We’ve been assured for the last five years that Donald Trump is every naughty adjective in the dictionary: racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, white supremacist… you get the point.

So of course the chattering class nearly fell over backwards when, at this year’s election, Trump gained ground with almost every demographic except -- wait for it -- white men.

According to New York Times exit poll data, Donald Trump won the highest share of the non-white vote of any Republican since 1960.

Trump increased his African-American vote share significantly since the last election, with 18 percent of Black men voting for him, up from 13 percent in 2016. And double the number of Black women favoured him this year -- an increase from 4 percent in 2016 to 8 percent last week.

Hispanic and Latino voters also rallied to Trump, with 32 percent telling exit pollsters they voted for him this year, up four percentage points from the last election. Trump’s gains among Asian Americans followed an almost identical trend.

A separate exit poll, conducted by the Republican Jewish Coalition, found that Donald Trump won over 30 percent of the Jewish vote, an increase from 24 percent in 2016. If accurate, this is the best result for any Republican candidate in over 30 years.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Donald Trump doubled his share of LGBT voters this year, with 28 percent of this demographic supporting him.

So how have the pundits responded to these results?

“The more I look at this election, the less I imagine I understand,” tweeted New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. This is the same Nobel Prize winning Paul Krugman who, in July of this year, attempted to satirise his summary of the 2020 election campaign with this tweet:

Trump: I'm racist. Vote for me!
Voters: No thanks. Also, Biden might keep us from dying.
Trump: But I'm really, really racist! You have to vote for me!

With a mind this closed, perhaps it’s no wonder he still can’t quite process the results of Tuesday’s election.

Or consider Charles Blow, another New York Times columnist. Mid last year, Blow provided his less-than-subtle assessment of Donald Trump on Twitter:

Donald Trump is a racist. Full stop. If you are part of this administration, defend him in congress, or voted for him and continue to support him, you are part of that racism. I don’t differentiate between him and you. Dems, stop trying to court these people. They are poison.

Did Trump’s gains among minorities cause Charles Blow to moderate his views on the incumbent president? Hardly.

The day after the election, Blow contributed his thoughts to The New York Times in an article entitled, “Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy”. The sub header told you all you need to know: “Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with their oppressors.”

It’s remarkable to think that, had minority voters abandoned Trump in 2020, this would have been proof-positive of his racism for pundits like Charles Blow. But now that minorities rallied to Trump, this also counts as ironclad evidence of the president’s supposed racism.

When literally everything can be marshalled as evidence for your theory -- even two entirely contradictory sets of data -- then it might be time to question whether you have a theory or just an irreparable cognitive bias.

Writing for the New York Post, Josh Hammer offered a corrective. “The progressive elites are genuinely incapable of understanding why it is that their nostrums have been rejected by a growing share of the populace,” adding that, “It turns out that minorities aren’t so infatuated with the brand of unrepentant progressive ‘woke-ism’ now peddled by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party.”

Conservative black columnist Candace Owens said that much of the criticism of Trump is absurd:

“ … he increased his support considerably among black Americans, doubling it among black women from four per cent in 2016 to eight per cent this year. Among black men the numbers are even more staggering – increasing from 13 to 18 per cent and counting.

“And he's had my support, too. I've worked with his campaign for re-election in recent months.

“But in the media echo chamber, where reality is forbidden and critical thinking is suspended in service of a higher narrative, people like me are explained away with petty name-calling. Minorities who support the President are traitors, minstrels and fools.”

Indeed, if anything certain can be said about the results of the 2020 election thus far, it’s that America’s new centre-right coalition is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working class, populist — and sick of the coastal elites who don’t understand them and don’t want to.

In truth, everyday Americans just don’t buy woke-think. They don’t see themselves primarily by their skin colour, gender, or sexual preferences, but first and foremost as Americans—Americans with families to raise, children to put through school, jobs to work, and lives to live.

And they clearly don’t have much time for exhausting racial theories that pit people against each other.

Whatever the final outcome of this election, the future on the right hand side of politics is looking bright and energetic.

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