JAUNDICED EYE
The world is in a daze. Bemused at how Donald Trump stormed to such a commanding victory in the US presidential election.
What lies behind the extraordinary rehabilitation of the most unapologetically sleazy politician ever? Or at the very least, since Jacob Zuma, Silvio Berlusconi, Boris Johnson and Bill Clinton. The global consensus is that American voters must be mad.
There is indeed a kind of mass insanity afoot. The Free Press reported this week that Georgetown and Missouri State universities — and no doubt other educational institutions where the young are being readied for the rigours of everyday life — centres had been set up to help students cope with post-election stress and trauma. The one programme included mindfulness exercises, self-guided meditation, playing with Lego, filling in colouring books, and of course milk and cookies to sooth the troubled souls of the fattest generation since the dawn of time.
The Guardian, standard-bearer of Left politics, responded to the effects on its UK staff of a “very upsetting” result that could “reverberate for a million years”, by organising a 24/7 online GP and various “virtual wellbeing tools”. Its shattered US and Australian staff have similar programmes offering “professional counselling”.
This kind of “progressive” infantilising and grievance-driven identity politics has become the norm in much of the West, but in the United States and Britain especially. It’s the toxic wokery-pokery of obsessions like critical race theory, intersectionality, and men in women’s sports, which has alienated swathes of those countries’ populations while simultaneously making the sceptics the targets of officially-approved derision, abuse and exclusion.
The marginalised folk who turned out for Trump in droves in preference to Kamala Harris were not prejudiced racists and misogynists, as one commentator during the post-election analysis on CNN dared to point out to the outrage of his fellow panellists. They’re ordinary, good, hardworking people who just want to live and let live. They’re the much-spoken-about but eternally elusive “silent majority”.
At a fundamental level, this US election was — as is the steadily rightward drift in European politics — about this silent majority finding its voice. In voting for Trump, many of them undoubtedly holding their noses while doing so, they have sent a signal that has shaken the US’s political and cultural firmament to cause reverberations that will be felt worldwide for a long while.
The contest had pitted Trump, a deeply flawed and temperamentally erratic narcissist, against Harris, the Democrat’s accidental candidate, an intellectual lightweight who flubbed even the gentle, underarm lobs of an unprecedentedly supportive media. Trump also had to overcome the self-inflicted reputational damage of being a sex pest, his unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, two impeachments, his opponents’ weaponisation of the legal system to debar him from the race, and two assassination attempts.
The drumbeat of the Harris campaign was the imperative for voters to safeguard an endangered US democracy. All else, most specifically the economy and illegal immigration, were minor issues to be addressed later, the manner left conveniently and condescending vague, once their glass-ceiling candidate — A woman! Cross-racial! — had been dutifully anointed.
Harris was spot on. American democracy does need safeguarding. Unfortunately for her, the electorate decided that it was she and the Democrats who were the greatest threat to it. Not Trump and the Republicans.
The Democrats warned that a Republican victory would usher in a fascist autocracy. Adolf Hitler, reincarnated as Donald Trump, would exact bloody revenge on his domestic enemies.
For their part, the Republicans warned that a Harris administration would ensure the final triumph of the sinister Deep State. Future elections would be moot because the US would be overrun by illegal immigrants, guaranteeing in perpetuity a Democrat majority.
The chasm between the two parties made for the nastiest and most fearfully anticipated US election ever.
But, at the end of the day, celebrity endorsements by the likes of Taylor Swift and the massed ranks of a forelock-tugging mainstream media, were not enough to deliver to Harris the victory that many thought would be hers.
It was an extraordinary triumph for Trump. For the third time, the pollsters had it wrong. This turned out not to be the “neck-and-neck” race that was predicted would take days, perhaps weeks, before the final count was delivered. Before the night was out, Trump had triumphed decisively.
Not only did he win both the electoral college and the popular vote, but the Republicans wrested control of the Senate and appear set to narrowly hold onto their majority in the House of Representatives.
The result leaves in tatters much of the progressive agenda that has grown to dominate the US, and hence world discourse. Trump also turned on its head the Democrat’s arrogant assumption that they own the minority vote. While Blacks, Latinos and Asians still predominantly voted for Harris, they did so in diminishing numbers. He also made inroads, despite the abortion issue, among women and young voters.
While anything that diminishes the woke consensus and government overreach is to be welcomed, the potential dangers of a Trump administration are considerable. Raised tariffs are likely to worsen the US economy, as well as that of everyone else. His insularity threatens NATO and the US will, again, withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
A post-World War II international order that is already shaky and drifting towards large-scale conflict will have as president of the US — still the most powerful nation on earth and the one that underpins and pays the lion’s share of the costs for every multinational institution — a man who takes pride in being amorally transactional in his foreign policy approach.
The obvious big loser will the Ukraine, where the three-year war has swung in favour of the Russian invader. Trump opposes the US$175 billion in aid and materiel that has gone to Ukraine and has promised to end the war within 24 hours of stepping into the White House. What that means, in effect, is that Ukraine will be bullied into a peace agreement that cedes large chunks of territory to the aggressor.
This, the European Union nations — who have a historically engrained understanding of the high price of appeasement — know will only serve to whet the appetite of a Russian bear that has already snacked on neighbouring Crimea. The former Eastern bloc countries that have shaken off Russian imperialism to join a free Europe can already feel Putin’s fetid breath on their necks.
The obvious big winner will be Israel. Unlike the carrot-and-stick approach that the progressive, anti-Israel faction of the Democratic Party was nudging Joe Biden towards, Trump has been unambiguous about US support and will give Israel the political space in which it could hope to finish the job in Gaza and Lebanon, at least initially.
The keyword, however, is initially. Since everything emanating from Trump is distorted through the prism of his enormous ego, Israel should be aware that this support is always going to be conditional and that it must move fast.
The Abraham Accords, which Trump brokered in 2020 between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and later extended to Sudan and Morocco, were the great foreign policy achievements of his first presidential term. (Deserving, by the way, of a Nobel Peace Prize that a fastidious international political establishment simply couldn’t bring itself to award to a man they despised on so many levels.)
Should Israel’s actions endanger the progress that Trump will now, in his second term, hope to make with that anti-Iran alliance, it may well find that his commitment, like his attention span, can be very short.
Choosing Trump for a second time, after everything that Americans knew about him from the first time, is one of those victories of hope over experience that humans often irrationally succumb to. It’s like tossing your rack full of dud Scrabble tiles back into the bag in the firm belief that you will draw a better combination. Of course, you might then with your new tiles fluke a triple-word score. Or you might, as likely, draw a Polish surname.
Follow WSM on X @TheJaundicedEye
