Good morning America, how are you

Don't you know me, I'm your native son?

(with apologies to Steve Goodman)

There will be plentiful post mortems. I’ll keep this one short.

It’s awful. It’s also chickens coming home to roost. There are many reasons for Trump’s win, but it also has to be said, and forcefully, that the Democrats did much to bring this on themselves. Not just in the election campaign, but over the years.

I don’t think Gaza was in itself the decisive issue, except maybe in Michigan, where both Trump and Stein beat Harris in Dearborn, which Biden took with 88 percent of the vote in 2020, and the Dems managed to lose most every college town.

But Harris’s “I’m speaking!,” the exclusion of Palestinian speakers from the DNC stage, and Bill Clinton’s condescending intervention were all symptomatic of a wider mindset that affects the Democrats’ approach to (or ignoring of) other issues too—the arrogant, cynical, contemptuous mindset of an entrenched, entitled political elite that has long lost touch with the American people, including the Democrats’ own party base.

Gaza was also important in another respect. If you campaign on “ironclad support” for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, you are saying there are no moral limits on the means you use so long as the ends are worthy. Don’t be surprised if people then conclude it’s OK to vote for mass deportations, internment camps, jailing of political opponents, and using the military to quash dissent at home in support of THEIR (decent, Christian, patriotic) agenda. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

In its contempt for the rule of law in international affairs, the Biden/Harris administration has helped prepare the ground for the coming Trump tyranny at home. Trump’s victory could be seen as Gaza’s revenge for the Democrats’ indifference to—not to say enabling of—Palestinian suffering. Now liberal America will suffer too.

So, unfortunately, will many others.