Despite obvious media bias in the recent presidential debate, Trump still didn’t just “win” against Harris.

If you were paying attention, his closing remarks and their effect were profound: the stakes for the U.S. are not political, but existential.  And not only at a personal household level concerning inflation, prices, and jobs, but in the larger national context of security, borders, trade deals, manufacturing, energy, and growth — and survival in an avoidable world war. 

Trump is the strength, peace, and economic opportunity candidate.  Harris represents the weakness, war, and economic devastation party.  Trump didn’t just beat her; he overwhelmed the party’s fraud and pretense by taking life seriously.  Ultimately, he also fought for and won something much more: national standing.

Why does that matter?  Because, as he stated several times, the world doesn’t take Harris and her party seriously.  The implications for that loss of confidence are critical: loss of global confidence means loss of global respect; loss of global respect means loss of global order.

Global order is what Trump stands for, because he understands that the world does indeed look to the American nation.  Hope is the one thing that a man can never lose; it is the one thing that a nation can never lose, or else nihilism and despair take control of the human psyche. 

As psychiatrist Carl Jung said from Switzerland, watching the Second World War unfold, a breakdown in global order is first a breakdown in human psychological health.  This is because it not only lacks a genuine leader, but has been damaged by a loss of confidence from fraudulent ones.  This creates a loss of social cohesion and unity and, therefore, any reason for maintaining law and order. 

Harris embodies a breakdown in that psychology and a collapse of the most fundamental natural laws.  Indeed, as much as she now tries to distance herself from Biden, he and Harris are mentally identical; they together symbolize a failure in psychological stability.  Harris is, in fact, exactly like Biden — she is only less biologically degenerative, but her worldview is just as strategically delusional, and just as confused and disoriented — but it is more dangerous because it is tied to an acceleration of the radical policies that were introduced by first using Biden to create an illusion of institutional continuity.  Her ability to independently perceive, to comprehend complex information, and to act as an effective civilian commander is just as impaired, however, and just as utterly dependent on an army of unelected handlers.  

As we all saw in the extreme rioting and destruction in the violent summer of 2020, the political left trades precisely on psychological and social disorder, and a loss of faith, reason and self-respect.  It trades precisely on the same mass psychological breakdown that Jung diagnosed as the source of global civil disorder and collapse.  The left seeks to destroy public self-confidence, health, and order, because it means a flight to political dependence, psychological resignation, and obedience.

War, disease, disorder, chaos, and fear make up the political left’s manifesto.  Trump’s manifesto is a business plan: confidence, hard work, investment, responsibility, reward, and national pride.  From these great virtues come the admiration that the rest of the world seeks.

President Trump won far more than a mere media debate.  He won the vision for a world order stabilized by principles of personal and national confidence.  He continues to show where that confidence comes from: by fighting the good fight, and never giving up, giving in, or giving over. 

Giving up and giving in make up the cultural order sought by the authoritarian movement that Harris represents.

Matthew G. Andersson is a former CEO and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Guardian, the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2001 Pulitzer Prize report by the Chicago Tribune.  He received the Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America and has testified before the U.S. Senate.  He is a graduate of the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with economist and White House national security adviser W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.  He is the author of the upcoming book Legally Blind, concerning law and policy.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.