11 Nov The era of the polished politician is over…
Why Trump?
The post-mortem of the U.S. presidential election has generated a glut of ‘explainers’…
Was the Democrats’ ultimate Achilles, what ended up as a distinct unrelatability in their branding?
Weak policy posturing?
Too many word-salads from Harris?
Is an internalised bias against women that strong, that people would prefer a rapist to a female?
Is it the final gasps of late-state capitalism that is giving us this wave of elected megalomaniacs, who sense that their heyday is over and patriarchy is sliding down the slope of irreversible dissolution? (holding out hope for this one!)
Or is it Trump’s unapologetic expression - definitively unfiltered and ‘himself’, that has secured him a place as the 47th president of the U.S.?
It is of course worth noting that his popularity has not suffered following being charged for 34 felonies, despite only being convicted for 1. Also of relevance is the fact that during his last stint in the Whitehouse, he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any President. That’s a whooping rise of $7.8 trillion. Yet – he’s back. For round two. Wild enough.
I think, and what can’t be underestimated, is that he represents the repressed fears, biases, prejudices that a lot of U.S. people harbour. Not only does he represent these inane thoughts – but he externalises them, and what’s more, revolves his whole campaign around them. He ‘shoots from the hip’ in a way that eviscerates evidence and defies the laws of clarity. His contradictory rambles are embarrassing – yet, I hypothesise is that they resonate more strongly with people of middle America because they espouse the cognitive dissonance that most people exist within.
Bizarrely, his vitriol is (mis)taken as authenticity. Because many have come to a saturation point with well-dressed, career politicians who will say anything to get your vote but are dealing in, to borrow a phrase from Orwell ‘double-speak’. Trump has trumped because of this perception of him as ‘real’. The era of the polished politician is over….
He's impeccably unhinged. Perhaps like a lot of lay people who have conflictual feelings because they are existing in a State with shaky foundations. Built on a hornets-nest of half-truth, stolen-land (any surprise Israel is a natural bedfellow?) and misremembered history.
I feel for the people of the U.S. It does feel like some archetypal fable, that warns against the dangers of repressing your shadow. It eventually comes back to bite you.
When I woke up with that sense of dystopian deja-vu, admittedly I did have an instinctive Kali-esque response: “They’ve gotten what they voted for” (subtext: deserve). Kali is a major goddess in the Hindu tradition, representing time, death and destruction. Deep within me, there’s a Kali part that tends towards chaos, anarchy and ‘ripping the plaster off quick’ if you will. It’s also the part of me that thinks all of the world’s systems will need to be dismantled in order for us to build an egalitarian society. ‘Reform’ is pointless.
This knee jerk emotional response was situated very much in the discompassionate territory of my inner world - somewhere between the coordinates of apathy and nihilism. It’s all well and good, and exceedingly easy for me from the vantage and buffer of my transatlantic ivory tower to say, ‘good enough for em’. But the sea of images of people from minority and marginalised communities, rivulets of tears on numbed out faces, that returns me to the interconnectivity of all our struggles. Photojournalism of the aftermath has been truly stomach-punching. Of the cataclysmic sadness on the one hand, and the petrifying emboldened bigots on the other.
(Above L-R: Women mourn. Extremist, fundamentalist Christians portend the return of the trad-wife and gays being lynched by the looks of things - it appears the 'neighbour you love' will obviously have to fit a prescribed demographic. Nick Fuentes, incel cretin, OG utterer of "Your Body, My Choice" An X post by this despicable specimen, White nationalist and Holocaust denier last Tuesday night saying, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” has been viewed more than 90 million times and reposted 35 million times. Between Thursday and Friday, the ISD recorded a 4,600% increase in mentions of the phrase on X. The manosphere has been given a proverbial pat on the back.)
It's hard to imagine what it’s like for people whose identities, and by extension LIVES are now seriously undermined is deeply disturbing. Essentially what women, people of colour, students, migrants, LGBTQ+, Disabled and economically disenfranchised folk now feel is that the person in the single highest office of power is laughing at them. That he has gotten to where he is on a platform that denies their equality, their worthiness.
Having a head of state that so blatantly doesn’t care about people is alarming. What’s more alarming is the wave of people like that who are rising into positions of power.
In other European contexts we have seen Meloni in Italy, Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary and obviously beyond EU frontiers, Netanyahu in Israel promote anti-social, dehumanising policies and procure power. There’s ideological congruence between all of these demagogues: they exploit fear of the Other, they are ultra-neoliberal, and they manipulate economic scarcity.
Nesrine Malek, columnist for the Guardian sums it up splendidly here:
“Because ultimately for the Democrats, the same moral vacuum that has enabled and allowed the slaughter in Gaza to continue is the same one that prevents them from seeing voters as ethical beings. The realpolitik attitude that weighed up Palestinian lives against loyalty to Israel is the same one that cannot conceive voters who do not also act in similarly cold and self-interested ways. The feeling of unperturbed exceptionalism is the same one that cannot allow them to understand the sense of vulnerability, precarity and fear that the past year has given rise to. Those astonished by Trump’s win and who worry about the terrifying era that he is about to usher in will never grasp that to many, that world is already here, they’ve just not been living in it.”
*For Kevin. Inspired by one of the best men I know, following a ‘eureka’ exchanging conversation about one of the worst men I know becoming President of the U.S.A. (again).