Donald Trump and the US

S P SETH

Donald Trump, the Republican contender for the US presidential nomination, is the country’s worst nightmare that simply will not go away. In the process, if the unthinkable were to happen in the next year’s presidential election and he gets the Republican Party nomination and ends up as the US’s next president, he will also become the world’s worst nightmare. Win or lose, he has come to reflect the deep insecurity and vulnerability many Americans feel about their country’s situation both at home and abroad. And they feel that the political leadership of the country on both sides of the political spectrum, Republicans and Democrats, is failing to put the country back on track to restore its ‘greatness’. The challenges are many from China’s assertiveness, Russia’s ‘belligerence’, and Islamic militancy with IS as its biggest and most dangerous manifestation.

At home, Obama’s presidency seems to have only deepened the racial divide between the country’s African Americans and White citizens, if the recent killings of blacks at random and in police shootings are anything to go by. At the same time, a number of Republican-run states are seeking to restrict and/or make difficult for African Americans to exercise their right to vote, as they tend to vote Democrats.

Obama’s presidency has also hardened the Republican Party’s immigration policy against the Latinos, particularly Mexicans. The Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012 presidential race did create some introspection among the Republican leadership for the need to win over Latino voters, who voted for Obama in large numbers, by toning down their opposition to facilitating the path for citizenship for many Mexican immigrants already in the US. But it backfired enabling Trump to play upon the deep-seated insecurities of conservative White America by labeling the Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. He promised to build an impenetrable border fence and actually make Mexico pay for it. He tapped the vulnerable underbelly of many Americans and they found in him an authentic voice and a strong voice, saying it the way they often felt. One important cause of insecurity for many Americans is that with the demographic changes in the US, Whites are gradually losing their preponderant voting advantage. As a result, minorities like African Americans and Latinos are able to decisively affect voting outcomes, creating a fear that Whites could end up losing control of the country. Obama’s election as President was greatly helped by African Americans and Latinos favouring him in large numbers. They constitute about 13 and 17 per cent of the US population respectively.

Trump never let off the advantage that he sensed might flow from tapping into the dissatisfaction and disenchantment from Obama’s election in the hardcore White constituency. With his obvious political ambition to have a go at presidential nomination, particularly after the Republican Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, he kept up seeking to delegitimize Obama’s Presidency. He continued to run the line that Obama was not born in the US and that he was, in some ways, a closet Muslim. Obama’s father was a Kenyan (Muslim), and with his name as Barack Hussein Obama, Trump and the likes of him were having good fun at raising doubts about his credentials. In other words, Obama’s patriotism was suspect, insinuating that that his ‘weak’ policy against Islamic terrorism was indicative of this.

This has two objectives. First is to paint Obama as weak and lacking commitment to pursue US’ national interests. Secondly, and its natural corollary, the country needs a strong president willing to say things as they are. Which is that the country is in dire shape across a whole range of issues and that only Trump can deal with it without ambiguity and dillydallying. And among the issues that need immediate attention is Islamic terrorism. And for Obama to make distinction between moderate and radical Muslims is simply evading the issue. In a sense, all Muslims are terrorists. Therefore, there is need to create a database for the Muslims in America analogous, in some ways, with Hitler’s Germany where Jews were targeted. He didn’t stop at this. When San Bernardino massacre happened in California involving the killing of 14 people and 22 injured by a husband-wife Muslim team, Trump called for a ban on the entry of Muslims into the US because all Muslims are potential, if not real, terrorists. And any criticism and opposition to his ravings, at home and abroad, does not deter him from stirring up hysteria in the United States against Muslims.

But there is a method to his madness. Trump is seeking to erase the line that seeks to distinguish between the vast majority of Muslims that are against terrorism and the hard-core militant radicals bent on inflaming the Islamic world, presenting the Islam-versus-West (Christianity) as a conflict between two civilizations, a carry over from history of the Crusades, with victory assured for Islam.

The problem is that Trump and his kind are simply reinforcing the theory of civilizational conflict, a version of which received some respectability in the nineties propounded by the US academic Samuel P Huntington. Donald Trump’s crude version is intended to exploit popular prejudice against Muslims in the US, much more so that he is now seeking Republican Party nomination. As with his tirade against the Muslims, Trump represents/reflects all that is crass, repulsive and dangerous in US society and body politic. In one of the debates among Republican contenders, when a woman moderator asked him some tough questions, he sought to put her down by referring to her menstruation cycle for no reason at all. And when he was asked about one of his supporters attacking a Latino, Trump simply brushed it aside by saying that his supporters were very passionate. The worrying thing is that he is getting away with all sorts of offensive and contemptible behavior because many people in the US think like this and now Trump has put a powerful political voice to it.

In other words, Trump’s rhetoric is overtaking any rational debate because his rival presidential contenders in the Republican Party try to play catch up with him but feel constrained, in varying degrees, by the sheer outrageousness of his rhetoric. And Trump increasingly becomes the authentic voice of a hardcore constituency, which is not insubstantial, that makes him such a dangerous political figure. Whether or not he wins the Republican Party nomination or the country’s presidency, he is a political phenomenon that will influence US politics for the worst. 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.