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20/11/2016
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2353NM
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inequality
Yes, you read the title correctly. Donald J Trump will be the 45th President of the United States of America after amassing more ‘Electoral College’ votes on 8 November 2016. It doesn’t matter that Clinton won the popular vote as the ‘Electoral College’ is where you need to outperform. The reality is that close to 45% of the population used their democratic right (in the US anyway) of not voting for any
Presidential candidate. It’s easy to make the assumption that a lot of people either didn’t care, didn’t like the candidates or just couldn’t be bothered. Some of those may now be regretting their choice.
The internet is awash with articles by full time and citizen journalists telling us why Clinton lost or Trump won. To be honest, there is probably a grain of truth in a lot of the discussion. This isn’t another ‘we woz robbed’ or ‘wot went wrong’ monologue, history is history and Trump may last as President from 20 January 2017 to 20 January 2021 or beyond. Despite the apparently common theme in Australia that Trump is not a good thing, are we not seeing the wood for the trees here?
Michael Moore of
Bowling for Columbine and other documentary movies’ fame actually tipped not only that
Trump would win the election last July, but which US states Trump would pick up:
You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts — “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump can’t win a majority of any of them!” — or logic — “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” — is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to — we need to — hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a s**t show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”
Moore suggested:
I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states — but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.
Moore also talks about ‘angry white men’ who can’t adjust to equality of race or gender, Clinton’s negatives, the Democrats who supported Sanders not necessarily supporting the Democrats eventual nominee with the same gusto as ‘their’ candidate and those who were always going to vote for Trump because doing so gives the royal finger to established politics.
And you know what, Moore is right. If you are a factory worker in Michigan who no longer has a job because the cars you used to make are now imported — or even a mining worker in the Hunter Valley or Central Queensland who has lost their job because of global markets either not requiring or finding a cheaper alternative to ‘their’ product — you too would think about destroying the system that on the face of it looks after itself, but not you.
Rightly or wrongly Clinton wasn’t a great candidate. Sure, she knew how the system worked and had the experience, as she has been a part of the system for a long time. Unfortunately, she also had made some decisions in the past that were marketed as demonstrating Clinton didn’t follow the rules when it didn’t suit her. The perception therefore is that she is there to look after herself, rather than the unemployed labourer or farm worker suffering because of changing economic circumstances.
So if you think that Clinton could refute Trump’s appeal, in the words of Moore:
… you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut.
Yes, from the other side of the Pacific, Trump is a xenophobe, narcissistic and seemingly will do what it takes to gather popularity. However, how about we look at this strategically?
Trump (and Hanson/Abbott in Australia, Farage in the UK and La Pen in France amongst others) is telling voters that if you vote for me, I will ‘fix’ your individual problem, be it health care, education, jobs, commodity prices or whatever else is the reason you are disaffected with the ‘political’ class. Trump has made that implied promise to something like 380 million people. Before he starts campaigning for his Presidential re-election campaign somewhere around 2019, he has to deliver on a lot of promises made to a lot of people. Given that it would be well-nigh impossible to understand the problems of a lot of the US population inside two years, there is Buckley’s chance of a solution being delivered. Let’s say that Trump ‘fixes’ imports, giving jobs back to the ‘rustbelt’ states that effectively elected him. Apart from the domestic replacements being more expensive and/or of lesser quality than the current import, imported products also have a supply line of distributors and resellers who would conceivably be worse off if the tap on imports is turned off. In a similar vein, a lot of those who rely on what are claimed to be ‘undocumented Americans’ to do the menial work around the home and so on would probably find themselves either doing the work or paying a lot more for a ‘documented American’ to perform the same tasks.
Trump has by implication promised to ‘fix’ the perceived personal problem of every person that has voted for him, as well as those who didn’t. It really doesn’t matter that there are a multitude of problems and, given all the good will in the world, some of the problems are so entrenched in the global economic system that they will never be ‘fixed’, Trump’s implicit promise is to ‘fix it’ and benefit all those US citizens who voted for him. When it comes time for other Republicans to challenge him for the 2020 nomination sometime in 2019, a lot of the disaffected that voted for Trump this time around will look at their individual circumstances and decide whether they are either worse or no better off. While Trump may not necessarily follow the usual political protocols, he can’t ‘fix’ everything he claimed to be able to manage in under 24 months. He is already ‘talking down’ his promise to cancel Obama’s
Affordable Health initiative. Will these people (probably numbered in the hundreds of millions) accept Trump’s inevitable line that he is gradually turning things around? Or will they, to paraphrase a former Australian politician be waiting on the porch with a baseball bat?
We do have a precedent here. Campbell Newman came to power in Queensland promising to fix the state, and the people gave him a wallopingly large margin to do it (the Official Opposition, led by Annastacia Palaszczuk, could hold meetings in an eight-seater people mover and still have a spare seat). Newman instituted his vision of reform and not only did Palaszczuk form a minority government at the next election some two and a half years later, Newman lost his seat in the 89 seat Queensland parliament. You could also argue that the 2016 federal election result was a result of Abbott’s claims prior to 2013 that he would ‘fix it’ with a similar lack of actual ability to do so.
The beauty of Trump’s election is that from 20 January 2017, he is arguably the most important person in the world. The common belief is that if the US President says jump, the expected answer is ‘how high’. If Trump can’t make everyone happy in the next couple of years, do the Hansons and Farages of this world have any chance of doing so? In reality — probably not. Probably the easier question to ask is will every other political party in the world (apart from the ultra conservatives such as One Nation, UKIP, etc) be reticent about pointing out that Trump couldn’t fix it — so how on earth will Hanson, Farage or whoever else do better?
Trump in the view of a lot of people doesn’t deserve to be President because he worked outside the traditional rules of engagement. Rightly or wrongly, he convinced enough people in the right areas to trust him to deliver. While the jury is still out on the delivery of his promises, Trump is highly susceptible to claims that he is no better than the rest if each one of the implied promises he made to make things better for every American citizen isn’t happening by 2019. Trump will soon have in his command the established forces of the largest and most well-resourced democracy in the world to make the changes he considers necessary to the world’s political and economic systems. If Trump can’t do it (and the chances are he won’t in the minds of a lot of Americans) people like Abbott, Hanson and the other ‘like-minded’ people around the world have even less. Trump’s probable failure also should be concerning other political players who have been using similar arguments for a number of years — including Hanson’s One Nation Party.
Michael Moore managed to blitz the field with his tips for the 2016 US Elections. He still has one tip in play. As reported by
Paste magazine, Moore appeared on American television on
November 11, 2016:
During the sprawling 45-minute discussion, Moore said that he didn’t think Trump would last his whole term of office. Moore said:
This is why we’re not going to have to suffer through four years of Donald J. Trump, because he has no ideology except the ideology of Donald J. Trump. And when you have a narcissist like that, who’s so narcissistic where it’s all about him, he will — maybe unintentionally — break laws. He will break laws because he’s only thinking about what’s best for him.
In some ways, impeaching Trump would be a tragedy.
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