In the end it seems that the endorsement of Hulk Hogan mattered more than the backing of Taylor Swift. If the 2024 presidential election wasn’t confusing enough before the polls delivered their verdict, then Donald Trump’s decisive victory on Tuesday proved that you could turn any sort of popularity – or infamy – on its head.
In The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit suggested that the nation’s problem in the wake of this result was that too many of its citizens believed that they lived in a better country than they really did. Solnit laid the root of the problem at the doors of toxic masculinity, the power of Silicon Valley – and for the benefit of this election cycle and era, that may as well be shorthand for Elon Musk – and “the failure of the news media”.
Solnit may well be right about the first two elements, but I’m not so sure about the third. Political incompetence, misogyny, criminal conviction, a litany of cases filed against him, two attempts at impeachment and a riot in the US Capitol building that was as good an endorsement of insurrection in America as anything since the Civil War. It’s true that this list – which would be a death knell for any other politician – barely scratches the surface of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanours, but were these and much else besides given scant coverage by the media, at home or abroad?
If the media were at all culpable in the second coming of Donald Trump, it is perhaps in writing his obituary just one too many times, as well as boosting the popularity of Harris just a touch further than was translated into ballots cast for her. At its height, in late August, Harris’s bump in the polls on the back of her taking over the Democratic nomination from Joe Biden and securing that endorsement at a very successful party convention, still amounted to no more than a four-point advantage over Trump.
It’s also a striking indictment of some polling that post-election analysis has started picking up on crypto betting markets in the US like Polymarket offering much more accurate odds on a Trump victory weeks ago, and that set against accusations the site was being manipulated at the time by pro-Trump supporters trying to inflate his chances.
If tracking polls can’t be trusted anymore, and if gamblers know the inside story more than political analysts, then we might as well just listen to the celebrity endorsements and track where popular reaction goes from there.
At the Republican National Convention in July former wrestler Hogan ripped his shirt open and declared, “Let Trumpmania run wild, brother! Let Trumpmania make America great again!” In September, best-selling artist Swift endorsed Harris just after the one and only presidential debate had taken place between the two candidates. “I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” she said in an Instagram post that was signed off with the phrase, ‘childless cat lady’ a reference to vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s comment in a 2021 Fox News interview about the kind of people he thought were running the country. Swift’s post got as many as 340,000 Americans registering to vote within hours. In interview, meanwhile, Hogan thought he’d make a good vice-president one day.
On Tuesday, over 72 million Americans decided that the country’s future was in safer hands with Trumpmania and wrestling celebrities who thought they had a shot at public office, than calm and sober judgement as practiced by the biggest pop star on the planet. In four years’ time, one of them is likely to have the last laugh.
Ian Scott, Professor of American Film and History
