2486: One and Only Post About America’s New President

America elected Donald Trump, noted toupee wearer and generally unpleasant person, as their President. This is either terrifying or highly amusing — or perhaps a combination of both.

I have no love for Donald Trump. He’s shown himself repeatedly in both social and popular media to be a bigoted twat who frequently speaks without thinking, promising entirely unreasonable things and making objectionable comments about all manner of groups of people. He is not, in short, who I would have voted for as President, were I an American.

I feel that it’s worth contemplating exactly why so many people voted Trump, though, much as it was also worth contemplating why so many people voted Brexit, and why so many people voted for the Conservatives to govern the UK after seemingly widespread dissatisfaction with their previous work and particularly their former leader David Cameron.

This article from The Guardian offers an explanation.

Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

• Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
• Her scandals weren’t real.
• The economy was doing well / America was already great.
• Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
• And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.

How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

In short, instead of allowing people to make their own mind up and encouraging them to think critically about both candidates — or the pros and cons of Brexit vs Remain, since a very similar situation unfolded with that vote — the mainstream media attempted to rely on its power over society by clearly marking one option as the “wrong” one. Trump is evil because x,y,z, Brexit is bad because a,b,c. It didn’t stop there, though. It then repeatedly listed all the reasons why you would be a terrible person for voting for the “wrong” option along with all the reasons you would be an absolute paragon of virtue, ally to the oppressed and generally wonderful human being if you voted for the “correct” option.

It may be that if you critically analysed the positions of both options, you still thought that Hillary was the right choice, and if so, great. If it had been left at that, she could have probably won. But people need to reach that conclusion naturally rather than being shepherded away by barbed wire, locked gates and signs saying “DANGER! TRUMP AHEAD”. People, particularly in the age of the Internet, are curious beasts, and if you tell them they can’t or shouldn’t have something, that will only make it more attractive to a particular type of individual. “Why is the media so absolutely adamant that I shouldn’t choose this option?” they’ll think. “What are they trying to hide?”

We are in an age of social media, where buzz and influence can be created artificially to a certain extent, but more commonly it is an organic, natural process that occurs seemingly randomly and at the bitter, twisted and above all unpredictable whims of the great Internet Gods. In this age, where everyone likes to feel like Their Opinion Matters — and where we’re repeatedly told that Our Opinion Matters, even when it clearly doesn’t — people really don’t like to be told what to think. People really don’t like to be talked down to or told that a conclusion they may or may not have reached themselves is “wrong”, or that there is only one “correct” option, regardless of whether or not you personally actually think it’s right for you if you take a closer look at it.

This kind of attitude — a “journalists’ crusade”, as Frank puts it in his Guardian piece — leads to people feeling bitterness and resentment towards the media. We’re already in a place where general trust in the media is at something of a low, so it wouldn’t have taken much to push people into “spiteful” mode, where they deliberately go against whatever the media is telling them to do simply to send a very clear message: we want to make up our own minds, and fuck you for trying to tell us we’re awful people for doing so. There is, of course, a certain irony in doing this causing everyone who feels that way to vote the same way, but when you only really have two practical options, there are limits to how effectively you can protest.

“[Hillary Clinton]  was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment,” writes Frank. “An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.”

Well, I’d say that sledgehammer has well and truly been taken to that machine, and a clear message has been sent. I’m not excusing the result or saying that it was the “right one”, just saying what has seemingly happened from an outsider’s perspective. It is pretty much exactly the same reason there is so much resistance to perceived “political correctness” — people do not like to be told how to think or feel.

It remains to be seen whether or not this election result is ultimately “good” or “bad” for America — and the world — as a whole, but as a friend on Facebook noted, “I look forward to four years of people learning how little power the President has.”