 "Hillary Clinton supporters react as results come in at an election night party for the Democratic presidential candidate at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York")
“Is this even possible?” “He is not a president.” “I need more beer.” “Well, that’s what they said after Brexit.”
For a room-full of people who usually have an inexhaustible cache of opinion on everything from football to queer theory, a silence of incomprehension can be the hardest thing to counter. These are graduate students in a University located in one of the more progressive, forward-thinking American states. Electoral maps invariably paints Oregon blue (for Democrats) in predictions. This state voted for Bernie Sanders in the US Democratic Primaries 2016. It voted for Hillary Clinton in the US Presidential Election 2016. And now, like the 49 other states of America, it knows Donald Trump as its 45th President-elect. Silence is all one will find here for some time now.
Trump has not red-washed the American electoral map. Some would say it was a tough fight. It wasn’t for the new US President-elect, though. The elephants, even as they sit pretty in rooms across America now, were in the lead from the very first set of voting results. Hillary’s donkeys kept up a dogged pursuit, but in the end, it would not matter. Florida unrolled the Red carpet to the White House. Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa secured the keys. Pennsylvania marched the man in. All these states had been loyal to Democrat and incumbent President Barrack Obama in 2012.
As state after state turned red across TV screens, many in Eugene, Oregon, did not know how to react to the mandate. “This has to be a joke” became the common quip, a last ditch effort to convince oneself that anytime now the blue brigade will swing back into dominance. However, as data from the New York Times showed, by 6 pm EST, all major forecasts had swung from a Democrat to a Republican victory, irreversibly.
While the question on most minds would be “Why/how Donald Trump?”, the answer to it lies in another question: “What is Donald Trump?” For most, he had been the wild card. A real estate developer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, his harsh rhetoric about women, immigrants, people of colour, and homosexuality, made sure he was never taken seriously by his opponents. Wikileaks went on to propose he had been fielded by the Clintons as ‘the opponent who will surely lose’.
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That the mere sight of “Trump trucks” would cause people to jeer and shout curses, was not uncommon in this part of the US. And yet, now, television screens flash a delirious montage of people in red-caps, dancing shouting, celebrating, in Florida, Arizona, Iowa. The Republicans have taken the US Senate and the US house. New York Times sums up the victory as “a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters who felt that the promise of the United States had slipped their grasp amid decades of globalisation and multiculturalism”.
Maybe it is that simple. Maybe not. One of the very few Indian students at the University of Oregon, was found Googling the details of H1B visas and the condition for their termination. Another would tell anyone who would listen to her, that this has already happened in India, and she knew how events will unfold. She was prepared. A doctoral student who did not wish to be named, said, “Trump was not supposed to win. That he is our new president is simply because whatever he has said over the past one year – his stance on immigrants, global terrorism, foreign relations, economy, gender issues – has, somewhere down the line, touched a nerve with the American people. And that is scary.”
According to the data from Associate Press, Clinton won nearly 84% votes from counties where less than 50% of the population is white. She won a similar pie-share in counties where at least 45% of the population is African American.
In a recent class – one of those inconsequential literary theory seminars which usually fail the litmus test of a result oriented world – I remember, we had a discussion on French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory on “phantom ideals” – images of something grand, pure and happy which we are taught to aspire for, like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” or Narendra Modi’s “Achhe din”. What does ‘Great’ really mean? What and when was this ‘Great’ America, that Trump wants to bring back? Is it an America of the all-white, middleclass, heterosexual, Christian male? Is it something similar to the UK post Brexit?
Trump’s victory underlines the fact there are a considerably large number of American citizens who readily buy into this “phantom ideal” of a ‘Great’ United States. Trump garnered votes like an ion rod, a single rallying point for all those who believe in a ‘Great America’ which is lost, and can be brought back again.
Even as some students head to their beds, hoping to wake up next morning from a bad dream and find the world sunny again, while a few others take to the streets shouting slogans of “Down with Trump” at no one particular, we might already have started moving towards a ‘Great America’. Economic and political ramifications notwithstanding, it definitely promises to be churning pot for new ideas. Till then, we need more beer.
The author is a doctoral student at the University of Oregon
