2024 analysed: Trump's year
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, James Hansen and Alex Dibble. As the year draws to a close, we're bringing you a series of episodes analysing 2024 from a security perspective.

Yesterday we discussed what the last year has meant for Volodymyr Zelensky. Today we're looking at Donald Trump. To say it's been an eventful year for Trump would be an understatement. He survived not one, but two assassination attempts and became the first former or sitting US president to be convicted of a crime.

And yet despite all of that, in November he completed a remarkable political comeback and won a second term in the White House, four years after he was rejected by American voters. Our guest today is The Times' US correspondent Charlotte MacDonald Gibson. Charlotte, it's easy to forget, but at the start of 2024 it wasn't even certain that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination for president. What did you make of how easily he came through the primaries? Well,

Well, yes, I think when we started out the year, he also had these criminal cases looming. We didn't know how they would affect his general popularity. You know, he made that decision to not actively join that primary process. So we didn't see him in any of those debates with the various candidates on the stage. And that was obviously a gamble. As you said, at the start of the year, it wasn't clear whether this gamble would pay off.

especially considering there was all this pressure on him. There were these legal cases. You know, there was obviously all the allegations, counter allegations about the elections, Jan 6th. You know, so whether or not all of this, how all of this was going to play out really wasn't clear at the start of the year. I say that, but it then became pretty clear pretty quickly that actually, you know, his strategy was working. That strategy of stepping outside of that

you know, that, that media narrative, that standard, like, well, here are the primaries. Here's the debate. Here's what the candidates do. His decision to step outside of that actually worked. It worked straight off the bat. It played into that whole outsider narrative. And,

you know, straight away from the first primaries and caucuses we had in January, he was winning. It was very, very clear that he was winning. And you'd watch these debates and increasingly we'd watch these debates with Haley and DeSantis and Ramaswamy. And they just, you know...

They felt kind of obsolete. You know, it felt like you didn't feel like you were watching, you know, a potential presidential candidate. You felt like you were watching a bunch of people, some of whom were, you know, maybe auditioning for a cabinet post in Trump's eventual administration or, you know, trying to justify their own previous actions. So I would say it became pretty clear very early on in the year that he was going to win that nomination. Yeah.

And as you mentioned, throughout 2024, various legal cases against Trump have hovered over him.

In May, he was found guilty on all counts of falsifying business records, becoming the first former or sitting president to be convicted of a crime. What should we read into the fact that none of his legal problems were ultimately capable of derailing his re-election campaign? Well, yes, I mean, I think you've got to the heart of the paradox of Trump there, haven't you? Because it's the classic, I mean, these various, these legal cases, these allegations of sexual assault, all these things, these...

These events, these convictions, these cases, they should be enough to derail any political career. But when it comes to Trump, they seem to do the opposite. If you look at the May conviction, which is obviously the very significant first conviction of a president, after that, he had his best fundraising period of his campaign in the three days after that decision. So we see that he had been so effective in creating that fundamental narrative that

So he created the narrative, well, this is a justice department out against me. It's the big guys, it's the elite, it's the system out against me. And once you've made people believe that narrative, this all just fits into it. So people just don't believe that he was guilty or that he should have been guilty or that he should have been tried. So as you said, once he's created this narrative,

this spun this narrative around himself that everything fits into it. Therefore, when these things happen, they do in fact boost his support. I think the big question that we didn't know the answer to at the time, and I think maybe we do now is whether or not that was only playing to his, you know, his small MAGA base or whether or not, you know, these cases were going to have a broader impact. Cause obviously, you know, I would say that the broader, you know, this, this whole, uh,

outsider narrative, the Justice Department is against me, does that play to a broader audience? That's what we didn't know at the time, but we have a better sense of now. Of course, this has been the year in which Trump survived, as we mentioned, two separate assassination attempts.

How significant was his reaction to the first one in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he defiantly raised his fist to the crowd and shouted the word fight? Oh, it was hugely significant. It created the image of the campaign. As you said, that image of the blood in the air, the fist in the air.

that was everywhere. It only took hours for it to start appearing on t-shirts, of course. And it's remained one of the defining images. And it really brought together a lot of his own theories. So we talked about his outsider narrative, this idea of being persecuted, this idea that people were against him. It made them all real as well. So it backed

up things he'd been saying all along. So you had the visual element, you had, you know, if people had been sort of saying, oh, well, Trump is a bit of a conspiracy theorist, he's saying people against him, that's not the case. It sort of proved to some of the doubters that there were elements that were very much against him and there was a real danger against him. So the momentum after that was extraordinary. I remember the convention a couple of days later when he came out

with the bandage on his ear. I mean, it was a really electric moment. You know, it was astounding and it really felt then that the momentum had swung in his favor so much. But absolutely,

But as is the way in this election campaign, you know, a few weeks later, it then felt like it swung the other way when, of course, we had Biden stepping down, Kamala Harris coming in. And for a while, that seemed to overshadow the whole, the momentum of the assassination attempt. So it's very easy to look back now and say, well, yes, of course, this was a real moment. But I do remember at the time, first of all, his speech at the convention, which was actually very rambling and didn't really seize on that momentum. And then how the Democrats managed to gain the narrative afterwards, saying,

So that was interesting that, you know, now we look back and say it was a moment, but at the time it got overshadowed quite quickly by other events. But that's just the nature of this year and the campaign has been like this year. Yes, it's interesting how Kamala Harris's entry into the campaign seemed to shift the momentum because people were talking about her brat summer and bringing new energy to the Democrats. But ultimately, Donald Trump outperformed the polls again and won the election again.

Looking back, what issues do you think won it for him? Did it come down to the economy and immigration? Well, it's interesting. Yeah, you mentioned that sense of momentum that Harris had, the Bratz summer, that message of joy that people felt was resonating with voters at the time. And it's like, oh, well, there's this politics

positivity about her campaign, which is a great contrast to sort of the relentless doom-mongering of Trump. And people said that was something positive and something that was really helping her. But again, now, if we look back, I think the problem was, was that sort of sense of joy did not reflect the way most Americans were feeling about their daily lives.

So, well, you know, you could say, well, it was a nice counterpart to Trump. Yeah. But, you know, people in America struggling to buy food for their kids to get clothes. I mean, inflation, inflation, inflation. I mean, it was just such a such an all consuming issue for people. And the Democrats never care.

got a handle on it. They never got a message across about it because Harris is, of course, inevitably linked to the Biden administration as his vice president. So she was never able to distance herself from Biden and really say, well, this is my vision for how I'm going to fix the economy. And it's just something that people talk about

Every single day, every single walk of life, people are moaning about how high costs are. At the end of the day, I think that Trump had a message. He had a very, very strong message on that. And it was the classic people were better off under Trump. They would look and say, I was better off under Trump. Harris isn't giving me an answer to this one. So while we talked about his outsider narrative and that sense of being persecuted, that may have chimed with some people.

But overwhelmingly, it was the economy that decided this election, in my opinion. And Charlotte, with Trump being inaugurated on the 20th of January, what are you expecting from his first few weeks back in the White House? I think it's going to be incredibly interesting to see because he has promised to do so much even on his first day. Whether or not he frees the people incarcerated over the January 6th Capitol riots, I think that will be a very, very interesting one to watch because that will really set

signal what his intentions are in that campaign. Because again, this was a promise he made, and it's a promise that was very, very controversial. If he makes good on that promise, I mean, that really sets the tone for the administration. I think migration as well is a big one. The promises he's made on migration in terms of the numbers that might be potential for deporting, I mean, it's millions. Is he going to act on that very, very quickly, which he says he is going to do? And the

is we've already seen him acting on things like on trade with Canada and Mexico, making the threats of the tariffs. So he's already acting on some of these campaign promises. And if we look at the cabinet that he's appointed, that very much suggests also that he is going to make good on a lot of those campaign promises. So for me personally, I'll be watching the January 6th, because that is also another potential flashpoint. If he doesn't free them all, there is a potential there for trouble for him. So it's

also a flashpoint I think we should be watching. And on migration as well, how quickly is he going to act on that one? Charlotte, thank you. That's The Times' US correspondent, Charlotte MacDonald-Gibson. That episode focused on Donald Trump, as you have just heard. But tomorrow, we will be taking an in-depth look at how 2024 has gone for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with The Times' Israel correspondent, Gabrielle Weininger. Do join us for that. Thank you, though, for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. See you tomorrow.

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