<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/06/how-trump-won-us-election-president>
"Sometimes fear triumphs over hope.
Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the 2016 US presidential election was
described as a leap into the political unknown. This time there is no excuse.
America knew that he was a convicted criminal, serial liar and racist demagogue
who four years ago attempted to overthrow the government. It voted for him
anyway.
The result is a catastrophe for the world. It saw Kamala Harris’s competence
and expertise, her decency and grace, her potential to be the first female
president in America’s 248-year history. It also saw Trump’s venality and
vulgarity, his crass insults and crude populism, his dehumanisation of
immigrants that echoed Adolf Hitler. And the world asked: how is this race even
close?
But elections hold up a mirror to a nation and the nation does not always like
what it sees.
Future historians will marvel at how Trump rose from the political dead. When
he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, people gathered outside the White House
to celebrate, brandishing signs that said, “Bon Voyage”, “Democracy wins!”,
“You’re fired!”, “Trump is over” and “Loser”. There was a tone of finality, a
sense that, after four gruelling years, this particular national nightmare was
over.
For many, there was the comforting idea that moral order had been restored. It
was Trump who was the aberration, not Barack Obama, the first Black president
who had preceded him. Hope, not fear, was the national default. Now America was
back on course after its unfortunate zigzag of history.
Then came Trump’s ultimate disgrace, the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol
on 6 January 2021. He seemed at peace with the idea that his own
vice-president, Mike Pence, might be hanged by the rampaging mob. He had
finally gone too far. “Count me out,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina,
once a devout Trump loyalist, said in an impassioned speech on the Senate
floor.
But the political obituary writers forgot that 78-year-old Trump is the
luckiest man in the world. A series of opportunities to snuff out his political
career, banishing him to golf courses in Florida for the rest of his days, were
squandered."
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
