The Don of a New Era
Well, this wasn't supposed to happen.
November 8th was a tense night, as Americans closely watched states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and Michigan to see how this nightmarish marathon of a campaign was going to end. Things started looking bad pretty quickly, with many states too close to call for hours after the polls had closed, but many of them appearing to lean red rather than blue. At around 1:30, with neither candidate quite at the 270 mark but with Trump in a substantial lead, Hillary's campaign manager announced that no statement would be made by the Clinton camp until the morning. At about 3:00 in the morning, New York time, Trump took the stage to announce that he had received a concession from Hillary and to make his victory speech. The American people went to bed and woke up in a daze over what had come to pass.
Pretty much all of the polls and predictions made by people who were supposed to be in the know about the presidential race had predicted a Clinton victory. Donald Trump's ascension to president-elect is being called, almost certainly correctly, one of the biggest political upsets in modern American politics. It marks the official end of the Clinton era - Hillary's career in government is now pretty well over, it being highly unlikely that she will be tapped to serve in any capacity now that she's lost the prize that is the Oval Office. Obama pushed her aside in 2008, and she made a second bid for the Democratic nomination with almost no competition (save for the opposition of a democratic socialist independent senator from Vermont with almost no name recognition) because it was accepted in Democratic circles that 2016 was her turn. And now her turn is over, and she won't be getting a third shot.
By not just winning most of the swing states but actually flipping several states that went to Obama in 2012, Donald Trump won by an electoral margin that is nothing short of shocking, and even more shocking by the fact that Hillary narrowly won the popular vote. With the margins paper thin in some states, it's inevitable that voters who opted for third-party candidates have been blamed for Trump's win, although that's perhaps a little off-base; Green Party candidate Jill Stein got a paltry 1% of the vote, and Libertarian Gary Johnson got about 3% - falling short of the 5% he needed to ensure that his party would see federal funding for the next election - and it's likely that Johnson took more votes away from Trump than he did from Hillary. Low voter turnout, closings of polling places, and a drop in enthusiasm on the part of Democratic voters in the wake of a renewed probe into the Clinton email investigation have also been cited as contributing to a Trump victory.
It didn't take long for those on the left to start speaking out. Protests were organized across the nation in the days after, petitions were signed to abolish the electoral college, liberal pundits veered between righteous indignation and breaking down in tears in the their reactions to what had happened. The Canadian government's website crashed due to the heavy volume of traffic, as people apparently lied to themselves that they were actually going to leave the country over the election results - a hollow threat that people make every election year. In one hilariously futile act of protest, Michael Moore personally walked into Trump Tower and left the man a note, reading: "You lost, step aside." Much like the Brexit vote that took place earlier this year, the voters seem to have cast their ballots for an outcome only to experience immediate and severe buyer's remorse. People are outraged right now, but if we all think back to movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, we'll remember that in America, our outrage only flares up to a point, before fizzling out as we lose interest and return to our daily lives. Give it a few weeks, maybe a few months, and the protest will die down.
So, where does that leave us now?
On December 19th, the members of the Electoral College will officially cast their votes and confirm Trump as the president-elect. And then a month later, on January 20th, he will be sworn in as the next president. It's hard for some people to accept, but it's happening. Donald Trump may not be the president we wanted, but in my opinion, he's the president we deserve. We've grown lazy, ignorant, ill-informed, materialistic, and prone to obsessing over celebrity and fame. He's America incarnate.
Will it get bad? Probably. But it would have under Hillary as well, who could be said to be to the right of Trump on some matters, including the military and even some trade issues such as the Trans Pacific Partnership. Donald Trump may be a disastrous choice to head the United States, but let's not already start to romanticize Hillary Clinton - she lost for a reason. She represents the establishment politics that Americans are clearly rejecting, as evidenced by the political rises of Bernie Sanders and Trump. She was a flawed candidate and probably one of only a handful of possible Democratic candidates who could have lost to Trump. If anything good comes of the Trump presidency, it will be that the Left will look to foster grassroots politics and produce a candidate that will cause voters to go to the polls to vote for something, rather than against something. If anything ELSE good comes of the Trump presidency, it will be that the Right will put systems in place to prevent a buffoonish madman from taking over their party again. And if a third good thing comes of the Trump presidency, it will be that Americans will sit back, take a long, hard look at the way things have gotten, and come to the conclusion that it's not fucking working anymore.
I don't celebrate the fact that Trump is going to be the president. I just recognize the fact that modern history doesn't show that it matters much either way who's in the White House. Republicans and those on the Right were horrified at Obama's win in 2008, but in his eight years he hasn't been able to achieve a goal as modest as the closing of Guantanamo Bay, and we haven't transformed into the socialist, oppressive, Islamic state that some were predicting he would make us into. Giant border-walls and the fascist dystopia that some people are predicting now just isn't going to happen. Presidential politics, while they don't get get weirder than they have been over this past year, are largely business as usual - and so who better to "run" the country than a businessman? He was elected as an "outsider" candidate - his rise to power was predicated on the fact that Americans don't have faith in the system. We would do good to go a little bit further, and try to fix that system not by putting it in the care of a man straight out of a political cartoon from the Gilded Age, but by tearing the system down and starting from scratch.
