There are two views of human behaviour. One is that people are primarily motivated by self-interest—what’s in it for me? The other is that people are primarily influenced by deeply ingrained moral values—what’s right and wrong? The first view comes from the rational choice or game-theoretic school; the second belongs to what scholars call constructivism.
Now, the common belief is that Europeans tend to privilege high principles over narrow self-interest. By contrast, Americans have long been seen as mostly self-interested, individualistic people, to whom moral values are secondary considerations. That caricature of the Americans played out powerfully recently when they overwhelmingly returned to power Donald Trump, president from January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021, notwithstanding his deeply flawed character and untoward past behaviour!
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Think about it. How many countries will elect a convicted felon, someone convicted of 34 criminal charges, as president? How many countries will re-elect a president who tried to overturn an electoral defeat and who incited an insurrection against the legislature? Yet, that’s what the majority of US voters did on November 5 when they helped thrust Trump back into power in a resounding victory. In Britain and in most other European countries, a politician like Trump would not even be nominated by his party, let alone be elected by the voters. But in America, the saying that there is no morality in politics is more than a slogan; it is a truism. Americans shrugged off Trump’s past and returned him to power.
The Financial Times said in an editorial: “In voting Donald Trump back into the White House, the electorate appears to have concluded that his record as a convicted felon, his unpredictability, and his reputation for disdaining the norms of democracy matter less to them than his crisp ‘America First’ prescriptions.” Another writer said, “Americans elected Trump with eyes wide open: They know him and his past, but those didn’t matter.” One despondent US voter told the FT. “Trump hasn’t put forth anything that he’s not. He hasn’t tried to fool us: he’s a racist, a misogynist, a liar, a cheat. He’s an all-round bad man, and he’s not tried to hide any of that—and yet the population still picked him. That blows me away.” The question is why? Why did most Americans plump for Trump, knowing what they knew about him?
“But in America, the saying that there is no morality in politics is more than a slogan; it is a truism. Americans shrugged off Trump’s past and returned him to power.”
There are three main reasons, but the most critical is the economy. Indeed, as someone put it, “It was the economy first, second, and third.” Most Americans believed life was better for them during Trump’s first term, whereas it was unbearable under President Joe Biden due to high inflation. And because Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival in the presidential election, is Biden’s vice president, she was punished for the economic pains their government inflicted on ordinary Americans. Most of the voters wanted Trump to return to power and make the economy work for them again! It is a classic self-interested calculation. When moral issues like Trump’s criminal conviction, several criminal indictments, and two impeachments were put alongside economic issues, such as the high cost of living, millions of Americans decided their economic well-being was more important than Trump’s moral failures.
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Of course, being the world’s preeminent populist politician, Trump ruthlessly exploited the people’s resentments as he did against Hillary Clinton in 2016, when he seized on declining standards of living and the anger of the economically marginalised to pitch himself as being on the side of the people. Biden defeated Trump in 2020 mainly because of Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and also because most Americans believed Biden, vice president under President Barack Obama, was instinctively pro-workers and pro-the middle class. However, four years later, more than 75 percent of Americans believed America was on the wrong track under the Biden/Harris administration. Biden prides himself on his $1.9 trillion stimulus package, but spraying money around simply pushed up prices. Ordinary Americans felt poorer despite the stimulus and the so-called economic growth it created.
Interestingly, Trump’s response to the economic concerns of most Americans was a promise to row back globalisation by imposing 10 to 20 percent tariffs on all imports into the US, with 60 percent on Chinese products, even though virtually all economic experts pointed out that such a policy would hike up inflation and worsen living standards. But the voters ignored experts’ analysis of the possible impacts of Trump’s economic prescriptions and simply based their judgement on their present economic circumstances and past experience of Trumpism.
Which brings us to the second reason Trump won: uncontrolled immigration. In the nearly four years of the Biden/Harris presidency, illegal migrants in the US rose to 9.4 million, more than thrice as many as under Trump.
As president, Trump signed several executive orders imposing immigrant visa bans on many countries, including Nigeria, which he described as “posing the highest degree of risk” to American national security. However, when Biden took over in January 2021, he revoked all the executive orders, resulting in massive inflows of migrants from across the world.
Well, Trump has vowed to reinstate the executive orders and, indeed, to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting up to 20 million undocumented immigrants! Most Americans voted for Trump because of his promised mass deportations. They were untouched by the moral issues raised by such mass deportations, which would see parents taken away from their citizen-children. Rather, most Americans loathed the Biden administration for spending money on illegal immigrants, thus limiting the resources available to them as citizens. It was a self-interested consideration.
Finally, Trump won because the Democrats prioritised “woke liberalism” or culture wars over the concerns of working-class Americans. They were more interested in protecting abortion rights, gay rights, and transgender rights than tackling the economic concerns of ordinary Americans. The Democrats believed that identity politics encompassing women, Latinos, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, Muslims, etc. was a vote-winner. But Trump mercilessly exploited the folly, showing that most Americans were, in fact, culturally conservative and cared more about bread-and-butter issues. He won massively among the various demographics. For those groups, class or economic well-being mattered more than race, ethnicity, or religion!
Inevitably, the above analysis must invoke a comparison with Nigeria. What shapes voting behaviour in Nigeria? Morality? Absolutely not. Economic performance? Certainly not. Rather, it’s mainly ethnicity and religion. Take morality. In 2023, the 36.6 percent of the electorate who made Bola Tinubu president knew everything about his past – his drug-related property forfeiture in America, his unexplained wealth and the miasma of dubiety surrounding his age, education, origin, parentage, etc. Yet, they voted for him mainly because of his ethnicity or his Muslim-Muslim ticket.
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What about economic performance? Well, if the economy is a major factor in winning or losing an election, as it is in developed countries, Tinubu would not have become president after his party destroyed Nigeria’s economy under President Buhari. Yet, even now, despite the high inflation and high unemployment decimating ordinary Nigerian lives under his administration, Tinubu might still win in 2027, regardless of his appalling performance and attendant high misery index.
But here’s the key lesson from Trump’s historic comeback: despondency about democracy could metastasise into something uglier. Americans ignored Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection and returned him to power because safeguarding democracy wasn’t their priority amid worsening living standards. The truth is, if an angel can’t govern well and improve people’s lives, the electorate will turn to a devil who they believe can. Thus, owing to Biden’s governance failures, America will now have a convicted felon as president. Shocking!
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