It’s as if an alien spacecraft called The Apocalypse has crash-landed in the capital and their orange leader alighted and strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue where he had vowed hed end up. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States resonates frighteningly.
For the shell-shocked, it will be forever incomprehensible how a dishonest tax-dodger, bully, narcissist, habitual liar and xenophobe has managed to engineer the most hostile and blatant takeover in US history.
Yet, Trumpland and its denizens would be more readily recognizable to the “Founding Fathers” than the America of the last eight years and certainly an America with a woman president.
US president-elect Donald Trump is the personification of white male Americas tragically warped sense of entitlement and that is what he has tapped into something that is as American as the tragic social stratification deeply embedded in the United States and constructed by the Founding Fathers.
In 1776 until 1810, the right to vote in the United States was the prerogative of white, male, Protestant property owners over the age of 21. During the presidential elections of 1787 and 1792, the first two held in the United States, less than 1per cent of the population voted. They believed America belonged to them and them alone.
This week, while many voters in Rochester, New York lined up at the gravesite of 19th-century feminist, abolitionist and womens suffragist Susan B. Anthony to plaster their I Voted sticker onto her Mount Hope Cemetery headstone, hundreds of thousands more were casting their vote for Trump, oblivious to who Anthony was and what she stood for.
Those ideals are manifested in the colossal sculpture gifted to America by the French that we call the Statue of Liberty. It is also known as the Immigrants Statue and when Trumps grandfather sailed to America from Germany in 1885, the Statue of Liberty was still in crates. Perhaps it should be disassembled and placed back into crates because Trumps America will not be welcoming to immigrants or the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity the French thought America represented.
That American mystique was carefully curated by Revolutionary Americas European emissary Benjamin Franklin, who traversed the Atlantic in a small non-descript boat and arrived surreptitiously in Paris to begin a mission of diplomacy and fund-raising that would culminate in the Franco-American Alliance of 1778 which bankrolled the American Revolution.
Only, the beautiful values expressed by the Declaration of Independence would be tarnished by a US Constitution that declared more than 690,000 African slaves as being merely three-fifths human and women not fully human because they had no property rights and no voting rights.
Strong, independent women such as Anthony were ostracized. Only 100 years earlier, if such women were unlucky enough to live in extremely ignorant backwaters like Salem, Massachusetts, they were deemed witches and hanged to death in a public spectacle. Hillary Rodham Clinton has just endured her public hanging by Trump against nasty women everywhere.
Clintons unsuccessful path to the presidency has been agonizingly long and vexing. Her primary and presidential campaigns were dogfights. But somehow she was able not to lose sight of her devotion to public service that got her involved in politics in the first place.
Contrary to being unqualified to be president as her Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders claimed Clinton has long been considered presidential material and in fact more qualified to be president than most of her predecessors.
Even her arch-enemy, Trump, could not but inadvertently admire her during their last debate when he said, “I will say this about Hillary: she doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up. I respect that…[s]he’s a fighter…[a]nd I consider that to be a very good trait.”
The rap against Clinton was that she cannot be trusted. Thats it. Thats enough to demonize a woman. And Wikigate email “scandal” sealed her fate. No man would ever suffer the humiliation and defeat she has suffered because of an email “scandal” while her opponent ran a campaign devoid of substance and high on reality television production values. America has been dumbed down that far.
Trump will not bring jobs back to America: it was greedy capitalists like him in search of cheap labour that took jobs out of America in the first place. He will not introduce much-needed reforms and oversight of the financial/banking industry.
What he will do is destroy the universal health care initiative begun by Obama. He will polarize America to red line levels and usher in an era of fear setting the stage for domestic terrorists to persecute immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community and progressives who actively disagrees with his neo-fascist ideas.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, backed by the most complicit and compliant Republican Congress imaginable, will achieve what his ilk could only wistfully dream of when he entered the race a reactionary right-wing state apparatus that will stand for many generations to come. Unfortunately, I don think I’m wrong about that.
