Michael Wolff: Trump’s dominant win makes the US his country and his ethos the dominant ideology of the age

Last month, when I interviewed billionaire mogul and major Democratic donor Barry Diller, he told me that – even more than a Kamala Harris victory – he wished for a decisive victory, by one side or the other, to break the great American logjam.

In the end, he got his wish.

On Tuesday night, America repudiated the liberal plan, temperament and future. There isn’t any ambiguity here.

The wavering districts of the country, where hearts and minds might have seemed unsure, broke for Donald Trump and the Republicans in a big way.

It turned out to be quite an early night.

The choice was emphatic and binary: America chose the opposite of every Left-wing notion of what is good and right and decent.

The idea that American women would carry the day, and protect the fundamental rights over their bodies, failed.

The idea that the Democratic Party best represented the nation’s minorities, crumbled.

The idea that we are a country of unimpeachable laws, in which the justice system has the last and final judgement, was swept aside: a convicted criminal won.

The idea that Trump was an outlier, however persistent, was smashed to smithereens.

In the end, it meant nothing that the Establishment had lined up powerfully for the Democrats.

Not in recent memory, in fact, has there been such a bipartisan gathering, shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricades, of the great and good: former generals, foreign policy experts, the daughter of a recent Republican vice president (Liz Cheney).

And for naught. Their status, standing and experience turned out to sway few, if any, other than those already in the choir.

In a real sense, we are simply back to 2016 – though, now, with even more foreboding and angst for the Left.

Trump’s 2016 victory, liberals could tell themselves – and have done for eight long years – was a fluke.

But 2024 cannot be ignored.

The 2016 question, never quite answered, is back on the table: is it the novelty of Donald Trump that the country wants, or is this sharp repudiation of the attitudes and precepts of the liberal Establishment?

Well, he is no longer novel.

It would be foolish to not acknowledge the obvious: Donald Trump and the populist ethos he represents is the dominant political ideology, style and impulse of the age.

And the age is long. For a decade, Trump has been the overriding figure of our time, with Joe Biden and the Democrats offering, at best, what seems only to be a mere footnote.

Now, barring an act of God, the age of Trump continues for another four years. This is looking like the longest political run since Roosevelt and the New Deal.

And, as that time remade the nation – with its governing methods, its social aspirations, its moral philosophy – so will the age of Trump.

Indeed, judging by Tuesday night, it already has.

The internal Democrat blame game will now be fierce and cleansing.

Biden and his old age and his desperate efforts to hold on to office, along with his weak management of the Democratic coalition and its veering to the loony Left, deserves much of that blame.

Harris, a mediocre candidate with a tepid campaign, will be dealt her share, too.

But the Party’s own lack of a compelling message will come under the microscope more than anything.

Its one-note reliance on abortion left it sputtering in the face of Trump’s ownership of the case against the Biden- Harris economy and their Southern border crisis.

The Democrat’s fatal assumption: Donald Trump’s blasphemies would overcome their own feeble response to inflation and immigration – the most pressing and emotional issues of the day.

In fact, his blasphemies rather seem to have been a net plus for him. His grievous faults turned out to be his unique virtues.

The mainstream media could not have beaten the drum harder – damning, in particular, the supposed darkness of his Madison Square Garden closing rally for its nastiness, its racial slurs, the open threats against MAGA’s enemies, all this venom in plain sight.

But if you were there in person, what you saw were 20,000 people having a wonderful time. It was a WWF wrestling match or, even, in its working- class familiarity, a Grateful Dead rock concert.

Even the Trump campaign in these final weeks has shrunk from its candidate’s obvious invective and weirdness. But Trump himself never wavered.

When doubts arise around him, he simply leans ever further into being Donald Trump – and he’s rewarded for it.

That is the Democrats’ existential predicament: quite a healthy majority of the country is drawn to this man. They enjoy him. They admire him. They respect him.

The Democrats’ inability to get their head around that – a total inability to understand why anyone would not entirely reject this man and is not utterly horrified by his presence – is what, most of all, now casts them into the wilderness.

And so we move beyond an evenly divided nation – always the last refuge of the Democrats. Even if they lost, their true majority in the popular vote (which everyone assumed they would win), as well as their moral one, would have held.

It still would have been – but for the anomalies of the electoral college and the MAGA deplorables – a liberal nation.

The Establishment would have held. But now Republicans have handily won the White House, the Senate and likely even the House.

Liberals in America are a certain island. And it will be a long time before they can regroup and plan an effective counterattack. If ever.

There is no doubt about what has happened. This is Donald Trump’s country.

Michael Wolff is the author of Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency