by Stephen Soukup
What they didn’t expect—what they couldn’t really have imagined—is that this time, Trump intended to do what he’d promised.
The 2014 Australian psychological horror movie The Babadook is generally well known for a handful of things. It is generally considered to be a uniquely disturbing and frightening film, one of the best horror movies of the decade. It is respected as a powerful commentary on the awful, destructive effects of suppressed grief. It is beloved by some in the LGBT community because the monster (Mr. Babadook) is campy and dramatic and literally comes out of a closet. Mostly, however, it is known as the source of a once-ubiquitous internet meme.
Long story short: “The main character of the film is a mother of a young boy with social difficulties who believes The Babadook, a character from a terrifying children’s book they read together, is real.” In one particularly distressing scene, the mother (Amelia) is exasperated, driving her son (Samuel), who is screaming and generally freaking out in the back seat. Amelia, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, turns to Samuel and yells, “Why can’t you just be normal?!” at which point he starts to scream louder and more violently.
Naturally, the meme is mostly used to mock people who are behaving stupidly or recklessly. It was used to make fun of teenagers dumb enough to participate in the “Tide Pod Challenge.” It was used by opponents of Brexit to insult supporters. It’s been used to taunt both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And now, thanks to yours truly, it’s a universal explanation for American election results.
I know that many analysts blame the Iran War for last week’s GOP midterm disaster. I know that others blame President Trump’s tariffs, while others still blame inflation and Republicans’ general indifference to it. All of these factors and more undoubtedly played a role. And I’ll probably write about some of them presently. Still, the best explanation for the Blue Tsunami is that the American people were the mother, Amelia, frustrated, angry, exasperated, while the GOP was Samuel, irritating, loud, and completely abnormal. Last week, the electorate turned around and yelled at Republicans, “Why can’t you just be normal!” Time will tell how the Republicans react, whether they continue to scream and freak out, or if they break the meme and calm themselves down.
Now, before you go thinking that I’m picking on Republicans, I’m not. Two years ago, that same electorate turned around and yelled at Kamala Harris and her crowd of weirdos. In 2020, they yelled at the impeached and seemingly impervious Trump and the GOP again. In 2016, they yelled at Hillary. And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.
I don’t think it’s always been like this in American politics, but it has certainly been this way for all of this century. Last week, I mentioned that one of my roles as a longtime political analyst for the financial services world was making predictions about things, most notably elections. Way back in 2000, my boss (Mark Melcher) and I predicted that Texas Governor George W. Bush would beat Vice President Al Gore, largely because Bush was infinitely more normal than Gore. Sure, he was a little rich kid, the son of a former president. And yes, he was a reformed drinker. And of course, he was a little squirrelly, the kind of guy who made up words occasionally and might be at risk of choking to death on a pretzel. But he was also just a normal George. He liked baseball. And while he partly owned and ran the team, he was still prone to doing dumb things we all might do, like trading 20-year-old Sammy Sosa for 30-year-old Harold Baines. He was the kind of guy voters described as someone they would like to get a beer with. More to the point, he wasn’t Al Gore.
Eight years earlier, the American people had elected Bill Clinton (and his co-President, Hillary), choosing youth and excitement over the staid regularity of George H.W. Bush. Bill seemed fun—and we didn’t yet know that Hillary would turn out to be the polar opposite of fun. Over the next eight years, we experienced plenty of excitement: Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, the miraculously disappearing and reappearing Rose Law Firm billing records, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and her missing cat, and, of course, the young White House intern who thought she had spinach dip on her blue dress. The Clintons promised entertainment, and boy did they deliver! Unfortunately, everyone felt a little dirty after all that excitement. The Clinton presidency was, as Father Richard John Neuhaus famously described it, like “watching with fascinated horror as the toilet backed up and overflowed into [the] living room.”
By midsummer 2000, people had had their fill of “excitement.” They were tired of it, in fact. They just wanted their lives and their politics to go back to being normal. They didn’t want to explain to their 8-year-olds what the meaning of the word “is” was. They didn’t want to tell their elderly moms why one of the greatest Boomer feminists had to debase herself and her legacy by writing an op-ed that came to be known for its creation of the “one-grope rule” to accommodate the president’s behavior. They wanted normalcy, and they thought George W. Bush was more likely to deliver it than the guy who missed the White House counsel’s admonition not to shake down Buddhist nuns for donations because he drank too much iced tea that morning and had to go to the bathroom a lot.
In 2004, Bush was in trouble. The war in Afghanistan seemed fine, but we still hadn’t caught bin Laden. More damagingly, the war in Iraq was turning into a mess. We had Saddam, but we had no exit strategy and no working definition of what “victory” would look like. And then the Democrats nominated John Kerry, one of only a handful of people in the country who could make two wars and general foreign policy chaos seem normal by comparison.
The conventional wisdom has it that the voters chose “Hope and Change” four years later, electing the country’s first black president. And to some extent, this is right. By electing Barack Obama, the American people hoped to put an end to centuries of racial dysfunction. Obama’s election would normalize race in the country once and for all—or so they thought. Of course, it didn’t hurt Obama that his opponent was a brave, honorable, and incredibly volatile longtime partisan “maverick.” Sure, John McCain was a hero and had endured things while a POW in Vietnam that most people could never even imagine, but he was also, to put it delicately, a little nuts. Obama won the contest when McCain, in all his capricious glory, paused his campaign about six weeks before the election because he was worried about the collapse of (my former employer) Lehman Brothers…or something.
The following presidential election, in 2012, is the only election this century that might not fit the pattern. When given the choice between Obama and the eminently normal Mitt Romney, the voters chose Obama. To be fair, the Obama campaign team and its allies in the mainstream media did a pretty good job of making Romney look sinister: he forcibly cut his gay classmate’s hair; he put the family dog on the car roof while on vacation, à la Clark Griswold; he gave a woman in Kansas City fatal cancer; he had binders full of women, for crying out loud!
In 2016, everyone, everywhere, assumed that Hillary Clinton would cakewalk to victory over the orange-haired reality-show host. But everyone, everywhere, forgot that the voters knew who Hillary Clinton was. And while they thought—for a brief second—that it might be fun to have Bill as the country’s first “First Gentleman,” they quickly concluded that even that bit of entertainment couldn’t make four years of President Nurse Ratched tolerable. Donald Trump was miles from normal, they understood, but he was miles closer than Hillary.
As I said above, of course, four years later, when they had to choose between reelecting Trump and electing the nation’s goofy uncle, Joe Biden, they chose Uncle Joe—and then they regretted it almost immediately. By the time the 2024 election rolled around, they’d had more than enough of effectively open borders, incoherent public appearances, topless transsexuals on the White House lawn, and bizarre rambling debate performances. Even after Biden dropped out of the race, replaced by his equally incomprehensible VP, the American people couldn’t wait to get Trump back. Sure, he brought planeloads of baggage with him, but at least he was better than the circus that replaced him.
What they didn’t expect—what they couldn’t really have imagined—is that this time, Trump intended to do what he’d promised. The line on the guy had always been “take him seriously but not literally.” Well…in term two, that was a mistake. He promised aggressive immigration enforcement. He promised steep and biting tariffs. He promised not to allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. In short, he promised some things that other politicians promise but never even consider doing. He promised other things that no other politician would dare to do. And then—for better or worse—he did them.
Last week, the American people told him that doing so is not what they consider normal. They don’t like stories in the paper about grandpas being deported after living in the US for 45 years. They don’t like nurses getting shot by ICE. They don’t like wars—or, at least, they don’t like wars we don’t win. They don’t like tariffs. They don’t like inflation. They just want normal, quiet lives.
One could, of course, make a very strong case that the voters chose poorly, that much of the drama of the last two years would have been avoided if the Democrats had simply behaved themselves like an opposition party rather than a perpetually angry, out-of-control mob. Moreover, the idea that the new majority—which is already promising political chaos—could possibly deliver normalcy is itself nutty. Still, that’s the way the game is played these days. You don’t actually have to be normal to win. You just have to seem more normal than the other guys.
That’s also the silver lining for the GOP. If the Democrats deliver the chaos they’re already promising, then the Republicans will look normal by comparison, and they can win the White House and maybe regain control of the House of Representatives in 2028. The key is looking normal. The key is putting the Democrats in the back seat of the car again and convincing the American people to turn around and yell at them.
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/11/09/the-babadook-electorate/
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