroine—not because she had any competence to preside over the United States, but solely because they didn’t want to lose the legal right to use the $200 million already in their electoral coffers, which would go up in smoke if she wasn’t the candidate.
This original lie led to a second one—that Kamala was an administrator of immense talent, while, in reality, she had been proven a hopeless nullity. Her greatest feat as Supreme Authority of the southern border, charged with solving the problem of illegal immigrants (“undocumented people,” in the mandatory woke language), was a gala trip to Mexico where she launched an “appeal” for people to stop entering the United States illegally. She didn’t manage to articulate any idea regarding what she would do as president. She promised “change,” but when asked what such change was, she said nothing came to mind. She is a sort of a lively Dilma Rousseff who speaks English—with the difference that no one understood half of what Dilma said, making it just impossible to know whether she was right or wrong. The only thing Harris made clear was her support for abortion.
From there, it was Cuesta Abajo (downhill), as in Gardel’s tango. They nearly killed Trump with a shot to the head, but the press, initially trying to hide the assassination attempt, went through the entire campaign without bringing up the subject again, as if telling the truth would entail comforting the enemy. They accused Trump of intending to use the Army to kill his opponents. He was massacred by claims that he was an extremist obsessed with immigration—when he always made clear he was against illegal immigration, as is the case in any democratic country. They seriously claimed he would start World War III, destroy the global economy, promote the “climate crisis,” and drop nuclear bombs across the planet. It was said, and seriously considered, that he would never leave the White House if elected. In the end, none of this mattered.
Of course, there are people who read or see these things in the press and audiovisual media and believe or tend to believe them. The problem posed for the left is that there are increasingly fewer believers. As admitted by the owner of one of the great beacons of “progressivism,” The Washington Post, it’s clear that more and more readers don’t believe what his newspaper writes. It’s the same story, obviously, with the rest of the media. How could it be any different? For years, an increasing number of people have been turning from traditional media to the internet for information. The system, horrified, holds a furious “Inquisition Tribunal” to burn social networks at the stake—X, today the world’s largest hub of free expression, is a clear example of this persecution.
But Trump’s victory clarified the limits of this Holy War in the world’s largest nation. It’s quite simple. For years, social networks have been systematically accused of not being informative, spreading fake news, of disseminating “disinformation.” They might share true facts, but they draw the wrong conclusions. They are messengers of hate, they undermine authority, and they traffic “extremist right-wing content,” or merely “harmful” content. And what do the facts show? Social networks, whose prime example is X again, spent the entire campaign informing that Trump was the strongest candidate and should win. The mainstream press, allied with over 80 polling companies, claimed Kamala was always ahead and would win by a tight margin.
Social networks are monstruous like a werewolf at noon at a crossroads. The official media, in turn, would be the fortress of professional and safe information. And how did the competition end? It ended with social networks delivering accurate news—and the consortium between mainstream media outlets and polling institutes delivering false news. There was never a tight advantage for Kamala, but a comfortable win for Trump. From there, two questions arise. The first is: if social networks are the hell where falsehood reigns, and the traditional media is the paradise of accuracy, how come it was, in the end, the other way round? The second is: if social networks get it right and traditional media gets it wrong, what’s the point of reading and listening to the latter? It’s all a big charade that Trump’s victory exposed.
Something begins to appear very off in politics when citizens increasingly get information from the internet. It’s an unprecedented and extremely uncomfortable situation for journalists and those who regularly speak with them—from political crooks to sociology savants. On social networks, there is no editor-in-chief, no editor, no phone number to call. “Content moderators” do something here and there but can’t hold back the flood—especially because the vast majority of users do nothing wrong. X publishes texts from Elon Musk, Lula, and at least 550 million others worldwide. How can such a wild beast be tamed?
The result is that Donald Trump was the most attacked candidate in any American election—by the press, judicial investigators, pollsters, climate activists, philosophers. It’s possible he didn’t obtain, in a world of 8 billion people, the support of a single, scarce sociologist or “reference” in any subject. But this multitude, who daily access the pages and scroll up the screens of social networks, lacked the strength to prevent the election of the candidate publicly most hated by the press in the U.S. election history. More than that, they suffered a Titanic-like electoral shipwreck. If they haven’t won this election, how will they win any other?
The fact is too many people voted for the enemy, and that’s the heart of the problem. You can eventually get rid of Trump—he’s 78 and not getting any younger. But neither can you change the people, nor can you repeat the brainwashing that just failed to make any difference at the ballot box. Starting January 2025, Trump will do absolutely nothing he was accused of during the campaign. In that case, how will the hysterical, false, and irrational claims against him hold up? If he proves in office, and he will do so, that he isn’t the man the left said he was, how will the enemy be retrofitted for a comeback?
Will they say he will commit crimes not even thought of yet? Or that he will appear during the day as the kind Dr. Jekyll only to turn into the infamous Mr. Hyde in the still of the night? Will they target his potential young successor? It’s a lot of work, and they can’t repeat the fiasco of 2024. Perhaps above all, they must solve a tough paradox. How to accuse of being an “enemy of democracy” a president who chooses to come to power through impeccably democratic elections? How to accuse of being a dictator a president who won’t censor a single journalist or media outlet? Or who will comply with everything Congress approves? Trump won’t request the freezing of bank accounts of those insulting him online or their profiles to be taken down, or the annulment of laws he doesn’t like.
The truth is the game has changed. Today, Donald Trump is the one defending freedom—which, in practical terms, that’s precisely the case. It’s he and the right who focus on the world of work and workers. They’re speaking to the real citizen—the man in the street. The muscle to keep American democracy alive will be produced by them. They understand that global peace, balance, and a more prosperous economy can’t come from a weak, hesitant, and demoralized United States. Whether Trump will start the “healing” of the American nation is still to be seen (or not) in the new world that unfolds now. But it is certain that he will act as the leader of a powerful nation should —and that the global left’s “Nazi-fascist” may actually be the guarantor of democracy today.
O post Democracy has spoken apareceu primeiro em Revista Oeste.
