Donald Trump: Hate has won
A rude awakening! Indeed, a rude awakening as the world watched in great disbelief the rise and triumph of a potent concoction of right-wing populism and sheer lunacy packaged and braded, Donald Trump.
I have no doubt that the sheer magnitude of this shock, must have recorded high on the Richter scale. It certainly is of volcanic eruption proportions. Trumpism, as the die-hard followers of potent ideology prefers to call it, is premised on exploiting racism, bigotry, hatred and fear to attain a political goal. Hard as it is to come to terms with the reality that comes in January 2017, the Trumps would be swapping their already luxury home for the iconic Whitehouse, the one thing we can at least all agree on is that Trump heavily relied on racial resentment and patriotic animus as high-octane fuel to power him to the Oval Office.
From day one, hate has been the dominant strategic component of his campaign. It was by far the most defining feature of his political message, effectively rendering his take on economy and foreign policy immaterial footnotes. Essentially, Trump normalised hate and prejudice.
It is therefore, almost impossible to ascribe Trump’s victory purely to his showmanship, wealth and policies (if any) while ignoring his open intimacy with right-wing populism, which premised on white supremacist ideologies. Essentially, hate has won. But the politics of race and hate are not anything new to mainstream American politics, particularly to the Republican Party. Remember the racial abuse that President Barack Obama had to endure to the Oval Office; he was literally not accepted as a legitimate American. But Trump has just taken the fever of hate, lunacy, loathing and ‘otherism’ to a level never seen before in contemporary societies.
Let us bear in mind that, in 2012, Trump commissioned investigators to go to Hawaii, Obama’s hometown, to ‘dig’ for his birth certificate. Subsequent to this, polls showed Trump leading in the conservative vote even though he had not announced his intentions to run under the Republican card. Essentially, Trump had found an opening that had long existed within the conservative front: racism. Trump has been trading in hatred, paranoia, and irrationality. His own brand of the politics of hate had connected with a significant portion of white audience. In hindsight, there is nothing surprising that he has expanded this base by unleashing sweltering hate on immigrants, Muslims and other people of colour.
Trump has proved to be the political pivot that the hate-spewing white nationalists were long looking for to leverage and propagate their hate. No wonder, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) endorsed him and other White supremacists flocked to his campaign.
Trump’s campaign also cashed on scaremongering. He decried Mexican and other immigrants as “criminals” who were threatening to overrun United States. He even at one point suggested ISIS was about to invade the United States under the pretext of immigration. He claimed the Generals in charge of US policy knew nothing and that Obama was sympathetic to terrorists and absurdly insisted that Obama and Clinton had founded ISIS. In other words, US national security was in the hands of fools and traitors.
Throughout the campaign, Trump's demagoguery and bigotry were not bound by facts."Make America Great Again" was a revisionist slogan designed to capitalise on hate, resentment and bigotry. Trump’s chief currency was anger anchored on racism-driven ignorance. Trump’s victory is an ugly victory because it was oxygenated by hate and bigotry.
