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By Herb Booker January 17, 2025

The presidential election is over, all of the results are in, and as we all know, Donald Trump was the victor. Whether you like it or not, when Trump is inaugurated on January 20th, expect sweeping changes on day 1 almost immediately. Scores of executive orders have been written and are ready for implementation. Be prepared to BUCKLE UP!

To help us understand how we got here, we need to dissect all of the factors and issues that went into Trump’s 1.5% popular vote margin, and a sweep of seven swing states on November 5th. The four key issues are the economy, border, abortion and social issues.

ECONOMY

High prices driven by inflation during the Biden/Harris administration is the key contributing factor in Donald Trump’s victory. People typically vote their pocketbooks. Year-over-year inflation peaked at 9% during the Biden/Harris administration and is now hovering at just over 3%.

To achieve a more thorough understanding of the economic factors that drove the election, we need to first understand the definition of inflation. What is inflation? In the most basic sense, inflation is characterized by too much money chasing too few goods.

First, we’ll look at the money part. There were three sets of stimulus checks that were provided to struggling working families during the Covid-19 crisis. There were two sets of stimulus checks in March (CARES Act) and December (Consolidated Appropriations Act) of 2020 during the Trump administration, and a stimulus disbursement in March (American Rescues Act) of 2021 during the Biden administration. Additionally, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was established in 2020 by the Trump administration to keep the workforce of businesses employed. The stimulus checks paid out a total of approximately $850 billion, and PPP doled out approximately $800 billion. The economy was awash in cash.

Next, we’ll look at supply chain issues. The economy essentially went from zero to sixty virtually overnight. Many Americans were stuck at home during the latter part of 2020 into 2021, and thanks to stimulus and PPP, many of them had available cash and were ordering billions of dollars of goods from overseas. Consequently, there was a bottleneck of goods coming into the country because most of the goods that are imported arrive in shipping containers on ships. I think many of you will remember seeing on television 30 to 40 ships lined up in the middle of the bay off of the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports that couldn’t be offloaded. The bottleneck was essentially choking the economy.

All of the aforementioned factors drove high inflation. Additionally, many companies did take the opportunity to raise prices and used inflation as an excuse. These companies earned huge profits during Covid.

Lastly, messaging played a huge part in how the state of the economy was perceived. To the detriment of the Democrats, the messaging from Donald Trump and his team particularly with social media was far more effective than the messaging from the Democrats as it relates to the economy. Democrats should take some notes here. Trump was able to convince almost half of electorate that four years ago, the economy was much better four years ago than it is now, even though due to his perceived Covid incompetence, Trump did not get reelected in 2020, and the economy lost 2.9 million jobs on his watch.

The Harris Campaign should have done a lot more to toot their own horn in regard to the economy. Sure, pricing was an issue, but the economy is a lot bigger than the price of eggs. The stock market reached record highs, and the unemployment rate is at approximately 4%, which is pretty much full employment and the drop in inflation was significant. In effect, the U.S. economy is by far the best economy in the world. I would have liked for the Harris Campaign to explain more thoroughly that the factors affecting inflation and pricing was not just a U.S. issue but a worldwide phenomenon. I would have encouraged voters to note the significant economic progress, that another Democrat four-year term would be needed to complete the task, and to not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

BORDER

This is an area that was probably the weakest for the Biden/Harris administration. The release of migrants into the country with limited ability to track them and ensure that they appear for their asylum hearings was deemed by Republicans as “catch and release” and was a big issue. In many cases the asylum hearings wouldn’t be scheduled for years out. More than 1 million migrants have been allowed to enter the country during the Biden/Harris administration utilizing the Immigration Parole Authority, which can allow the U.S. to bring into the country large numbers of people in an emergency situation. President Biden was perceived by many to have abused the parole authority with immigrants from several countries.

Fox News ran the border and immigration as their lead story for months and were very critical. Not only Trump supporters, but even many Democrats had issues with how the Biden/Harris administration handled the border. President Biden did pass several executive actions in June of 2024 that limited border encounters and border crossing, but it was too little too late. The damage had been done.

On the plus side for the Biden/Harris administration, they did support a $118 billion bipartisan border bill in February of 2024, which also contained aid for Ukraine and Israel, that would have fixed most of the border security issues. A key component of the bill would have provided facilities and support personnel to hold and process migrants that present themselves at the border without them entering the country. An asylum determination would be made quickly, and if rejected, the migrant would be deported almost immediately signaling an end to “catch and release”. Unfortunately, Donald Trump pressured the House of Representatives to reject the bill because he wanted to run on the border issue.

As far as deportations, Biden will probably deport more migrants by the end of his term than Trump did during his first term. Neither president deported more migrants than Obama.

ABORTION

The abortion issue obviously received quite a bit of attention from the pro-choice and pro-life factions, Trump did some flip-flopping on the abortion issue, but the Democrats probably put too many of their eggs into the pro-choice basket. Unfortunately for Vice-President Harris, she did not get the level of support she had hoped for from White women.

SOCIAL ISSUES

There is an element within the Maga-verse that is not too keen on a multi-cultural society to put it lightly. Donald Trump realized that playing to their anti-minority sentiments, including gaslighting migrant crime, even though migrant crime rates are lower than the crime rate for US citizens, and pushing the anti-DEI and Woke rhetoric, which may essentially amount to Jim Crow 2.0, just serves as a means of disenfranchising minorities again. Expect blog articles on DEI and Woke within the next few weeks.

Thank you for reading my inaugural blog piece. The current plan is to issue a new blog every week. My blog will lean heavily toward politics and world events, but I will also include quite a bit of satire. I don’t always claim to be right, but I always claim to have an opinion. All opinions herein are solely the opinions of Herb Booker. Comments are welcome and can be sent to hbooker2@yahoo.com, or at the bottom of this page. Next week “Is Woke the New Black”.