Trump is more honest than the American media

This is not a drill. Neither is it a dream. It is the real thing: Donald J. Trump is the president of the United States of America. Get used to it. The protesters need to go home. The sooner they get home the better. The petition to declare Clinton president is silly. And so is the “Calexit” over-reaction for the State of California to secede. It was silly when Texans did it in 2008 when Obama was elected and it is silly now that Trump is elected president. Also silly – academic but silly, still – are the arguments whether America took a step backwards when it comes to democracy by electing Trump. Or whether James Comey, the FBI Director, influenced the outcome of the election; or whether a situation where a candidate who won the most votes – as Hillary Clinton did – and lost the election is something bad for democracy. Democracy is part tradition and declaring the winner of the Electoral College is an American democratic tradition. Go home. On January 20 next year Barack and Michelle Obama will vacate the White House and anyone looking for President Trump and First Lady Melania can find them at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. Alternatively, they will be reached on twitter: @POTUS and @FLOTUS, respectively. In all seriousness, however, the attention given to this election is such that American politics is now global culture, just like the rest of its soft-power symbols such as McDonalds, KFC, Coca Cola, and Hip Hop. It’s inescapable that American soft power has reached a crescendo, thanks largely to the social media revolution. But just as soft power is the megaphone that spreads American culture and lures global peoples into its control and influence, there’s a negative side. It’s this side that placed America in a bind during these elections. This time round, the megaphone was off-message. It was undermining the American foreign policy intent of spreading a positive image of America abroad. For instance, one of the things America wants to export to the world is democracy; yet, the kind of democracy it had on display was not the kind it wishes the world to associate America with. In 2000, America’s image took a hit when the world came to learn that Bush had stolen the election from Al Gore. But democracies don’t steal elections, right?This time the anxiety was around what the world would think of America if word got out that it is capable of electing a ‘bigot’ and ‘misogynist.’ These defects would be much more difficult to conceal now than they were in 2000 thanks, again, to the penetration of social media across the globe. But democracy is transparent, right? In any case, if America valued democracy as much as it says it does, the bigots are citizens too. They have a democratic right which they may exercise by choosing one of their own. Even then, what is with the undertone that seeks to cast Trump as more racist than those who came before him? On the contrary, Trump is simply more honest. And his honesty was tailor-made for this political moment. The social context in America during this election, more than any other time since the civil rights era in the 1960s, was beneficial to someone who was openly racist – in fact or strategy. Since the 1960s to Obama’s election in 2008 the social context in America was punitive towards anyone who was openly racist. As a result, over the past half-century Americans developed a more moderated, covert and sophisticated, approach to navigating race; they learnt to conceal bigotry in the public space. It is the context that gave rise to Obamania in which a majority of white Americans were greatly invested. Not only was it an opportunity for a reparatory gesture of goodwill towards black people, whites could also use the moment to elevate their own humanity. It was a win-win. But something happened in the American psyche during Obama’s presidency. Two opposing phenomena emerged. One, at some point blacks realised that Obama was not going to do much for them and they needed to organise if they were to push for the reforms they wanted to see in America, a conviction that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement, itself precipitated by the killing of blacks in cities and towns across America. Two, the assertiveness of blacks taught white America a lesson: it did not pay to be closet bigots. The expectation that their goodwill towards blacks would be recognised never materialised; it was not feeling as good as it was supposed to. And so, Obama had managed to dupe blacks and whites alike. However, black people could not go after one of their own. Whites, on the other hand, weren’t having it; they wanted their country back so that they could remind blacks what it was like in the olden days before they were nice to them. This is how the sixth sense of a good businessman came into play. There was an opportunity that only needed a good closer. He could smell it; whites were out for blood. If Hillary Clinton was ridiculed for being out of touch with the American voter, here was Trump, truly in touch and locked in; he breathed the air and spoke the language of his voters – a man of the people. But how about damage control for Brand America? Easy. In defence of the republic, the media and the political elite on both sides of the isle would be called upon for patriotic duty: under report Trump’s looming victory and denounce him at every turn. And feign surprise at the anomaly.

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Trump is more honest than the American media