These election results prove that when it comes to the US, Donald Trump is no anomaly
The US is like that exemplary family in the neighbourhood, known and admired for its civility and decency, which one day suddenly gets involved in a squalid brawl in public that is laced with all sorts of insults. Neighbours gawk at the spectacle over the fence, stunned and amused. The US is acting completely out of character. Or is it? The country that for years has preached about democracy seems to struggle to practise it; the simple arithmetic of counting votes is a bit of a stretch.
The world has long admired the seamless transfer of power from one party to another, the graceful concession speeches by the vanquished and the closing of ranks behind the new president. It was, along with the country’s power and wealth, the epitome of American exceptionalism. Only the US could pull off such a feat. It came naturally.
This week, however, the US strayed from those ideals, its articles of faith. It looked more like a Third World dictatorship, with a bruised and battered despot recoiling from certain defeat, screaming fire and brimstone from his bunker at the White House. Despots don’t retire gracefully; they don’t accept defeat either.
Donald Trump seems determined to bring the house down with him, and to hell with the consequences. He cares little for vaunted American institutions, unless he can bend them to his bidding. Which is why he has no respect for democracy and its etiquettes or traditions. He’s an autocrat running the most influential democracy on Earth.
But I do think Trump has been getting a bad rap. We’ve been heaping all sorts of abuse on him and that’s unfair, it turns out. It’s an incomplete and therefore a misleading assessment. There should be others in the dock with him.
Trump, an unremarkable businessman with a lot of chutzpah, announced his entry into politics by promoting so-called birtherism, the canard that Barack Obama was not born in the US and therefore did not qualify to stand as president. He persisted with the lie even after Obama produced his birth certificate — which must have been humiliating for the president — to prove he was born in Hawaii.
The ruse worked impressively for Trump. It found fertile ground among conservatives and racists unamused by a black occupant in the White House. Trump sailed through the Republican nomination, beating seasoned political veterans. Though he lost the popular vote in the presidential election, he was able to cobble together enough Electoral College votes to beat Hillary Clinton.
The view among observers has always been that Trump’s victory was something of a fluke, and that the second time around the electorate would redeem itself by ejecting Trump from office and he would be defeated in a landslide as a public repudiation of Trumpism and all that it stood for. Trump was going to be buried in an avalanche, and the polls seemed to agree.
Unfortunately, those predictions didn’t come to pass. In fact, Trump gained millions more voters this time. The argument has always been that many people voted for Trump the first time without a proper grasp of the implications of their support. It was going to be a case of once bitten, twice shy. It didn’t turn out that way. This time they knew perfectly well what he stood for and they voted for him in droves.
What this election proves is that Trump is merely a mirror, a reflection of the inner feelings of a significant segment of the American public, specifically of white society. The fact that Trump performed better than the polls suggested means a number of people, the so-called shy Trump voters, were reluctant to reveal their true feelings to pollsters.
In some ways we’ve been naive to think Trump was an outlier, an aberration that would evaporate into thin air with the passage of time, and that America would go back to being its old self. No, he’s not an anomaly. He is its product, its avatar. That almost half the electorate would choose to vote for him after four years of his boorish behaviour, after all the juvenile name-calling, the ape-like chest-thumping, the racism, the misogyny, a cratering economy, after thousands of Americans have died because of his horrendous mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, is simply staggering.
The outcome of the election suggests that half of Americans seem to want more of the same. They see a ray of hope in that gloom. Denigrating women is emblematic of Trump and yet some of his biggest support has come from white women. For somebody who’s selling nothing but the hatred in his heart, Trump seems to possess unique gifts to coax people to vote against their own interests.
He’s shown no interest in or empathy for the problems the US is facing. The huge demonstrations by people of all races following the killing of George Floyd gave hope that the country would at last confront the scourge of racism. Yet many still voted for a racist.
Has the US been misunderstood all along? Or has Trump in four years been able to change its character? Or simply rolled the boulder aside to expose its hidden pathologies? Americans often wonder why people in developing countries tolerate corrupt, self-serving despots, why they don’t practise Western values such as democracy, political tolerance, freedom of speech. Yet they embraced a president who not only tramples on such cherished values but hobnobs with repressive regimes. Trump will go, ultimately, but the stench of Trumpism will, unfortunately, hover a while longer.
Ronald Reagan called the US a shining city on a hill. It’s hard to square such a description with Trump’s America.