SARAH VINE: Kamala’s biggest mistake was assuming that women would vote for her solely because of her gender. How completely justified and arrogant

As Democrats around the world cry into their kombucha, I’m afraid I have only one thing to say: You brought this on yourselves. I’m sure Kamala Harris is a very nice woman, but at no point during this campaign has she shown the strength of character, vision and sheer star power needed to win the White House.

Many Americans – certainly most Americans I know – have deep reservations about Donald Trump. They find him distasteful, divisive and deeply unreliable. And indeed, he can be all those things. But even the most ardent liberals felt deeply disappointed and let down by this Biden administration and especially by its stubborn refusal to acknowledge the current president’s obvious shortcomings.

Harris was a bad candidate – but perhaps more importantly, she was also an establishment choice of an elite desperate to stay in power, a human box-ticking exercise who, whatever her own personal merits, would always keep holding on. the cry of the ordinary American.

She was tense, didactic, wagging and above all reductive and politically one-dimensional. She joined a small part of the electorate, again its own kind of elite, consisting of people obsessed with identity politics and other liberal pet peeves, who didn’t realize – or perhaps didn’t want to realize – that in order to serve the entire country, you need to win. to sell yourself as a broad church.

The moment Trump donned that striking jacket and stepped, somewhat unsteadily, into a garbage truck was a feat of political genius, writes SARAH VINE

One of Harris’s biggest mistakes, I think, was to assume that just because she was a woman of color it meant that all women, of color or otherwise, would naturally side with her, especially given the ongoing issues of Trump with people like Stormy Daniels and others. al. This is a lazy assumption that left-wingers in Britain are also making (see Labor MP Dawn Butler sharing a social media post describing newly crowned Tory leader Kemi Badenoch as ‘white supremacy in blackface’).

They assume that they somehow “own” certain demographics, which again speaks of entitlement and arrogance. Women – whether they are of color or not – are much more complex and nuanced than that. In particular, Harris showed spectacularly poor judgment on the issue of abortion.

This was seen as her so-called trump card, the idea that women would come out and vote for her en masse to protect reproductive rights. But that seems to have had the opposite effect. The right to abortion is indeed an important issue for many women – but the idea that it is the ONLY thing they care about is, again, limiting and condescending.

There are just as many people who believe that women’s safety is equally at risk due to gender politics and the dangers and injustices caused by male-bodied individuals invading their sports fields and safe spaces in the name of inclusivity. And let’s be honest: Harris’s record on protecting THIS kind of women’s rights hasn’t been great.

It’s also insultingly condescending to assume that women don’t care about big issues like the economy, immigration and public policy.

The job of a good politician is above all to listen, even if he doesn’t like what is being said.

Even her choice of female voices to support her was hardly “everywoman.”

Rolling out the likes of J-Lo and Cardi B to lecture voters on why it was their duty to do as they were told was beyond cringe-inducing and guaranteed to have the opposite effect, just like her sycophantic appearance on Saturday Night Live, surrounded by fawning comedians and celebrities.

Former President Obama’s (belated and somewhat hesitant) endorsement only reminded people what a successful Democratic candidate looks like.

Isolated in her echo chamber, Harris completely failed to reach beyond the diners of the Upper West Side and Hollywood. But in the end, it was not she who delivered the decisive blow to her own campaign: it was Biden himself.

In response to an admittedly very inappropriate joke about Puerto Ricans, the president described Trump’s voters as “trash.” It was a turning point, a bald, visceral statement, an unguarded moment that became a loud cry for all those who, if not exactly Trump supporters, would be damned if they were told they were scum for not being in the Kamala Kool had believed. -Staff.

It was a misstep as bad as Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ – and in the end it turned out that nothing had changed: this Democratic elite suffered from a seemingly incurable superiority complex. Harris should have immediately distanced herself, but she didn’t. She left an open target in which Trump danced with characteristic panache.

Rolling out the likes of Cardi B to lecture voters on why it was their duty to do as they were told was beyond cringe

The moment he put on that striking jacket and stepped, somewhat unsteadily, into a garbage truck was a feat of political genius. It was funny, smart and above all self-deprecating, a quality rarely found in politicians, but which always connects with the audience.

Then, at a meeting, he poked fun at his own vanity and told the story of why he decided to keep his trash uniform: “I said, “NO WAY!” but they said, “If you did that, you actually look thinner.” I said, “Oh…” and they caught me saying I looked skinnier.’ I remember thinking at the time: he just won the election.

Meanwhile, Trump’s killer statement about the need to really like America and Americans to become president really hit home: It was clear all along that many of Harris’ compatriots and women were tiptoeing her and her party made curls. Once again the lessons of the Brexit referendum are becoming clear.

So Trump wins, and rightly so. But is he the right man for the job? That remains to be seen. Winning is the easy part; It is much more difficult to achieve a successful political agenda.

He has cast himself as the champion of the maligned and the disenfranchised, an advocate for ambition and aspiration, and an antidote to the wave of unrest in which America seems to be drowning.

Whether he can indeed ‘Make America Great Again’ remains to be seen: the obstacles are many and varied, from crippling national debts to illegal immigration, to the situation in the Middle East and, of course, the war in Ukraine.

As he says: it will be ‘a bit annoying at times, and perhaps especially in the beginning’. I have a feeling that he will focus primarily on domestic issues because then he will feel that he is on the most solid foundation. But you never know.

This Trump seems quite different from the Trump who won in 2016. Older, of course, if not exactly wiser, but certainly a more seasoned politician, and a man who seems ready to take a second term deadly seriously.