TRUMP-ECLIPSE

Just a month back, Kim Kardashian, the grand old woman of reality show industry, was interviewed on the show ‘60 minutes’- a show known for its forthright stabs into the gut of its guests. The interviewer asked Kim without batting an eyelid that what talent she has to operate an empire of over 100 million dollars? Kim, unperturbed, retorted, while tilting her head and sporting a wry smile, well it requires some talent. Kim’s reply captures the essence of Donald Trump’s victory in the recently concluded Presidential elections in the US. Trump was called a racist, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a liar, a scampster, and much more; but now, his detractors eat the humble pie. When history is recorded, the 2016 election would be labelled as the revolt against the establishment. Trump, like a force of nature and against all odds, capitalized on this mass disenchantment of Americans.

The Primaries

The Republican primaries were crowded with a gaggle of candidates, at one point 16 hopefuls were in the running for the party nomination. From, the heir apparent of the Bush Dynasty, Jeb Bush to, the irascible Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, about whom Lindsay Graham, the senior Republican Senator, had said that if someone were to kill Cruz on the Senate floor no one would testify, were in the fray.

In the muggy month of June 2015, ‘The Donald’ glided down, from an escalator of the Trump tower, and flanked by his, Slovenian born, wife Melania to address a press conference. What happened in the next hour, or so, upended the discourse of mainstream American politics and perhaps the world. ‘The Donald’, in his inimitable blowhard and hostile style, delivered politically incorrect jabs to issues that ranged from illegal immigration to China and declared his candidacy for the office of the President of the United States. The rallying cry for his campaign- ‘Make America great again!’- came at the end of the conference; the cry was an appropriation of the slogan used by the successful Ronald Reagan election campaign of 1980 - ‘let’s make America great again’. While Trump’s campaign cry, by employing the exclamation and deleting ‘let’s’, created an aura of an injunction for his countrymen, Reagan campaign’s slogan implied a cooperative spirit, imploring the citizens rather than enjoining them. This minor yet significant tweak of the slogan would set the tone for the election. Trump donning the robe (10,000 dollar Valentino suit perhaps) of a modern day messiah, though not wielding a staff or facing persecution, promised that he would build a wall on the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it; he would take down ISIS and has a secret plan for it; he would restructure ‘stupidly’ lopsided trade deals with China and bring jobs back; In subsequent days, he topped all this by declaring that during his Presidency Americans would be so tired of winning that they would say enough of it already.

Such was the lure of the Promised Land for the primary voters that ‘The Donald’ started the primary season on the top and remained there. His personal twitter account became an avatar of Zeus’s thunderbolt and was used with astonishing effect in targeting his opponents. One of his early targets, Jeb Bush, long touted as the smart bush, smarted under the constant and the scathing attacks from ‘The Donald’. ‘Low energy Jeb’- the epithet, Trump created for Bush, became a self-fulfilling prophecy- on a campaign stop, Bush was seen imploring primary voters to clap. With over 150 million dollars down the drain, Bush suspended his campaign in February. Further, the Republican debates were reduced to tacky reality show television where personal attacks trumped substantial policy debates. In one of the debates, Marco Rubio, the young Senator from Florida, alluded to Trump’s small hands as a metaphor for insufficiently sized male reproductive appendage to which ‘The Donald’ took serious umbrage and reassured tens of millions watching the debate that there was no problem with his manhood. The party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan was reduced to Presidential version of ‘Real housewives of New York’. Critical issues like global warming, perhaps the single biggest threat confronting our planet, was never discussed on the Republican Platform.

Trump was consistently under attack, mostly with good reason, not only from fellow contenders, but also from the press, the Democrats, and everyone under the sun. Whenever ‘The Donald’ opened his mouth or used his twitter account, he ended up verbally assaulting someone. Rending asunder the norms of civilized public engagement, Trump never apologized for any of his attacks. After a vicious primary season, Trump emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee delivering a blow to the Republican establishment whose preferred candidates were rejected emphatically by the party base.

If the Republican Party primaries were about a revolution from above, the Democratic Party primaries were a revolution from below. The unlikely partisan of this revolution was a self-declared socialist, nay democratic socialist, the independent Senator from the state of Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Like Trump, Sanders was an outsider whose platform unnerved the Democratic establishment. In contrast to Sanders, Hillary Clinton, who in 2008 had been trounced by the charming and the young Senator from the state of Illinois, went about drumming support and campaign funds from all quarters of the mainstream establishment, the wall street, the main street, and of course Hollywood, which this time was split down the middle in its support for Sanders and Hillary. While Hillary represented the standard bearer for incrementalism, Sanders was the insurgent who wanted a political revolution and obliterate the status quo. The Democrat primaries were not as crowded as the Republican ones. Within months, the primary was narrowed down to Sanders and Hillary.

Sanders with his rhetoric of cracking down on the Wall Street, which he believed hadn’t been held accountable for excesses in leading up to the Great Recession of 2007, mobilized people who bore the brunt of that economic calamity. Also his populist platform of providing free college tuition and tackling global warming attracted legions of young supporters, most of whom were first time voters. However, the feasibility and the fiscal tenability of his manifesto, in general, were called into question by experts. Much like Donald Trump his proposals didn’t meet the crucial criterion of policy reality, but unlike Trump his rhetoric had matched his actions in the past. Sanders had been a vocal critic of big businesses that influenced Washington politics whereas Trump profited from the influence he bought in Washington through campaign contributions, and this was boasted by Trump in is his rallies too.

Hillary, though armed to the teeth with funds, lacked a resounding message to pull together aspirational voters. Her campaign was constantly undermined by Hillary’s inability’s to mount a vigorous defense against the charges leveled against her, with the alleged closeness to Wall Street being the most serious charge. The Democratic debates gave Sanders a chance to shoot holes in Hillary’s campaign plank and expose her weaknesses. Even though media’s lopsided coverage hindered Sanders’s exposure, the debates acted as great levelers in which Hillary, more often than not, evaded Sanders’s trenchant attacks. Another major evidence of the bias against Sanders came in the form of Democratic National committee’s (DNC) hack when the WikiLeaks published a substantial collection of emails that reflected DNC staffers suggesting ways to malign the Sanders campaign. Despite being denied a level playing field, Sanders never took advantage of Hillary’s email server scandal, which loomed large over her campaign for much of the election, rather he kept his attacks civil and focused on policy issues.

After a closely fought primary, Hillary emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Sanders graciously conceded but not before winning 22 states and creating a support base that reflected the economic and social realities of the day.

The Election

In their respective conventions held in Cleveland and Philadelphia, the Republican and Democratic delegates nominated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to run for the office of the President of the United States. While the Republican convention hall thundered with chants of ‘lock her up’- alluding to Hillary’s alleged email scandal, the Democratic convention presented a picture of America swaddled in prosperity and freedom.

The general election, much like the Republican primaries, devolved into a battlefield of crass personal attacks and calumny. While Hillary won the majority of the Presidential debates, her wins didn’t mellow down Trump’s abrasive rhetoric. Throughout the campaign cycle, Trump was always in the eye of the storm for politically incorrect language; however, the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape was even too much for Trump. In the tape, ‘The Donald’ was heard making lewd remarks to the anchor about female genitalia. Responding to this, before the second debate, Trump paraded women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct and brought up the issue again in the debate.

The email server scandal came back to haunt Hillary in the general election. The FBI director sent a letter, days before the general election, to the US Congress, informing the parliamentary body that the FBI had uncovered a cache of emails that may or may not contain classified information. This letter not only stalled Hillary’s campaign momentum but also hurt Hillary’s credibility, which was already under the close scrutiny of the undecided voter. However within days, the FBI sent a new letter that the emails had been reviewed, and there was no classified material in them. Despite the second letter, the irretrievable damage had been done to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.

As the Election Day came close, the high priests of data journalism predicted prophetically that Hillary would secure a thumping victory. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, had predicted that Hillary had a 71% chance of winning the election. Mr. Silver was in good company of failed pollsters on the day after the election when Donald Trump gave his victory speech.

How did Trump prevail?

The stoic philosopher, Seneca had said that man is much more than a rational being.

However, when Seneca said these words, perhaps surrounded by an army of slaves in ancient Rome, he wasn’t mocking but rather commenting charitably on other visceral attributes that make a man. If he were to live through the 2016 US election, he would have changed his tone to that of mocking. The mainstream American media asked how a country could elect an individual as its President whose loathsome disposition is more than matched by his septic mouth; or how can a country (Britain) could choose to exit the European Union, given the obvious harmful economic effects? There is not a single answer for these questions, but a brief survey of history and the current economic, political, and social conditions may provide some insight.

The world plunged into a global depression in 1929. Thereafter, Roosevelt undertook a fiscal expansion to boost demand but it wasn’t enough. In fact, the US was sliding back into depression by 1937. The world war saved the western civilization’s model of capitalist democracy. The period of 1947-75 was characterized by a strong middle class, strong labor unions, and umpteenth manufacturing jobs in the western world. Come the early 80’s, neo-liberal economics took hold. The trumpet of free trade was blown long and hard, resulting in manufacturing jobs being shifted to Japan (cars) and China (everything). Further, technological innovation started rearing its head in the Wall Street (no bright guys used to go to work in Wall Street till late 70’s) and started paving the way for an incentive structure that would ultimately lead to the Great recession of 2007. Interestingly, the concentration of wealth in the top 1% was 23 % both in 1928 and 2007. The blue collars workers (lower middle class and predominantly white) seeing their jobs shipped off to Japan and China and their societal white privilege lampooned by the left were looking for a ‘Molotov cocktail’, as coined by Michael Moore, to blow the system. Donald J. Trump was that cocktail.

The period of 1947-75 was the period that saw sweeping civil liberties reforms in the US. In fact, the reforms received support from almost all major constituencies (except George Wallace or Dixiecrats). During the aforementioned period, America became a superpower, and its segregation policies undermined its moral credibility in the world. Therefore extending empathy was more of an exigency than the generalized narrative that moral arc of the universe eventually bended towards justice. However, white America, especially the former Confederate States, didn’t fully embrace the post-segregation reality. With the economic situation going south, in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007, Trump tapped into the latent resentment of blue collar white America. The blame for the economic and social upheaval was moved to the most vulnerable minority- it was the Jews for the Nazis, and Mexicans and Muslims for the jobless, blue collar white American.

Further, the derision from the left dominated mainstream media towards the conservatives actuated the rust belt America (Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania) – all swing states that voted for Trump- to cock a snook at the Eastern coast elite.

The way forward

Now that Trump is President. It is perhaps appropriate to prepare for a world that would be shaped in Trump’s vision. As this piece goes to press, President-elect Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the Unites States of America. The speech he delivered after his swearing-in was described by observers as the most populist and nationalist in the post-world war two era. Some critics went even as far as to compare the speech with that of Bane- a villain of Batman movies. Trump reiterated his campaign’s commitment ‘to make America great again’. However, leading up to the swearing-in, his cabinet appointments don’t inspire much confidence. He has appointed individuals with close ties to the Wall Street and big business: Steve Mnuchin, an old Goldman Sachs hand, as Treasury Secretary; Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobil, as the Secretary of State. Trump’s reasoning for appointing these insiders is that they know the system and its corruptions, and therefore are well placed to fix it. Only time will tell whether Trump’s perverted logic bears any fruit.

The Trump administration would inherit - a massive debt burden, a quagmire in Syria, an expansionist Russia and an assertive China, a nuclear armed and a brazen North Korea- challenges that require bipartisan support and domestic consensus. Given the deep political divisions in America, Trump would need to work towards healing those divisions.

Liberal America hasn’t still come to terms with the election results; Hillary supporters haven’t got over the fact that she lost despite winning the popular vote. In his monologue on his hit HBO show, Bill Maher, a liberal opinion maker, asked ‘why do they hate us’? – With ‘they’ being Trump supporters; rather than asking this question in a mocking and a high-handed manner, there is a need for a deep introspection on the gulf that exists between conservative and liberal America. While divisions have always existed and must exist for a rich political discourse, the current schism isn’t enriching the discourse but is poisoning the idea of America.