President Trump – Part One – What

It has happened – Donald Trump has been duly elected the 45th President of The United States. There are many issues to address here, hence the multi-part series. We start with what Mr. Trump is.

I am not talking here about character: I am not interested in cries of racism, sexism and all that. That some voted for Mr. Trump because he is a racist (which he is) should not be doubted. But consider the bigger picture. There is far more to Mr. Trump than meets the eye. For all the sensational media coverage that he received, there was a subtle, strategic brilliance to his campaign (keep reading). It manifested itself in three main ways.

First, Mr. Trump exerted confidence, even when he was completely incorrect, or utterly contradicted himself. The current position was right – and we have always been at war with Eurasia. The stream of consciousness nature of his rhetoric, even when he was wrong, lent his campaign a certain appeal, with Mr. Trump presenting himself as a ‘straight shooter who tells it like it is’, as opposed to a typical polished politician. This was false, of course, since he was actually quite thin-skinned: he sued the Onion over a satire piece. But, as is so often the case, perception is more important than reality in politics.

Second, he played the media like a Stradivarius: he postulated that their hunger for views and clicks could generate a plethora of free media coverage for his campaign, and there is nothing the media loves more than scandal. The media’s blindness in its pursuit of ratings resulted in a highly inept reading of the situation: by covering all of Mr. Trump’s scandals, they not only provided him media coverage, but they also made him the centre of the campaign, thus allowing him to control the narrative. The miscalculation was vast: for all the reporting of his words, Mr. Trump’s face was on television constantly. If the media sought to bury him by covering these scandals, they were misguided: Mr. Trump was not buried, but rather he rode the coat-tails of the media’s greed and lack of self-awareness to victory.

Third, he presented himself as being anti-establishment. Whether or not he is remains to be seen (prediction, he will not be). This leads to the single most accurate assessment that I have heard about Mr. Trump’s campaign. It is from Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks online news service. He described Mr. Trump as ‘the brick through the establishment window’ – that is, Mr. Trump was seen as being against the establishment, as represented by Mrs. Clinton. Let us be clear: he did portray himself as that, talking accurately of corruption and bribery. But, yet again, there was hypocrisy. Mr. Trump criticised former Florida Governor Jeb Bush of being ‘a puppet’ to billionaire donor Woody Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson fame), which he was, but then Trump took huge donations from Mr. Johnson. Mr. Trump is unlikely to do anything about money in politics, since he himself benefited from it, but his campaign’s venir of criticism of the establishment resonated with large parts of the voting public, as his victory shows.

To condense Mr. Trump’s victory down to its essentials, he was a brash, confident anti-establishment non-politician who manipulated the media to perfection.

Mr. Trump is portrayed by his critics as an unintelligent dolt. I would suggest that his campaign strategy indicates the contrary. He read [all facets of] the pulse of the nation, for good or ill, and baited the media to cover him with his ‘naughty words’.

In Part Two, we will look at the Why of Mr. Trump