Posted on Tuesday, November 19, 2024

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by Shane Harris

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Following President-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping victory on November 5, elected Democrats and the establishment media quickly pivoted from slandering Trump and his supporters as “fascists” to calling for “unity.” Conservatives should see this ploy for what it is – just another effort to undermine Trump’s agenda and the will of American voters.

President Joe Biden, speaking from the White House, urged the country to view one another as “fellow Americans” rather than adversaries after the election – never mind the fact that just days earlier he had called every Trump supporter “garbage.” Tim Walz, fresh off comments comparing Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally, likewise called for “unity.”

Kamala Harris also made overtures to unity in her concession speech, apparently forgetting or ignoring that the closing themes of her campaign were comparing Trump and his supporters to Hitler and running blatantly false ads claiming that Trump would be a “dictator” if he won.

The inconvenient truth for Democrats about the 2024 election is that Donald Trump has already unified the country – he’s just unified it behind his America First platform and against the left’s failed agenda. Trump improved on his 2020 performance in 90 percent of counties nationwide, while Harris lost ground compared to Biden’s 2020 numbers in every state.

Trump also won the popular vote this year – something no Republican presidential candidate has done since 2004. Even when Trump won the White House in 2016, Democrats claimed a “victory” of sorts due to Hillary Clinton’s popular vote edge, lamenting the supposed unfairness of the “biased” Electoral College. Now even this talking point has been erased.

Republicans also held their majority in the U.S. House and won back the Senate. While votes are still being counted, GOP House and Senate candidates – the vast majority of whom ran under Trump’s “Make America Great Again” banner – are very likely to have garnered more votes nationally than their Democrat counterparts.

Even before the final matchup between Trump and Biden and then Trump and Harris was officially set, it was already clear the country was unified against Biden and Harris. Biden entered office with an approval rating above 55 percent. That sunk to 38 percent earlier this year and is now barely hovering above 40 percent. This dramatic collapse is the direct result of four years of runaway inflation, 10-20 million illegal border crossings, multiple foreign fiascos beginning with the Afghanistan debacle, forcing radical left-wing social policies on the American people, and a litany of other policy failures, along with Biden’s staff attempting to hide the president’s cognitive decline from the public.

Kamala Harris, as Biden’s “border czar” and someone who bragged about being the “last person in the room” with Biden before his most fateful decisions, most notoriously the Afghanistan withdrawal, owns these failures as well. Before the media’s all-out effort to rehabilitate her image following Biden dropping out of the race, Harris was the least popular vice president in modern history. Some liberal pundits were even calling for Biden to replace her as his running mate for fear she would hurt his chances at re-election.

What November 5 showed, however, is that the American people aren’t just united against Biden and Harris – they are united behind Trump.

It’s worth considering just how remarkable this outcome is given the concerted decade-long effort to slander and villainize Trump in order to foment the very opposite of the “unity” that Democrats now claim to want.

From Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” smear in 2016 to Biden’s “you ain’t black” remark in 2020 and his “garbage” comment this year, Democrats have relied almost exclusively on a “divide and conquer” strategy when it comes to Trump. Democrats and their media allies have incessantly called Trump racist and “accused him of “dog whistling” to white supremacists to alienate voters of color, propped up dubious claims of sexual assault against him and lied about his abortion policy to alienate women, and propagated an endless stream of hoaxes to distract from the undeniable successes of Trump’s first term.

The 2024 election was a thorough repudiation of this divisive strategy. Since November 5, Trump has been one of the most unifying political figures in recent history, nominating multiple former Democrats to serve in his cabinet and announcing a string of popular policies like making IVF treatments free and expanding school choice.

Democrats, for their part, seem poised to run the same gameplan against Trump that they have for the past eight years – accusing him of being “divisive” while themselves using every media and political tool at their disposal to divide the country.

Republicans should be confident in advancing the policy platform outlined by Trump throughout the course of the 2024 campaign, no matter how loudly Democrats try to claim it is “divisive” and demand “compromise” with the far-left agenda.

Trump’s agenda is what Americans voted for, and that is what Americans deserve.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.