The US appear to have voted against the establishment and for Trump to be elected as President. The reaction has been the same as when the UK voted for Brexit. Here’s an analysis of why Trump may have won, with the parallels to Brexit also being compared.
Here’s a preface before we start this: I do not support Trump (The Donald as he’s known in some British media outlets) or any of his supporters in any way, I’m simply just stating the facts between the two campaigns and their outcomes. The racism and violence from this US election and Trump supporters is awful, and shouldn’t be happening, but he’s obviously spoken to someone and lots of people had voted for him.
People are protesting against him, which I can and do understand, but a bit like Brexit, protesting isn’t going to change much - we’re still leaving the EU and Trump is still going to be president, since he won a majority vote. The groups that Trump has disgustingly discriminated against have people that voted for him - Latinos, ethnic minorities and the people of middle America, probably because they’re sick of being told by politicians what’s going to change, only for them to put more money into their own pockets and leave people worse off.
That’s the case with both Clinton with the US election and David Cameron of Brexit, as they both are career politicians, who know nothing else except politics. They went to good universities, got degrees and Cameron went straight a job in his government, with Clinton spending time as a lawyer before enveloping herself in the country’s agenda. Trump and in our case Nigel Farage showed something different, a new way that things could be done and how they can put a different perspective on people in countries that wanted a change and had grown sick of seeing the same old faces on televisions and in newspapers.
The media didn’t particularly help either, creating mass hysteria around any little headline to do with Trump, Clinton or Brexit and possibly forcing people into choosing what they didn’t want simply because of what they’ve read. Secretary Clinton spent $50 million on her campaign’s advertising, whereas Trump didn’t need to spend anywhere near as much, as he simply said something outrageous (some of which he has taken back and rephrased since being elected) and his face would be splashed all over the World’s newspapers for 6 weeks, which is just free advertising for his campaign.
This is the same for Brexit, as Nigel Farage created a bus which had ‘£350 million will be taken back into the NHS each week’ emblazoned across the side. I certainly don’t support every word that comes out of his mouth, so when he went on national TV after the referendum vote and said that it “was a mistake”, even I had to agree (and still do) that he was a massive bell-end for doing that, but it’s that kind of campaigning and running against the norm that won the two of them the votes of our respective country’s people. Both Clinton and Trump had awful debates and an awful campaign - just trying to score points at each other and not come up with any real solutions for the land of the free.
This kind of rebellion politics has been going on for a while in the UK, especially as Nigel Farage’s UKIP (UK Independence Party) got a whopping 4 million votes in the UK general election last year, but because of the way our politics works the party was only given one seat in Parliament. It clearly shows that people want change and as soon as the EU Referendum came around in June, everyone may have changed their minds at the last minute or have supported the Leave campaign from the start, but still the people spoke and we voted to Leave the EU, just like people spoke and voted for Trump to be president.
If I had the chance to vote in the election, I wouldn’t have voted for either Trump or Clinton, as both of them have their issues and are very untrustworthy candidates, one with more issues than the other. The future on both sides of the pond are very uncertain, but in both cases we will have to see how it plays out. One thing’s for sure, nobody knows what’s going to happen and Trump is only in office for four years, whereas Brexit is forever.
I wrote an article about why I voted for Brexit - if you want to give it a read, click here. Also check out my words about music and lifestyle on my blog, Hooked On The Music.