Triumph of maverickism

Mr. Donald Trump will be sworn in on January 20, next year as the 45th President of the United States. Before November 8, the day of the American presidential elections, many analysts including this one thought, not thoughtlessly though, that his rival, Hillary Clinton, would nick it. Well, analysts propose and voters dispose.

Clinton has a rich resume: a successful lawyer, a senator, a Secretary of State and a former First Lady. She had a respectable grasp of America’s domestic and foreign policies, had in her corner two two-term Presidents of America Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. She won all the three presidential debates and her party, the Democratic Party, was solidly behind her. It looked like she and America were ready to make history by making a woman its President for the first time. Despite the e-mail controversy and the affairs of the Clinton Foundation it still seemed, going by the polls and the media, that the presidency was already in Clinton’s handbag.

On the other hand, her opponent, Donald Trump, a businessman and eccentric politician, seemed to be the most unlikely candidate for the Oval Office. His words were coarse, crude and bullet-like on every issue. He was abrasive, aggressive and temperamental. He refused to release his tax returns which was an indication that he was probably not paying the appropriate level of federal taxes. He made a mockery of a disabled reporter. He attacked the heritage of a federal judge and abused the Muslim family of a slain U.S. soldier. All of these caused some violent reactions at his rallies.

Then his mysogynistic comments about women riled a good number of women intelligentsia and the liberated male voters especially when it was revealed in an audio tape that he talked about groping women, including married ones. He also boasted that he could get away with it because he is a celebrity. He later described it as “locker-room talk.” In the course of the campaign, 11 women showed up claiming that he had fondled or groped them inappropriately. Other groups, apart from women, came under the hammer of his foul tongue: Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Republicans, war veterans, U.S. allies. Strangely, he made President Putin and Russia his sweetheart and many people may have wondered what kind of relationship America under his watch would have with its archrival, Russia.

His campaign did not receive the full-hearted support of Republican honchos. Many of them distanced themselves from him and he carried on in his strangely unorthodox way and when he won he said that “ours was not a campaign. It was an incredible and great movement.” If orthodoxy is approved by conventional wisdom in elections Trump has proved that there is a new way to the American presidency: maverickism. There was an unorthodox cattle rancher called Sam Maverick who reportedly rounded up all strays and gave them his own brand and he let his own calves run unbranded so that many neighbours who were also ranchers would brand his cattle with their brands. Pure unorthodoxy. Trump may have been a student of Sam Maverick.

Trump’s promise to build a high wall that will separate the United States and Mexico is a strange method of solving the drug problem that Mexicans seem to have exported to the United States. As a clincher he said he would get the Mexican government to pay for it. And the border between the two countries is about 3000 kilometres long which would, if implemented, take years and billions of dollars to complete.

In spite of all the evidence in the world, Trump denied the existence of climate change. He said it is a hoax foisted on the world by China, and promised to stop climate change payments by the U.S. to the United Nations.

During the three debates with Clinton all of which he lost, he interrupted Clinton more than 50 times and the lady kept her cool and concentrated on the job at hand even when he called her a “nasty woman.” This election campaign was nasty, nauseatingly nasty, and may have set a new record in how to win elections with bitchy-ness.

Many analysts, believing in America’s moral Puritanism in election matters, thought that Trump’s sexual peccadilloes would trip him. But those who managed his campaign had mastered the rhetoric of defending the indefensible. Some of their statements went like this: we are not electing a Sunday school teacher; anybody can record anything about you when you are just joking with your friends; whatever he said about women was “just boy’s talk”; we are sure those women (his accusers) wanted him because he is a celebrity. Those eyeing 2019 politics in Nigeria can go over to the Trump campaign organisation for apprenticeship.

Why did Trump win? He won because there is a growing anti-establishment movement in America arising from the people’s disenchantment with their leaders who cannot solve most of their problems. Such problems include job losses, insecurity, immigration challenges, welfare, education, poverty, health and xenophobic issues.

Fully aware of these issues as being central to their lives Trump crafted his message appropriately building on their fear – fear of immigrants, fear of job losses etc. These messages resonated loudly with the dispossessed, the low income earners, the poorly educated and some hyphenated Americans who believe that the Washington politicians are their curse. Trumpism, his politics of populism and isolationism worked for him the way the Brexit message worked for those who wanted to get out of the European Union. Brexitism and Trumpism are Siamese twins with one umbilical cord. They are a movement for isolationism and against globalisation. This is the rebirth of negative nationalism. When Trump takes over, being American will be more rigidly defined for exclusion rather than inclusion if he decides to implement his campaign promise. In the same way the apostles of Brexit want to be British, not European because they think that Europeanism is corrupting their British credentials. But is this what will serve the best interests of Great Britain? We don’t know.

The other reason why Trump won is that Americans are apparently not yet ready for a woman president. Hillary Clinton is the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate by any of the two major parties. She seems, on paper, to be more eminently qualified than Trump but what does paper know? Let’s give it to Trump: he worked very, very hard for his victory tweeting on social media daily, attacking those who attacked him, abusing those who abused him, threatening those who accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour. He defied the press, defied the polls, defied the purists and defied the preachers of pessimism. He fought like a wounded lion traversing five states on the last day of the campaign and holding the final rally at 11 p.m. that day. He did not win the popular vote. Clinton won but America regards the electoral college vote as it. So Trump won it and won the poll and Clinton who lost it, lost the poll just as it happened to Al Gore some years ago. It is not our business to query how Americans choose their leaders. They have decided even though there have been nation-wide protests against it. Those protests will change nothing except to inform the President elect that he has to work hard to unify a country whose disunity he did a lot to exacerbate during his rabble-rousing campaign.

I believe that Trump will not be the President he promised to be. Soberness will soon take over from his idiosyncratic outbursts. Besides, America is a structured society with strong institutions that will not permit any elected leader to become a dictator who can bring about the erosion of cherished American values. Trump’s speeches during the campaigns showed that he does not believe in America’s exceptionalism. This may have been just an election bullet aimed at President Barack Obama’s presidency which supported and campaigned for Clinton. Trump’s message was to “make America great again.” America is already great on three fronts (a) It is the world’s number one economy (b) It is the world’s number one military power and (c) to a large extent it cherishes the universal values of freedom, human rights and the rule of law. But America is not perfect. Those imperfections came out during the campaigns. Those will be, for Trump, part of the agenda for the next four years.