Most election postmortems highlight the issues that played badly for Vice President Kamala Harris and were advantageous to President-elect Donald Trump: inflation, chaos on the world stage and uncontrolled immigration.
The Harris-Walz campaign failed to put any daylight between Ms. Harris and the unpopular policies of President Biden, while the Trump-Vance campaign effectively made voters yearn for the booming economy, control of illegal and relative peace abroad during Mr. Trump’s first term.
But there was another element to Mr. Trump’s historic success, which history will record as the greatest political comeback of all time: the discipline of messaging and the absence of distracting and destructive political infighting. While the anti-Trump media highlighted the internecine wars that persisted in Mr. Trump’s previous two presidential campaigns and through his first term, they had little material to work with regarding his coherent and well-run 2024 effort.
We can expect this cessation of factional infighting to last into the new Trump term with his choice of co-campaign manager Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. Much of the unified messaging, professionalism and streamlined operations that characterized Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign can be attributed to her quiet, persistent leadership and expert navigation of exigencies.
