Trump Elected: Time to Learn

Donald Trump speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. / Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore

After the fiasco of the Democratic National Convention and the attitude of the "establishment" towards many Americans, the Democratic Party has to learn from its mistakes.

“It is my high honor and esteemed privilege to introduce to you the President Elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump,” introduced future Vice President Mike Pence in New York in the night of November 8, 2016. Donald Trump himself soon appeared on scene accompanied by ceremonial military-like brass music reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” written in 1942, in a time of world war, after Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s speech in which he proclaimed the dawning of the "Century of the Common Man". A fitting entrance scene, for a candidate that has built his whole campaign on war rhetoric and the claim to want to give the power of the United States back to its citizens, its common men and women.

There is much to learn from this victory. This whole electoral season has been covered by the media in a binary way - the 'clown' and the reasonable one, the paranoid one and the open-minded one. It is undeniable that Donald Trump has appealed to some divisive, xenophobic and sexist fears that a great part of the population feel, and in a way more than just clownish. But to solely talk about this is a mistake.

Donald Trump has been out-spoken about his hatred of the media. According to him, the media were only painting a pessimistic and burlesque portrait of him - 'The Donald' - and took sentences he said out of context to confuse people about his actual policies. But only Donald Trump can be held accountable for the words he said, and he should know better when exposing himself to national and international criticism.

But the media also faked ignorance and feigned objectivity, going so far as to say – seeing the great popularity Donald Trump ended up getting for real – that he had cleverly “manipulated the media.” But only the media can be held accountable for the coverage they made of the Republican candidate, and they should know better as well.

What most “liberal establishment” media failed to see is that the common when-she-becomes-President kind of presumptuous attitude would not go unnoticed, nor unpunished. There is only so long you can make fun of such a great part of the population. Liberals – like me – liked to make fun, in an incredulous way, of Trump supporters. How could anyone go for someone saying such trashy things? Denying, lying so often about what he said or did in the past – WRONG! – whether long ago or recently?

And yet, he was not the only one to lie in this electoral season. As the Observer puts it in a nutshell: “Hillary Clinton and the DNC Have Only Themselves to Blame – This is what happens when a major political party rigs the primaries to nominate their preferred candidate.” Following WikiLeaks e-mails showing the dishonesty of the Clinton campaign towards Bernie Sanders, his strategist Cesar Vargas recently wrote an op-ed piece in The Huffington Post recounting the unfairness with which the Vermont Senator’s campaign was met:

"There has been no repudiation, let alone denunciation, of what was said in those emails-just denial, finger pointing, and doublespeak. To appoint the very same folks who carried out many malicious behaviors to tip the scales for Hillary is just as unpardonable. Why reward unethical behavior? It’s mind-boggling."

In a feature focusing on the Clinton years and the internal and ideological struggles of the Democratic Party, The New Yorker's George Packer asked the question “can Hillary win the white working class back?” We now see she narrowly failed to do so. And this social class was indeed the central focus of the whole Trump campaign: he spoke to disillusioned working- and middle-class white people in simple terms that hit home. While he did not propose any clear program – neither did Clinton, although she was more articulate in her views – he focused a great deal on trade, the dark spot of the Democrats’ legacy that left many formerly industrialized regions abandoned, in the face of rising globalization not yet well-mastered, or understood, by the political class.

The “American Dream” slogan does not work so much anymore because globalization has made competition much stronger and mobile, and capitalism crushed the little people with ridiculous living costs - mainly regarding health. This is not specific to the United States only of course, but this 2016 race will certainly have underlined it. On November 9, Bernie Sanders’ Facebook page published the following status, encapsulating what had been at stake:

It is now time for the Democratic Party to face its own demons, and reconcile with its pro-worker tradition. Hillary Clinton might have been just as sincerely passionate as Donald Trump, but the ways in which she "stole" the primaries from Bernie Sanders was too much to bear for many millennials that had been so inspired by the Senator. And while she got more popular vote than Trump, the point remains that even if she had been elected, it would not have been the landslide victory all were expecting: a deep divide exists within the American society, and it is no longer possible to shove it under the rug with terms of "post-racial society", as we were continuously hearing a few years ago.

Finally, such liberal bashing as we have seen, or participated in for some (the other way around was just as true, but the argument of "they did it too" does not stand) was very disrespectful to those many Americans who have true fears of having the control over their lives slipping away from them, and who have a true feeling of betrayal by their federal State. This is a sentiment all the more relevant in a country where self-reliance is a founding philosophy.

For them, what was more reassuring than finding a community of fellow-disillusioned that has more or less the same perspective, giving them a sense of belonging they certainly did not get from the disconnected political elite? Both Sanders and Trump found that vacuum, and the latter filled it up with populist and hopeful promises while the former got silenced too soon.

This article was written for this blog only.