This week, real estate mogul and alleged fraudster Donald Trump went from being a washed-up TV star to the most powerful man on earth.
Voters had full access to Trump’s long list of disqualifiers: his longtime tax evasion, his barely concealed contempt for women and ethnic minorities, his disregard for his own country’s democratic traditions, his schmoozing with mob figures. His political career began under U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, by perpetuating the racist lie that the outgoing president is not an American citizen, and he has been exposed as a longtime friend of Kremlin cronies and an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Yet Trump won. How?
Trump could never have been elected if America’s political elite had not been so out of touch with the deep rage at the establishment felt across America. Trump is a nationalist and a demagogue, but he somehow managed to be the first politician to convincingly appeal to the concerns of working-class Americans who feel that they have done everything right and are still drowning, while Washington and Wall Street sip martinis on the beach.
The Democrats – with President Obama’s help – picked a candidate from the political elite that working-class Americans now despise. In Hillary Clinton, it is difficult to imagine a candidate less suited to the electoral mood that allowed Trump to thrive.
Clinton’s failure has left the entire U.S. government in the control of one political party, ruled by a man too childish to concede in the event of a loss, and so reckless that his own campaign took his Twitter privileges away from him.
America’s most powerful argument for democracy and liberal values has been the example it sets through rule of law, the even application of justice, and open political speech.
Trump threatens all of that. His election exposes tears in America’s social fabric. And it suggests to the world that U.S. democracy is a sham, in which any two-bit con man can fire off a few angry tweets and find himself in control of the world’s most powerful nation a couple months later.
Trump, like all liars, will eventually be exposed as the carnival farce that he is. The task now is to create a political movement capable of providing a fairer deal to working Americans, so a demagogue like him never rises this far again.
