Well, that was a year, wasn’t it? While no one had a sitting president being booted off his party’s ticket while simultaneously witnessing the greatest political comeback since Grover Cleveland on their bingo card, we can all at least say 2024 didn’t have a dull moment…even when we wanted one.
As we look forward to 2025, let’s check out the background of the mirror one last time and rank the top 5 people who made 2024 a year that no one who lived through it will ever forget.
Five: Tim Walz. The Minnesota governor was a virtual unknown all year, outside of the small (and dwindling) audience of MSNBC, where he would occasionally appear. Then he called Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, “weird.” In a liberal media environment desperate for anything close to Trump’s ability to give out nicknames, it went viral. The unknown younger-than-he-looks governor with an unvetted past vaulted to the top of the VP contender list for Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris based on that alone.
It's a testament to how devoid of substance the Harris campaign was shaping up to be, that she would pick a nominally popular governor of a state that hadn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1972 over the popular, younger (looking and in age), more energetic governor of the swing state of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. When Harris announced Walz, the GOP collectively shook our heads and exhaled. It was the first important decision Harris had to make and she blew it – passing on taking Pennsylvania out of play because she seemed to be afraid to offend the anti-Semite wing of the Democratic Party, who’d been ripping up college campuses for a year.
All the glowing press and slobbering interviews in the world could not cover for the fact that Walz had a long history of embellishment and lies about everything from his military service to awards he’d received as a kid. It was enough to make you wonder just how horrible the opposition research team in the Minnesota GOP is that they missed all of it for two election cycles.
But it was found, and there was no defense. After a brief honeymoon and all the propping up the corporate media could muster, Tim Walz became a non-entity in the election. The only positive things that can be said about him is that Kamala Harris was so much worse as a candidate that people will forget he was even on the ticket.
Which brings us to Kamala Harris herself, at number four.
Not since “New Coke” has so much money been spent trying to convince the public to buy into something they simply did not want – four more years of a Joe Biden presidency. With enough cash to found a country, the Harris campaign couldn’t even settle on a message. Thanks to that money, they didn’t have to.
What was the theme of the Harris campaign? Stump your friends and ask them. She would’ve changed nothing from the failed and unpopular previous four years, yet should somehow be a fresh start. The same people would bring about different results. It was like only having the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies and promising everyone they would have steak for dinner.
Harris was originally sold to the public by Joe Biden as someone ready to be president “on day one.” As it turned out, she wasn’t even ready to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president on any day of the campaign.
Trump hammered her as more of the same and her response was to say she wouldn’t be, but would do all the same things. The only thing more numerous than the dollars she had to spend was the claims she made that, as the child of two tenured professors with good-paying jobs, she somehow grew up “in the middle class.” Voters realized that, even if that were true, telling that to the grocery store manager or their landlord did not make life more affordable for them and they voted accordingly.
Next comes Nancy Pelosi. The former Speaker of the House and current true leader of Democrats in the lower chamber (spare me the idea that she gave up anything more than the title to Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)) took out a president. It was one half of one of the greatest stock-picking teams in history (no insider trading, so don’t even ask), Nancy takes the place of the president of the United States on this list because she flexed her muscle and did what no other Democrat could do: get Joe Biden to give up power.
Exactly how she did it will remain between the two of them – did she threaten to end their party’s obstruction into the investigation of the business dealings of his family, or did she simply beg? Only they know, but no one buys the idea of her showing him polling data and that doing the trick; he’d worked his whole life to get into that office – running three times – no way does he give it up over bad polling five months before an election.
Maybe an enterprising journalist could get to the bottom of what really happened? Just kidding, they don’t exist anymore.
Then we get to Elon Musk in the number two slot. It wasn’t his money, though that helped. But you have to remember that the $200 million he is alleged to have spent in helping Republicans was dwarfed by a factor of almost seven from just the Harris campaign alone. Add in all the money spent up-and-down the ballot and Musk’s money almost seems quaint. Besides, money alone can’t win an election, just ask Harris or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent a billion dollars of his own money on his 2020 bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in just one month before dropping out in humiliating fashion.
No, it was Elon Musk himself. His existence became an in-kind donation to the GOP of incalculable size. His ownership of X didn’t do anything except allow Republicans to speak as freely as the old Twitter regime allowed Democrats to do, without the reciprocal silencing of the opposition. He didn’t tip the scales, he leveled the playing field. And Democrats, rather than debate and discuss, took their ball and went home. They quit or retreated to “safe spaces” where differing opinions were not allowed. You’ll never change a mind if you refuse to engage. Democrats learned the hard way that the air inside a bubble gets awfully thin rather quickly, and oxygen deprivation is not good for the brain.
OK, maybe they haven’t learned that lesson, but everyone else noticed and that was because of Elon Musk.
Naturally, Donald Trump takes the number one slot. How can he not? The left – Democrats, the media, Hollywood – threw everything at him and he swatted it all away. There isn’t a name he wasn’t called, or an allegation that wasn’t made against him. Hell, the mythical “they” responsible for all unsolved crimes, tried to kill him at least twice – shooting him in the head once – and he ended up turning that into the most iconic moment in politics in the 21st century, if not ever.
Where most people would’ve said “to hell with this” and walked away from the relentless onslaught, Trump gave it the finger and walked straight into the storm…and won. It certainly helped to have really horrible competition, but his win was so convincing – gaining 3 million votes over his 2020 total and an impressive 14 million over 2016 – was due to a lot more than how bad Kamala Harris was as a candidate.
Donald Trump decimated the Democratic Party establishment in a more thorough way than a party has ever been defeated before. They don’t seem to understand that, or be willing to learn from it, and that may end up being his greatest legacy.
Whatever comes next – and what comes next will matter an awful lot – what has just been was amazing. 2024 was the year of Donald Trump.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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