‘Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the day after that everybody seemed to understand everything.’ – The Plot Against America, Philip Roth.
Late last week, one US commentator considered the song which played at the end of every Donald Trump rally and wondered if the next president of the United States had listened to the lyrics.
The Rolling Stones have complained previously that Trump used ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ without permission, but what, some asked, was Trump thinking in choosing this track?
Was he so clouded by hubris that he couldn’t hear the words ‘But if you try sometimes/ you just might find/ you get what you need’ and understand how these lyrics applied to him?
Anyway, Trump would soon understand when the American people rejected him as all the polls indicated they would. This campaign, driven by ego and fuelled by fear, would unravel and American values would be restored.
On Wednesday morning, the savage purpose of this song became clear. As Trump walked off to the haunting closing bars of the Stones after making his first speech as president-elect, it all made sense. The song was not for Trump or even for his supporters, it was for all who opposed him. They wouldn’t get what they wanted, they would get what they needed, however painful, however destructive and however little they wanted it.
Trump had prevailed, something which we had been assured wouldn’t happen, even if shy Trump voters, like shy Tories in 2015 and shy Brexiteers earlier this year had remained hidden from the pollsters.
More telling may have been the fact that nothing could damage him. A month ago, Republican leaders were said to be exploring ways of removing Trump from the ticket after the tape of his conversations with Billy Bush was leaked and a number of women came forward to allege that, yes, Donald Trump behaved as Donald Trump said he liked to behave.
.@realDonaldTrump should drop out. @GOP should engage rules for emergency replacement.
— Mark Kirk (@SenatorKirk) October 8, 2016
While Billy Bush was fired from his job as a presenter on NBC, Trump survived in pursuit of his new role, demonstrating that if there is no line, you can never cross it.
In essence, television was more important than politics. If the political establishment was baffled when, in 1980, the American people elected a former actor in Ronald Reagan, the electorate went further in 2016, asking a man who had no experience of politics but plenty of reality TV to lead the country they believe will now be great again.
Trump was lucky in his opponent too, an insider in a world which wants outsiders, a political operative living in a time which has tired of politics as it always was.
There may be good reason for this. It is only eight years since the financial crisis of 2008 and the austerity which followed it, yet there has been a determination to return to business as usual at the top when so many below have found that things have changed and changed utterly.
But the change now is dark and disturbing. Trump can talk about healing the divides that he has done so much to exploit, but he won’t. Hillary Clinton would not have been able to do that either, but at least she would not have been elected on a platform which depended on an essential violence of words and actions, a war against the dispossessed and the weak which others are prepared to wage in his name, even if Trump now decides not to.
Clinton may end up shading the popular vote, but that doesn’t really matter. 59 million voted for her and 59 million voted for Trump. More people voted for Al Gore than George W Bush in 2000, but that made no difference to the way Bush governed.
It is said, with some justification, that those who voted for Trump were the ignored and forgotten in American society. From Michigan to Ohio to Pennsylvania, those voters ignored by the elites took their country back or voted to make America great or acted on whatever slogan demagogues use to drive a population closer to fascism. Of course, some people are ignored for a reason as well.
Because, just as with Brexit, the consequences, intended and unintended, will be to turn a country against itself and make the world more fearful and divided.
Exit polls – if they can be believed – suggest that Trump was not elected solely through the votes of the forgotten working class, but thanks to white voters in general and of both sexes, while black voters failed to vote for Clinton as they had for Obama.
There may be reasons to do with Clintons’s past associations and her valued membership among the political class, but she was also a highly qualified woman and 59 million in America decided it could do without one or both of those categories. Instead it embraced a man who, as Michelle Obama pointed out, had boasted of things candidates would normally be destroyed for boasting about.
The competition to decide who has committed the most egregiously self-destructive political act in modern times is a two-horse race. Brexit has the advantage that it was an utterly unnecessary referendum, but Trump’s election may shade it on the basis that it was not just a self-destructive act, but a globally destructive one too.
The most benign view of Trump is that he hasn’t believed anything he has been saying during this campaign. In the past, he expressed his admiration for Hillary Clinton and described himself as pro-choice.
At this time, people like to roll out the line that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Trump campaigned on fear but will govern functionally, according to the most hopeful analysis.
Now that he is elected, they say, he will abandon the positions that won him support among the Republican base and reveal that pragmatic heart. Unfortunately we know too much about Trump’s heart to believe that everything is going to be all right. We know too much about the forces that supported him. Even if Trump doesn’t believe all he says, they do and they believe things he doesn’t which they are now emboldened to act upon.
As Michelle Obama also pointed out:
“A presidency doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are. So if a candidate is erratic and threatening, if a candidate traffics in prejudice, fear, and lies on the campaign trail, if a candidate thinks that not paying taxes makes you smart or that it’s good business when people lose their homes, if a candidate regularly and flippantly makes cruel and insulting comments about women — about how we look, how we act — well, sadly, that’s who that candidate really is. That is the kind of president they will be.”
In a world in which it is a risk to cause offence, America elected the candidate who was the most offensive and now the country prepares for deep uncertainty while Muslims, African-Americans and others wonder what will become of them as Trump pursues greatness for his America.
Just as we understood nothing beforehand, maybe collectively we will be wrong about a Trump presidency, but it can no longer be denied that the country is dangerously fractured.
There is an America which some might naively still believe in, but which seems to have been extinguished in a land governed by President Trump. There is the America as set out in the poem of Emma Lazarus which appears on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and there is the new world.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
“Ours was not a campaign but a great movement,” Trump said early on Wednesday morning.
Today the tempest appears to be out of control in America. The golden door is shut as Donald Trump prepares to build a wall instead.
