I happened to be in the US in both weeks (2016 and 2024) Donald Trump was elected president. In both cases, the outcome was bewildering, especially now. How on earth can a man who is a rapist, convicted felon, racist and manifestly incompetent become the leader of the most powerful economy and military in the world?
In the past week, I have been forced to dig deep in the search for answers, and I have a few to begin with even though much more time is needed to get to the bottom of things.
On reflection, Trump is an uninteresting character in and of himself; what is much more fascinating is the people who chose him. In this regard, I have for some time had a sense that the task is to understand them, not their choice of president.
To be frank, there are things the average American citizen cannot see. Most Americans are cut off from the world, having never travelled beyond their borders. They are brought up on a series of myths about their homeland that they come to embrace as true. Until the bottom falls out. For example, how often do you hear this myth: only in America can a black man born of biracial parents rise to the highest office in the land? Well, how about this? Only in America can a man who lies vocationally and boasts about sexually assaulting women become the overwhelming choice of white evangelical Christians.
Why? Because white Christianity in America has its roots in white supremacy, creating and defending a racist system that sustained slavery and its aftermaths in a land with another myth: the world’s oldest democracy. The doctrine of discovery still frames the thinking of many Americans, that God planted Europeans on the continent for the project of civilisation, thereby spawning the myth of exceptionalism. To believe this nonsense, of course, you have to wish away the genocide of the native people and excuse slavery in the process.
Still, how does one explain the rightward drift towards Donald Trump that gave him a large share of the vote of Latinos and black men, for example, despite a history of racism targeting these groups? To put it bluntly, how can people so obviously vote against their own interests? He just promised to expel millions of Latinos, for example. This is an interesting conundrum for which we have some astounding answers from an experiment in New York by the leftist congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The activist firebrand asked her followers on X how they could vote for her and other down-ballot democrats, but not Kamala Harris on the top of the ticket. A sampling of responses is fascinating. “You and Trump get things done.” Much of this kind of explanation revolves around an individual sense of what is good or bad for me personally in the immediate term.
In other words, the democratic strategy of highlighting Trump as a threat to democracy (he tried to overthrow the last election in which he lost) and the global world order (Nato, for example) matters little to people who have been raised in an ideology of extreme individualism. I matter, and to hell with everyone else. That kind of reasoning is worse, as the data show, for non-college-educated voters than for degreed people with post-school education. This means that even if Trump does threaten to deport my extended Latino family, I am here now taking care of myself.
That kind of self-preservation organised around immediate individual concerns (material wellbeing) has its social and cultural correlates as well. The fear of losing racial dominance is for whites an existential threat. How else can you explain the poor and working-class whites voting against Obamacare when they need it most? As Isabel Wilkerson explains in her outstanding book. Caste: the origins of our discontents’, for this group of whites the fear of losing racial dominance matters even more than losing life-saving medicines.
The next four years are going to be hell in America. Those Muslims who would not vote for Harris, calling her administration’s policies in Gaza the support of genocide, are about to see what a full genocide really looks like now that another right-wing fanatic, Mike Huckabee, has been made Trump’s ambassador to Israel
Still, whether it is the poor whites or working-class Latinos, there is another thing Americans cannot see which is that they are not all middle class. In one election cycle after another, democratic candidates for president would make moving speeches about how they are going to uplift the middle classes. There is no language in the American political vocabulary for those who are not. They rail against the wealthy (impose more taxes) and make promises to the middle classes (more jobs). But they have nothing to say for black or white people who are not elites; in fact, now and again they let slip in describing these people as deplorables (Hillary Clinton) or garbage (Joe Biden).
It was those people who showed the Democrats the middle finger in this election revealing once and for all that the party has a class problem and not only a race problem.
The fiendish brilliance of Trump is that he knows that and was able to turn the knife into the democratic body politic by talking about the price of groceries and fuel to the struggling classes. Now, of course he does not care a damn about the working classes; he on occasion called them dumb and that they would support him even if he shot a person on Fifth Avenue, New York. But they believe him.
He had the audacity to tell women in America “I am your protector” and later “Whether you like it or not”, even though he is a convicted rapist with a record of serial philandering and the abuse of women. Most white women voted for him.
The next four years are going to be hell in America. Those Muslims who would not vote for Harris, calling her administration’s policies in Gaza the support of genocide, are about to see what a full genocide really looks like now that another right-wing fanatic, Mike Huckabee, has been made Trump’s ambassador to Israel.
Of course, incumbency in a post-pandemic world is a real problem for governments around the world. Trump's brand of authoritarian populism came just at the right time, mixed with an unusual hold over his MAGA base. A personality cult, some analysts call it. One offered that the only difference between Donald Trump and Jim Jones is that Trump will have you pay for the drinks. A horrible time lies ahead.
For opinion and analysis consideration, e-mail Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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