Blinded by The Donald: What Americans cannot see

I happened to be in the US in both the weeks (2015 and 2024) that Donald Trump was elected president. In both cases the outcome was bewildering, especially now.

How on earth can a man who is an alleged rapist, convicted felon, racist and manifestly incompetent become 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, though much more time is needed to get to the bottom of things.

On reflection, Trump is an uninteresting character; what is much more fascinating is the people who chose him and in this regard I have for some time had a sense that the task is to figure them out, 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 own 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 the US 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, you have to wish away the genocide of the native people and excuse slavery.

Still, how does one explain the rightward drift towards 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 Cortez.

The activist ask 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 are 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 shows, 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 Obama care 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 lifesaving medicines.

Still, whether it is the poor whites or working-class Latinos, there is another thing Americans cannot see-— and that 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, every 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 gas to the struggling classes.

Now, of course, he does not care a damn about the working classes.

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 multiple women have accused him of raping, kissing or groping them without consent and despite his record of serial philandering. Most white women voted for him.

The next four years are going to be hell in the US.