Trump Through The Pages of History
प्रकाशित मिति : मंसिर ३, २०७७ बुधबार
By Yogen Guragain
Florida is a major swing state with 29 electoral votes. As soon as Trump busted the polls’ expectation to win Florida on the night of November 3, I turned off my phone and slept, thinking Trump would achieve another shocking presidential victory in 2020. However, things were different this time around because America had already set a record in absentee or mail-in ballots. I got the first word of Trump’s defeat not from the News Media but the streets in New York City on November 7, 2020, where people were seen erupting in joyous celebrations. Then, I sifted through online sites that indicated Trump is in strong denial of the election results. There still existed more than two months before President-elect Biden is sworn in.
In the meantime, this article aims to explore the factors that gave rise to Trump and what his defeat means for America and outside.
Within a matter of four years, President Trump brought revolutionary changes to the Republican Party of America. He pushed the party of Lincoln further towards right-wing populism. His fervent nationalistic stances were bolstered by harsh anti-immigrant policies and undermined free world trade. Prior to his ascendance, the central agendas of the Republican Party relied on fiscal balance, tax cuts, unfettered world trade, and conservative social ideas. After Trump’s loss, GOP will try to reorganize by pinning the blame on his populist nationalism. The open question is how much of Trump’s legacy will be retained by GOP.
There is no doubt that President Trump loves chaos and controversies. The most baffling controversies historians will be tasked with to explain will be his warm embracing of so many wild conspiracy theories. From Birther Theory (he propagated the unfounded notion that President Obama was not born in the US) to illegal voting to defeat him to Covid 19 as Democratic Hoax touting Hydroxychloroquine as a game-changer drug to Covid 19 have a similar pathway. The most troubling of them is that he failed to denounce QAnon’s theory, which paints him as a Godly fighter battling Satan-worshipping Democratic pedophiles. His open support for those baseless notions makes him look like a real fighter for some people. And such hard-to-imagine belief systems propelled him to power. Large swathes of people believe what he states as my Trump-worshipping neighbor shares with him: coronavirus is a Chinese conspiracy as most of his conspiracy theories are based on a central concept that common people or those who fight for them are eventually destined to fail because an elite group of societal operators is secretly plotting against them. Trump propagates that a cabal of national and international players including top Democrats, government administrators (Deep State), China, George Soros are trying to hurt the supposed noble American way of life that he consciously or subconsciously links to White men of European origin. Hence, his conspiratorial beliefs’ crux can be pinned down to White Genocide, White Extinction, or White Replacement theory. According to the While Genocide conspiracy theory, the forces worldwide are actively working to end the entire race of While Christians through means like mass immigration. With these elections, his fantasies have suffered a huge blow, but the remnants will continue to be carried on.
I vividly remember a meme going viral on the internet when Trump was campaigning to win the Republican primaries in 2016. The meme presented a homeless man with a placard saying: If you don’t give me $1, I will vote for Trump. He defeated 16 other presidential candidates, and against everyone’s expectation, won the world’s most powerful position on November 3, 2016. Now in 2020, even with his loss, Trump won more than 72 million votes (the winner even set a greater record by scoring more than 77 million votes), more than any other Republican candidates have secured.
Many of those who voted to give Trump a victory in 2016 was not part of the Republican Party’s traditional base. The curious question is what pulled people into Trump’s orbit despite his chaotic management of either campaign or the presidency. The answer can be found in the Rust Belt states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) towards Trump-led GOP, where huge numbers of manufacturing jobs were lost to free global trade. Those states were home to great steel and automobile industries like Ford, General Motors, and coal mining. Many of those factories went overseas for cheap labor, or mines were closed down due to previous administrations’ environmental regulations. Obama administration, with its aggressive environmental policies, threatened the existence of those industries in PA. The Midwestern USA states had formed a so-called Blue Wall for Democrats, meaning they were the pillars of their stronghold due to the working class’s traditional tilt towards the Democratic Party. Donald Trump was able to destroy the Blue Wall (though by thin margins) after convincing blue-collar workers that it was through his upcoming America centered trade policies he would bring back their jobs. Trump’s nationalist and protectionist slogans caused not only the Blue Wall to crumble, but the long-held assumption that the working class is essentially aligned with the Democratic Party got ruptured in 2016. Trump was further able to convince the working class in the Blue Wall region and elsewhere that the flow of illegal immigrants is chipping into their job share. But, remember, GOP has long been considered to be the marketer of laissez-faire economic policies. And also, people believed that traditional political candidates were never going to tamper with the long-held liberal immigration policies of this country due to political correctness.
Trump lost in 2020. Does that mean Trump’s nationalist, protectionist approach failed? Some anticipate Trump’s or his like figures’ comeback is inevitable, arguing he lost only due to his mismanagement of the ongoing pandemic. And they also believe that Trumpism is an unstoppable insurgency.
Among many, the most pertinent reason for Trump’s election loss is his handling of the pandemic. From early on, he minimized the effects of coronavirus despite getting an intelligence report of its high severity in terms of transmission and fatality in China. With elections in sight, Trump’s transactional approach to the lockdowns was influenced by his desire to keep the economy normal. Trump’s opposition to restrictive economic activity to stop the pandemic was supported by his beliefs in the pseudo-science of herd immunity. Herd immunity refers to the policies of exposing the populations to the virus to develop mass autoimmunity against the disease. Trump’s appointment of Dr. Scott Atlas for health care policy, who recently sent a tweet urging the public to ‘rise up’ against state restrictions, is to overshadow mainstream epidemiologists like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Even prominent Republican Dr. Rand Paul believes that New York has been able to contain the virus because of its high infections early on, resulting in high percentages of bodily immunity in turn. Experts undercut this argument and argue that New York’s success is rooted in mask-wearing, social distancing, isolation, hand washing, and increased testing. Even Sweden’s, whose government actually left the people on their own throughout the crisis, current soaring cases further prove that the concept of herd immunity is always dubious, and even if it comes, it leaves behind a long trail of deaths. The immunity is not long-lived either. Trump’s disparagement of masks and negligent counting of coronavirus’s effect on children and healthy people brought larger turn out at polls.
In a nutshell, Trumpism is an opportunist political philosophy that relies on conspiracy theories, pseudo-scientific notions, half-truths, or non-existent reality to divide and rule people. With Trump’s downfall, we need to wait and see if British Euroskeptic will feel regret in dissociating from European Union, Modi’s Hindu-centric government will feel powerless, or Brazil’s Bolsonaro’s denials of Covid facts will last any longer.
