Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that earned him a return to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was blatantly manifested in the the last two weeks of the campaign. But Trump still sent a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration with the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and undocumented immigrants were to blame for inflation and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and absurd. For example, Trump has promised to both curb inflation and implement huge tariffs, a combination that almost all economists agree is impossible. Trump’s promised mass evictions would likely drive up prices rather than calm the economy. But in a country where about three quarters of Americans believe things are on the wrong track, the promise of improving things was powerful.

David Frum: Trump won. And now ?

Trump is perhaps the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers, including my colleague Peter Wehner noted the contrast between Trump’s attitude and the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan. But in a strange way, Trump offers a kind of hope. This is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies, nor for LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit into Stephen Miller’s category of “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump has promised a way out.

“We are going to help our country heal,” Trump said early this morning. “We will help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs it badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything in our country, and we made history for a reason tonight, and the reason will be just that. »

You can compare this with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly optimistic but suffered from a serious, perhaps irreparable, flaw.

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Harris has been praised for her positive campaign message, particularly in the weeks after Joe Biden dropped out and was nominated. Biden had spent months warning about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking — explicitly. “We’re not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. It was a fundamentally conservative response, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, became surprisingly conservativebut it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take seriously the economic consequences of inflation. In its first two years, the Biden administration focused squarely on recovering and restructuring the economy post-COVID, and treated inflation more as a passing annoyance than a long-term danger. But he also seems to have concluded that it lacked a good response to inflation. The administration frustratedly argued that inflation was a global trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that U.S. inflation had fallen faster than in peer countries and that the U.S. economy was performing better than any other. This was all true and politically unnecessary. You can’t make people feel better with statistics.

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In theory, the mid-summer switch from Harris to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris has struggled to distance herself from Biden. When we asked her to do it, she hesitated. At the beginning of October, the hosts of The view asked her what she would have done differently than the president, and she replied: “Nothing comes to mind regarding – and I was involved in most of the decisions that had an impact, the job what we did. Republicans were thrilled and made it a staple of their attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether out of loyalty to his boss or some other impulse, it’s unclear whether Harris would have been capable of making a more radical change. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world punished incumbents in recent elections. Her coalition meant she could not run an aggressive protectionist or anti-immigration campaign, even if she had wanted to. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters has kept her from moving very far to the left economically, although past campaigns also don’t offer clear evidence that she would have been a winner. Furthermore, Democrats had a strong empirical case that what they had done to manage the economy had been very effective. They just didn’t have policy case.

This is a bitter setback for the Democrats: Trump will now benefit from their successes in government. If he actually attempts, or succeeds, to quickly deport millions of people or impose 60% tariffs, he will drive up inflation and ruin the progress of Biden’s term, but Biden’s own political instincts Trump and the influence of many very wealthy people around him could temper that. Having clearly promised to solve the problem and defeated his enemies, he will now be able to claim a quick victory.