Weeks after President-elect Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, pundits and politicos are still looking at the returns to see how he pulled it off. For people of a certain age — specifically, those born between 1965 and 1980 — a particularly interesting question is: Why did Trump do so well with the cohort known as Generation X?
A generation known for being slackers turned out in big numbers to support Trump. The Associated Press reported that voters between the ages of 45-64, roughly those of us in Gen X, voted for Trump over Harris 52% to 46%, a six-point margin. That’s even wider than the three-point margin by which Trump carried his fellow boomers (51%-48%) and a one-point increase in Gen X support for Trump from 2020.
Everyone’s talking about how Trump has fared so well with young men, but what accounts for my generation’s Trump-ward move? Aside from the policy concerns that affect every generation, including inflation, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the chaos at the southern border, there are also probably cultural reasons. As Mark Judge has suggested, Gen X grew up with raunchy humor and offensive jokes, making us less easily upset by some of Trump’s outrageous statements. A stand-up comedian making fun of Puerto Rico at a rally may not strike us as good politics, but it’s not quite Eddie Murphy’s Delirious.
Also, I suspect another, more specific cultural element has played into Gen X’s Trumpian tilt: The Donald is a master of irony, and Gen X knows irony.
As George Costanza, Alanis Morrisette, or Winona Ryder’s character in Reality Bites could tell you, irony is difficult to define exhaustively. For now, let’s just say that Trump excels at a type of irony in which the author, character, narrator, or, in his case, the speaker demonstrates extreme awareness regarding the conventions of the form in which they’re working and shows the limitations of those conventions by breaking them. It occurs, for example, when Ferris Bueller, Zack Morris, or Will Smith look at a camera and speak to viewers directly. This self-conscious irony says to the audience, “We both know this is artifice. Let’s have some fun with it.” This irony breaks conventions. This irony breaks character.
Gen X was raised on this stuff. Many of us grew up watching David Letterman’s show in the 1980s, which reveled in undermining the conventions of late-night talk. Seinfeld, the sitcom that defined the ‘90s, flouted what viewers expected from that genre: characters famously never learned lessons and never hugged. Or take the theme to the Gary Shandling Show, whose lyrics winked at the convention of a theme song: “This is the theme to Garry’s show / The opening theme to Garry’s show / This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits. / We’re almost to the part where I start to whistle.” Later, Gen Xers Seth McFarlane (Family Guy) and Rob McElhenney (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) created their own shows that employed this irony.
The point is not that Gen X invented this irony, which has fancy names in ancient Greek for a reason. Nor is it that we’re the only people who enjoy it. Some of the examples I’ve given were created by boomers, but this irony is still centuries older than them. However, Gen X was particularly immersed in it. We came of age in it.
And Trump delivers it. Consider a few examples from his campaign this past summer. Addressing Wisconsin voters at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump said, “We are spending over $250 million here. I hope you will remember this in November and give us your vote.” Then he declared: “I am trying to buy your vote. I’ll be honest about that.” The disarming exaggeration gets at a reason the parties hold their conventions where they do: To show commitment to a major city or an important state. However, by confessing to “buying” the votes, Trump self-consciously presented himself as a desperate and shameless pol, which, of course, no candidate is supposed to do. It didn’t work for Jeb “Please Clap” Bush, but it apparently worked coming from Trump, who won Wisconsin.
Trump did something similar later in the convention during his acceptance speech. After being introduced by Gen-X musician Kid Rock (real name: Robert James Ritchie), Trump said, “Thank you, Kid Rock, sometimes referred to as ‘Bob’.” With this throwaway line, Trump humorously challenged a fairly silly artifice common in the entertainment industry: the stage name. It was as if Trump was undermining the street cred of the friend who introduced him. Bob Ritchie may insist, as he does in one song, “My name is Kiiiiiiiiid!” but Trump’s joke showed the truth has a lot less swagger.
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Finally, at a rally toward the end of the campaign, Trump was having trouble with his microphone. Frustrated, he playfully complained, “I’m working my [butt] off with this stupid mic,” before giving us a behind-the-scenes look at his speeches: “I don’t care about lighting. I don’t care about teleprompters because I never read the damn things anyway. … I don’t ask for much. The only thing I ask for is a good mic.” It was, as Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) might have said, weird, and it was unconventional, which was the point.
Trump’s delight in irony has its dangers. You don’t have to be a Harris supporter to see how his habit of challenging rhetorical conventions is parallel to his disregard for political standards. It also has the drawback of encouraging cynicism: If every convention is mockable, if every norm is bogus, if nobody can ever reliably be held to sincerely mean what they say, the overall political ethos is likely to echo Nirvana’s Gen X anthem, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: “Well, whatever, never mind.”
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.