America shows its true colours
Even if Americans feel that Donald Trump is a fit and proper person to become their president, he is neither fit nor proper to become the most powerful man in the world. An undeniable bigot who brags about his sexual assaults on women, repeatedly makes racist remarks, and made a fortune from repeated bankruptcy Trump […]
Even if Americans feel that Donald Trump is a fit and proper person to become their president, he is neither fit nor proper to become the most powerful man in the world. An undeniable bigot who brags about his sexual assaults on women, repeatedly makes racist remarks, and made a fortune from repeated bankruptcy Trump won by whipping up support amongst poor uneducated whites and the large population of closet racists which exists in the US. In 2011 Trump said Americans were idiots, and in 2016 they proved him right. There is a cult of anti-intellectualism in the USA where democracy ensures that one man’s ignorance is equivalent to another man’s knowledge.
The vulgar and extreme nature of Trump’s successful candidacy requires sober reflection on not only how he won, but how he became a candidate in the first place. A big reason for his victory was to do with Hilary Clinton herself. She gave him plenty of ammunition to repeatedly refer to her as corrupt, while she declined to highlight his reputation as a con artist. Clinton’s campaign team must carry the bulk of the blame for a strategy that was wrong to the extent that they took their supporters for granted and wasted time running around in Republican states where the race wasn’t even close. The Republican Party also aided Trump by allowing itself to be taken over. He could not have won if the Party had gone into the election deeply divided. However most senior party members felt he would lose and wanted to avoid being blamed, so quite disgracefully they placed party loyalty over patriotism united behind him despite his evident unfitness for office. FBI Director James Comey played the most ignoble and unprincipled role by placing an unjustifiable cloud of suspicion over Clinton to assist Trump.
The post Obama Democratic Party must share blame for creating a coalition of non-white voters who voted for Obama, but not for Clinton. An irresponsible media can be blamed for giving more time to Trump’s criticisms of Clinton than policy issues or his own sordid and chequered past. Quite incomprehensively TV networks spent more time on the Clinton e-mail scandal than all other policy issues put together! The pollsters and pundits also got it wrong and lulled Clinton’s campaign team into a sense of false security, causing many of her supporters to feel their vote was necessary for victory. Hilary’s problem wasn’t angry voters, it was absent voters. While the vast majority of the world’s leaders met Trump’s victory with a measured diplomatic response, a few have acted properly. Barrack Obama cancelled the photo op between the incoming and outgoing first families which had become a tradition. Africa’s first elected female President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia refused to mince her words saying she was “extremely saddened” by the election result. Deputy chancellor of Germany Sigmar Gabriel said “Trump is the trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinistic international movement” who wants to “rollback to the bad old times”. The riots after the announcement of Trumps victory indicates that some Americans are waking up to their new disastrous reality.
By electing a character like Trump, America has lost the moral right to leadership of the world. He will become the first ever US President-Elect to appear in Court to defend himself against allegations of defrauding his own countrymen. He is accused of defrauding students of the now defunct Trump University. In America, it’s illegal for businesses to convince consumers to purchase their services by using false statements and all the evidence indicates that Trump used a systemic pattern of fraudulent representations to trick thousands of families into investing in a program that can be argued was a sham. Trump is legendary for backsliding on his commitments and he will be no different in political office. He isn’t a man to be trusted simply because he habitually says different things on different days. He has expressed his belief that Muslims, Arabs, Blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Africans, NATO and practically everyone else is responsible for Americas problems, while they on the other hand aren’t responsible for anyone else’s.
World leaders cannot afford to embrace and engage Trump simply because he will be in the White House, rather they must ignore him. America must be left alone to stew in its own self-created problems. History teaches us that all great empires come to an end. When boxing legend Mohammad Ali refused to fight in Vietnam he described that war as “the white man sending the black man, to fight the yellow man, to protect the land he stole from the red man”. This is America’s predicament. Whites feel they own the country. What rest of the world has to come to terms with is that Trump didn’t win despite being an openly racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and sexist individual, he won because of it. He campaigned by saying openly what previous candidates have been too decent or too afraid to say. He was neither decent, nor afraid of ruining a non-existent political career. At the end of the day US democracy worked because he truly represents what the majority of Americans believe.