In this world of turbulent and dizzying changes, Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the US presidential election makes sense only if we examine the underlying reason Americans chose this racist political tyro with a penchant for foot-in-mouth statements over his seasoned, albeit tarnished, Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Trump won despite his glaring personal shortcomings, shady financial background, weak political machinery and lack of support from major Republican players because, like the British, Americans were frustrated, fearful, and angry with the new normal in their lives: an uncertain future with foreign and homegrown extremists sowing fear and terror in unexpected places throughout their land, and destabilizing change wrought by invisible and impersonal socioeconomic and technological forces.
The pollsters who predicted a certain (90 percent) Clinton victory clearly missed those deep-seated sentiments of the American people, many of whom belong to what we may call the uneducated, underprivileged, unprotected class condescendingly called “the rednecks.”
Although Trump cannot by any stretch of the imagination belong to the “unprotected,” his antiestablishment, anti-immigrant, and antiforeign engagement rhetoric obviously resonated with the electorate. Besides, he was the lone alternative to Clinton.
His victory is thus a product of weakness: the weakness in Clinton, in the Obama leadership, and in the US economy, and the inability of the establishment (which Clinton personifies) to regain its footing after the 2008 crash on Wall Street. Add to this reality the heavy weight of the American people’s feeling of helplessness amid all the powerful agents of change buffeting the United States and the world. So, America’s voters reacted like a frightened herd pursued by predators—by seeking refuge and safety in Trump’s promised Fortress America, where foreigners would be unwelcome and thus prevented from causing terror and mayhem, not to mention stealing American jobs. The erection of a physical wall on the US-Mexico border and legal walls, through higher tariffs on certain foreign goods and revoking trade and military pacts with traditional allies, would complete America’s disengagement from the world.
Now that Trump is president of the world’s most powerful country, it remains to be seen how far his mostly absurd rhetoric would go when it clashes with the real world of power, economics and geopolitics: His great wall, for instance, would cost hundreds of billions of dollars (which the recession-plagued US economy cannot afford), and would probably trigger a rebellion in Texas and California which urgently need low-wage Mexican labor. And withdrawing from the world would not sit well with the financial and military-industrial complex that rules America. The world waits anxiously as America enters uncharted territory.
Trump’s victory has stunned the world but as early as the late 1980s the mighty rumble of watershed historical events should have warned us that the unexpected are coming: The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later were harbingers of a new order struggling to be born. Then came the “Brexit” shock this year as Britain withdrew from the European Union, a decision triggered by the terrorist threat and exodus of Muslim refugees from the war-torn Middle East.
What we are seeing in Trump is an admixture of the same theme of isolationism and nationalism laced with xenophobia.
The compelling question now is to what extent Trump’s victory will affect the Philippines, which, under President Duterte, is bent on leaving its traditional US defense umbrella in favor of alliances with China and Russia. Trump’s pledge to deglobalize US commitment should be music to the ears of anti-American leaders like Mr. Duterte.
The two new players on the world stage seem made for each other.
Narciso Reyes Jr. (ngreyes1640@hotmail.com) is an international book author and former diplomat. He lived in Beijing in 1978-81 as bureau chief of the Philippine News Agency.