Donald Trump has won the 2016 presidential election, and he will be the next president of the United States whether we like it or not. He is our president, and to deny that is to deny the fact that he won the democratic process.
The democrats and the traditional media have been completely thrown off by this election. When Donald Trump entered the fray he was laughed off as a joke candidate who would likely only stay for one debate and then be whisked away like the wind. Trump had threatened to run for decades, and constantly railed against the powers that be whenever the media would pick him up. The media laughed at him, and while there was concern of his generalizations about minorities at the time, he was just taken as a comic figure. People just couldn’t bring it to themselves that Donald Trump could conceivably win the Republican primaries against these ‘qualified’ Republicans.
Donald Trump was not damaged at all because he wasn’t qualified as those in the mainstream thought. Donald Trump made a fool of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and the other standard ‘qualified’ Republicans who brought nothing new to the table. He knew this would be his chance to pounce, and he recognized that even if he got negative media it would help him promote his campaign. He would say the most absurd things about the other candidates but it didn’t matter because he was an outsider in a year where people rejected the mainstream establishment.
His only real contender in the entire race was Ted Cruz, a manic and a theocratic, who shared many of the same beliefs as Donald Trump. He believed we should carpet bomb the middle east, and had no issues with assigning badges to American Muslims. He did as well as he did because he also had the veneer of anti-establishment, although he received vast amounts of money from traditional Republican donors. He collapsed as it became clear he had no charisma and was still seen as an insider by many. Trump appealed to populist sympathies, Ted Cruz appealed toward the religious right who no longer hold the same relevance that they once did. Trump acknowledged this and actually appealed to the LGBT community, something that was inconceivable to other republicans given the role the religious right plays.
Every step of the way people kept saying he could not win another victory. This kept occurring victory after victory, and the media would laugh him off. In 2015 when Keith Ellison said that we should be afraid of a potential Trump victory because of what he spoke to, he was laughed off by the mainstream media and pundits. He was right. Ellison, an ardent supporter of Bernie Sanders he believed it was dangerous to put Hillary on the ticket as she is perhaps one of the weakest opponents against Donald Trump as she was ‘the establishment’, that Trump railed against.
Within a matter of months the comic candidate was leading one of the two major parties in the US. He was bombastic, he was xenophobic, but even beyond all that he presented a view of America that was simple and easy to understand that differed from the traditional conservative standard. Trump’s message was that America had been destroyed by 1, illegal immigrants stealing jobs and 2, foreign companies shipping their jobs overseas so they could pay lower wages. He railed against a lack of control of outside threats by the current administration, playing on very real fears. The fact that Donald Trump personally is responsible for shipping jobs overseas does not matter to his supporters, as it merely demonstrates that he knows how to play the system. They think that if he can play the system maybe he could use the system for their benefit. The fact of the matter was that he was spouting populist rhetoric, whether or he personally stood by those values or not.
Trump deviated from traditional Republican lines and supported protectionist trade policies, a non-contentious relationship toward Russia, and kept claiming that he was fighting a rigged system. These messages resonated with the white working class and minorities alike, as both deeply distrusted the mainstream establishment in representing them. This was the first election in quite some time that the democrat was the ‘insider’ and the republican was rallying against the establishment, and in times when people want change the outsider is almost guaranteed victory.
Unlike his insider opponent, Trump objected to trade deals that led to many American companies shipping jobs overseas. Hillary objected to the TTP among other potential deals, but nobody believed she was being genuine due to her record. Trump distanced himself from the neo-conservatives of the past, and aligned Clinton rightly as a hawk. The fact that Trump had previously supported most of the interventions Hillary supported does not matter; he was right to criticize Hillary for her hawkish tendencies. Trump hammered her on corruption, namely her campaign’s collusion with the DNC during the primaries, which he was absolutely right about. Hillary could not realistically answer these claims because there was no answer as her campaign never thought anyone would find out about the rigged process.
On election night most media outlets proclaimed that it would be a landslide for Hillary, as America would never support a candidate like Trump. State after state fell to Trump, and the media was shocked. It should have been obvious that the polls in this election were misleading as many voters were uncomfortable with admitting they supported Trump as in some areas it was socially unacceptable, as well as the fact that he had enthusiasm on his side. Enthusiasm is what won Obama the vote in 2008, Reagan the vote in 1980, and Kennedy in 1960. The candidate who presents a new vision is almost always certain to win at a national level, it does not matter who the candidate is. When there was only a ‘corporatist’ option against the populist right, is there any confusion of who would win the election?