Prior to US election results, political activist Yogendra Yadav preached that a voyeuristic partisanship, either pro-Trump or pro-Harris, was undignified and demeaning. But as an ordinary, politically concerned citizen of the world, I, like myriads of other undignified beings, am emotionally invested in what’s happening in the most powerful nation in the world. My partisan heart grieves for the victims in Palestine and is outraged by US’s complicity in the on-going genocide there.
I am also devastated by the runaway triumph of a felon convicted on 34 counts and a repeated sex offender who fomented a violent insurrection at the Capitol to try and block his removal from office after his 2020 electoral defeat. This man now has the world as the playground for his venomous, self-serving, wheeling and dealing fun and games.
For liberals like me, apart from the geopolitical implications, the US election was not only about left or right, democracy or fascism, but also about basic humaneness versus inhuman criminality. Trump has violated all norms of civility and decency ever since he ‘apprenticed’ his way into the public arena two decades ago.
On the night before the results were declared, I reassured my friends who were worried sick about a possible Trump victory. But I knew that I was treading dangerous ground. When the results were announced, Harris lost even the popular vote by almost six million votes – I was shell-shocked but not surprised.
I do not buy the favoured expert opinion that high inflation and stagnant wages were the primary reasons for Harris’s defeat. The truth is that by the time of the elections, the high inflation post-Covid had been brought under control, wages had increased, the stock market was booming, and unemployment was at a historic low. This election was quite simply a contestation between two diametrically opposed world views – the ‘wokism’ of the Democratic party that emphasised issues relating to racial injustice, sexism, denial of LGBTQ+ rights, environmental desolation and white privilege pitted against Trump’s dystopian nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-free trade and ‘global warming is a hoax’ anti-environmental philosophy. The sadistic Trump doctrine that unleashed the worst impulses of the American people, won hands down.
In recent years, the most powerful motivating force in politics is identity, linked to ethnicity, race and religion. White supremacy, racism and its embedded hatreds have clung tenaciously to the American psyche. Political analysts often draw a misleading distinction between racism and anti-migrant hostility, even though hostility towards migrants is an evident extension of racist instincts and is almost exclusively promoted by those invested in their White racial identity.
Lest we forget, a large swathe of White Americans has embraced the ‘great replacement theory’ that Whites are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-White people through migration, demographic growth and drop in birth rate of Whites – which one commentator describes as “genocide by substitution”.
Also read: The Key Factor Behind Trump’s Victory That Nearly Everyone Overlooked
Trump has masterfully played on these fears and promised what can best be described as ‘genocide by deportation’ involving about 11 million illegal immigrants. And his camp-followers like Elon Musk, who allegedly himself worked illegally in the US, have reinforced racist pseudoscience by harnessing his formidable social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to spread misinformation about racial minorities’ inferior intelligence and physiology. The South African expatriate, who is now Trump’s closest confidante and had even joined the President-elect’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is clearly playing from the Apartheid playbook that he was weaned on. And then you have the toxic, fringe alt-right sites which have been much more direct in purveying racism of the ugliest kind.
Don’t we in India know that fascists and racists swear by god and religion to exploit the gullibility of the faithful? By packing the Supreme Court with his henchmen, Trump succeeded in his mission of overturning the 1973 Roe vs Wade verdict that had legalised abortion. In its 2022 judgement, the Supreme Court declared that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists, much to the delight of Catholics and Evangelicals.
Trump acted on political theorist Noam Chomsky’s perceptive observation that “if you pretend to be a religious fanatic you can pick up a third of the vote right away”. Throughout his election campaign, Trump appealed to “my beautiful Christians”, feeding their fears about losing power in a secular and pluralist country, selling them Bibles and assuring them that he would rescue religion from anti-Christian forces. He placed emphasis on traditional Christian values, attacked the LGTBQ+ position by affirming that god made only two genders and promised a federal task force to fight anti-Christian bias.
Unsurprisingly, 84% of those who voted for Trump were White. Trump secured 74 million votes against Kamala Harris’s 68 million, but he was way short of the 81 million votes won by Joe Biden in 2020.
My explanation for this widespread acceptance of Biden in 2020 was that he is a White, god-fearing Catholic and benefited from the Covid trauma that fleetingly awakened people to issues beyond their identity. Kamala Harris is neither White nor Black nor a Catholic. Additionally, she is a woman in a country of misogynists. A section of her ancestral constituency – the ‘kick away the ladder’, solipsistic Indian diaspora, was firmly with Trump. With such a crushing handicap, what chance did she have?
With the Senate and the House of Representatives in the bag and a servile judiciary intent on doing his bidding, Trump has secured four years of unbridled power to do as he pleases. The blueprint for his agenda has already been prepared by a Republican think tank, the Heritage Foundation. The document titled “Project 2025” lays out Trump’s vision for governance in his second term and reflects every diabolical thing that he promised to do on his campaign trail. Here’s the terrifying laundry list of what his administration will be focussed on:
A total war on illegal immigrants. Trump, who endorsed the kidnapping and separation of migrant children from their parents in his first term, is bound to enforce his threat to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” He has even hinted that he will let loose the military to deal “with the enemy within”. He will expand the Trump travel ban, also known as the Muslim ban, to more countries, further tightening immigration laws and making more stringent the issue of visas from third world countries, including India.
In the Kafkaesque world designed for execution by Trump’s hatchet men, one should expect unsettling disruption on many other fronts.
Expect a federal abortion ban. The American allies are wondering how to respond to a loose cannon who seems to have pledged his troth to the likes of Netanyahu, Putin and Kim Jong Un.
The environment has had it; Trump will fulfil his promise to boost the planet-heating fossil fuel sector, to pull back on renewable energy which Trump calls a “scam business” and undo Biden’s electric vehicle mandate requiring 67% of new light duty vehicles and 46% of medium duty vehicles to be electric by 2032.
Thousands of career civil servants will be summarily terminated, their positions bestowed on Trump loyalists instead.
Education and health will also be on the ropes. The federal department of education will be wound up. Academic discussions on America’s most critical fault lines of race, gender and systemic oppression covered under the rubric of ‘critical race theory” will be censored. Trump has vowed to “promote patriotic education” with the obvious intent of rewriting history to nourish the purposes of his right-wing racist constituency.
Allow me to quote the great historian, humanitarian and playwright Howard Zinn on the state of democracy in America: “There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important for so long a time, as the United States.”
Trump’s resounding mandate is absolute validation that racism is alive and kicking in America.
Mathew John is a former civil servant. The views are personal.
