What just happened?

Trump's election victory marks the 'red-pilling' of the US electorate but the tipping point was Covid-19.

As a left-of-centre European, one of the most disorienting aspects of staying up late to watch the US election was seeing states turn red and thinking that the Democrats were winning.

In Europe, of course, red is associated with the labour movement and socialism and blue with big business and the centre right – the exact reverse of the US. But try remembering that when you’re bleary-eyed at 2am and Georgia - a state that pollsters had insisted that Harris had a good chance of winning – began turning red.

Waking the next morning to learn that Trump had won both the electoral college and the popular vote and that a convicted criminal had been returned to the White House, you can imagine my confusion. But by the clear light of day, I now realise the real meaning of that electoral college map: the reason Georgia and other supposed swing states went Republican was that some 77 million US voters now subscribe to an alternate reality. Or, to put it another way, they have been “red-pilled”.

By now, you will have heard many explanations for why Harris lost: it was inflation and “the economy, stupid”; it was the fear of unchecked immigration; it was the war in Ukraine; it was the war in Gaza; it was because one candidate had a penis and the other didn’t.

All these factors likely played a part but to my mind the most important, and the one that explains why, once again, the pollsters got it wrong, is that the majority of the US electorate now live in parallel universe, where Trump really is a victim of the “deep state”, or the “Cathedral”, or whatever conspiracy theory is trending this week. In other words, while we liberals remain enslaved in a Matrix-like dreamworld thanks to a steady diet of blue pills fed to us by mainstream media, Trumpers have been liberated from the simulation by their online feeds and see the world as it really is.

The other reason is the pandemic.

Let me explain. In retrospect, the most astonishing thing about the 2020 election result is that, despite Trump’s incompetence and the huge death toll from Covid, he very nearly beat Biden. That he didn’t was due in large part to the effect of the Black Lives Matter movement in persuading ethnic minority voters to vote Democrat. But this time round Trump upped his share of the Black vote to 20 percent (compared to 13 percent in 2020), while Harris lost ground with both Blacks and Latino voters (53 percent of Latinos voted for Harris compared to 65 percent for Biden in 2024).

However, for all that BLM galvanised voters from across the ethnic divide behind Biden, it was a temporary phenomenon and by 2024 the outrage at the death of George Floyd and the way the coronavirus had also disproportionately killed people of colour had dissipated. By contrast, enthusiasm for Trump’s MAGA movement and outrage at the way “deep state actors” like Biden’s chief medical officer, Antony Fauci, had robbed Americans of their freedoms by locking down their businesses, banning their right to assembly and mandating vaccines never went away. On the contrary it confirmed their worst suspicions about the threat to the freedoms and the cabal of “Satanic paedophiles” who, in MAGA world, secretly pull Biden’s strings.

I could give many other examples of liberal pundits who crossed to the other side during Covid, from the former left feminist Naomi Wolf, who was suspended from Twitter in 2021 for spreading anti-vax conspiracy theories, to Robert F. Kennedy Junior, now in line for the role of health czar in the new Trump administration. But perhaps the best example is someone you’ve never heard of: a yoga teacher from Orange Country, California, now serving 11 years in a Federal prison for helping foment the January 6^th assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Until Covid-19 hit, Alan Hostetter had a thriving business. But that all ended when stay-at-home orders forced Hostetter to suspend his beach yoga sessions. Angered by the lockdowns, Hostetter did what many people did during Covid: he went down a rabbit hole. You can hear his full story in The Coming Storm, Gabriel Gatehouse’s podcast series for the BBC about the role of the conspiracy group QAnon in the January 6^th insurrection. Suffice to say, you can draw a straight line from Hostetter’s arrest for defying stay at home orders in California to his appearance in Washington DC as a vocal member of MAGA and “stop the steal”, Trump’s false claim of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Hostetter was not the only person to be tipped by the pandemic from a blue- to a red-pill view of the world. A recent study of people in 50 states suggests that Covid-19 acted as a gateway to other conspiracy theories including Trump’s claim that that the FBI was behind the assassination attempt on him in July.

Indeed, a recent New York Times investigation found that since leaving office Trump has retweeted thousands of conspiracy theories via his Truth Social network. And following Musk’s reinstatment of Trump’s X account two years ago, his tweets were able to reach millions more voters.

But perhaps the most pernicious red-pill influence of all is Musk who besides donating $120m to Trump’s re-election campaign, used his megaphone at X to supercharge everything from Trump’s false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets to allegations of ballot fraud. Of course, once it became clear on Wednesday morning that Trump had won, the allegations of voter fraud ceased.

I recently wrote about what a Trump victory might mean for Musk and other tech bros. Having helped bankroll Trump’s campaign, Musk stands to reap millions of dollars in government contracts for his SpaceX and Starlink satellite businesses. J.D. Vance, meanwhile, owes a large part of his success to Paypal founder Peter Thiel.

Interestingly, Vance’s journey from Trump critic - he once described the president elect as a “total fraud” - to Trump’s chief cheer leader also seems to have begun under Covid. As he told the podcaster Joe Rogan last week: “The moment where I really started to get red-pilled … was when I took the vaccine.”