I’ll miss the days when we pretended to like each other
Trump mixed politics and prejudice to get elected – and voters who rolled the dice to put him in power must live with their decision.
WELL . . this is awkward. After most of the world spent the last two years lambasting Donald J Trump at every narcissistic egotistical turn, now he has the top job in the United States.
With this gig comes the nuclear weapons pin number, the most powerful military on Earth and – in a world that is slowly falling apart – the leadership of the West. Lord, hear our prayer.
Now Democrats know how Team New Zealand felt when Oracle came back from 8-1 down to win the America’s Cup. If only this was something as inconsequential as a boat race.
Just writing President Trump makes one feel like a writer on The Simpsons.
We should have known that something like this was possible when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California and Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota.
Don’t forget, either, that Americans voted movie actor Ronald Reagan as president. Twice. Given how history in the US has gone, that is probably how many times they’ll vote in Trump.
The rest of Earth wanted a steady, safe, experienced pair of hands in these turbulent times. American people just wanted change – despite the potential turbulence. One thing this election result proves is that Americans hate being told what to do by the world.
Looking at the racial profile of the voting, it’s easy to see this result as a ‘‘whitelash’’ against eight years of the country’s first black president in Barack Obama.
Trump supporters have said that it wasn’t about race or xenophobia. They point to the fact that the working class whites in Pennsylvania who helped swing the election for Trump, had in 2008 voted for Obama.
But it’s a bit hard to think that race wasn’t a factor with the emergence of a rise in hate crimes just in the few days since Trump’s victory.
Not to mention that former KKK leader David Duke tweeted: ‘‘This is one of the most exciting nights of my life – make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MAGA’’
That hash tag stands for Make America Great Again but what he and others like him really mean is Make America White Again.
Duke and all the many others like him long for the good old days in the US, before all this nambypamby multi-cultural diversity stuff, where the world looks like a giant TV ad for the united colours of Benetton.
Now North America feels it is in that scene from the movie Mississippi Burning in which Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman are FBI agents who drive into a racist southern town looking for murdered civil rights activists.
Trump’s tactic was to mix salesmanship with politics and to appeal to people on an emotional level. In doing so, he was addressing the rising anxiety and anger that had been brewing in the United States, far away from the Sex and the City locations of New York.
He tuned into the economic, cultural and security fears of an American electorate who were feeling resentful. A community who over the years have felt left out of the riches that was REUTERS supposed to be an integral part of the American dream.
But the many groups of people regularly harangued by Trump have also been ignored. What was important to these voters was the character of the person in charge.
They believed the many challenges the country faced could be met without a presidential candidate slagging off the LGBT community, women, blacks, hispanics, Muslims and immigrants in general – almost every voter group except white males.
What is shocking a lot of people is that none of the divisiveness he preached, slowed him down. The media played its part in normalising racism, sexism, misogyny and stupidity, until it seemed those were things that voters shouldn’t be upset about.
In these modern times where getting your message out is everything, Trump was given the ‘‘yuuuugest’’ megaphone – as though the whole of the American media was his Facebook wall.
The world’s media covered him, too, but mostly as a joke everyone expected would be gone by Christmas. This is the biggest political blind shot since Brexit. What on Earth will be next?
Trump may just be the man who has finally killed off the era of political correctness, when people had to at least pretend to be nice to one other. I will miss those days, when people had to hide their racism and prejudice and act in a civil way.
The people who elected Trump were prepared to roll the dice just to see what happens. He has shouted to anyone who will listen that he’s the only one who can fix everything. Now he has to. His Republican Party will control the Congress, the Senate and soon the Judiciary so they will have no excuses.
Still, many voters are going to be in for a shock when they eventually realise that the elites they rallied against are still in power.
We have no choice but to give Trump and his army of old white guys in suits, the benefit of the doubt.
Willing or not, we’ve all been cast into a future history lesson on what happened that time Donald Trump became US President.