Michael Moore observed early on that Trump was on a wining track. He did that by simply traveling around the Mid-West of the USA, and found that many people were simply disillusioned with both parties, but also if the Democratic Party could think of no better than to put up Hillary Clinton as their candidate, they had no choice but to vote for the other guy, warts and all. Somehow it got discounted in the mix of things because polls said Hillary was winning.
Well, polls have had their comeuppance. Just as the pollsters completely missed Brexit in the UK, their US counterparts completely missed Trump's support on pretty much the same methodology. Dare I say the pollsters in Australia missed the support for Tony Abbott, both in 2010 AND 2013; and if you look at a number of other elections, it's been clear for about a decade that polls have been far less reliable. Had they been reliable, Nate Silver would not have shot to fame in 2008.
What's surprising and interesting to dissect in the aftermath of Trump's win is just how much the media convinced itself that Clinton would win, and just how much America's heartland disagreed. It is in stark contrast to how they actually voted. White people voted for Trump and there were enough of them spread out through the country to swing the Electoral Colleges. Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote, but she won them predominantly in urban areas. She won big with the base and utterly failed to persuade Michael Moore country.
Now, it could be argued that these people are racists for voting for Trump who was endorsed by the KKK and various other neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists and 'Deplorables', but it actually flies in the face of the two terms won by Barack Obama. The demographic narrative that came out of the Obama victories was how the demographic was changing in such a way that a coalition could be built around various groups to beat the white majority vote. The fact that the Mid-West support Obama could count on, collapsed for Clinton has to be sheeted home to the candidate, and not the white people in the Mid-West who decided to vote against her.
Perhaps it's no coincidence - no make that, perhaps it was bloody pertinent - that the Sanders campaign offered more to those people than Hillary Clinton did, and the fact that she was carrying the baggage of Bill Clinton's presidency which effectively sold them down the river made it nigh impossible to win over those people. Thus combined, we have a situation where a bad candidate was sent out to win seats she wasn't going to win while the pollsters failed to understand this fundamental dynamic as they gathered numbers that obscured this fundamental problem, and the media reported those poll figures as if it paints the entire picture because it had a big investment in ignoring the underlying conflict, and they felt comfortable in doing this because the DNC assured them this was okay. This kind of circularity essentially led to the Media Bubble that formed around the narrative that Clinton was going to win, and this same Media Bubble got exported to the world.
No wonder the world is in shock.
"President Pussygrabber"
I know this sounds terrible, but if it does sound terrible, today is the day you should check your privileges in being able to think it's terrible - everybody has been way too keen to label Donald Trump with the expletives of the Post-Modern era. He's a sexist, misogynist, racist, entitled white male oligarch. And while all of that is true, it simply didn't matter to the wider electorate. And - again this is probably hard to bear but - those things not mattering is the normal condition of humanity and history. Also, there's a lot more to politics than identity politics, and so we ought not be jumping up an down over whether Donald Trump identifies himself as a sexist misogynist racist entitled white male oligarch - or not.
It's really easy to denigrate Donald Trump. He's been on the media as a caricature of himself for a very long time, so much so we don't even know how serious he is when he says the stuff that he says. And while it's most likely true that he sexually assaulted all those women who have come out to sue him, that's still not the entirety of the man. It might behoove us to keep in mind that the parts of the man that isn't the Pussygrabber is going be making decisions about who to drone-strike or not as the case mat be.
I know that sounds awful, but you have to get this into some kind of historic perspective. I remember when Ronald Reagan won. It was meant to be a disaster, but Reagan, combined with Bush Snr. (and a dose of Alzheimer) didn't exactly destroy the world through nuclear war. Equally, John F. Kennedy who is held in high esteem by the Democrats was a philandering sex-addict on the prowl for pussy. Nobody's seriously judging his presidency on the back of Kennedy's sexual adventurism.
While I wouldn't forgive Trump his peccadillos and sexual transgressions, the office of the President of the United States of America is going to demand much more of the man; and as long as the office is what it is, he's going to have to live up to it. He's most likely not going to be grabbing pussy. This kind of name calling isn't going to help us one bit, going forwards if we are to fight what is coming down the pike. The stupids have won, they are going to have their day. All Hail Stupid, Long Live the Reign of King Stupid.
The Gap Between What Is And What Ought To Be
Naturally, the media want to disown any claim that maybe they were part of the problem in how they couched the Trump candidacy. Politico had this editorial piece.
All that digging by the press corps meant a lot, and its message hit home. As the Cook Report notes today, newspaper investigations cemented into the public mind the preexisting image of Donald Trump as a bad person, as exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably. But that didn’t keep 15 percent of those who thought he was deplorable from voting for him. Likewise, 63 percent of voters believe Trump lacked the right “temperament” to be president. But of those respondents, 20 percent said what the hell and voted for him anyway. And 60 percent of voters said he wasn’t qualified to be president—and you can guess the rest: 18 percent of them voted for him.There you have it. The media did a fine job in exposing what a terrible human being Donald Trump was; it's just that people were stupid in not taking the media's heed. It seems a little self-congratulatory as well as self-serving. It is easy to argue what people ought to have done so given the plethora of information uncovered by the media. It overlooks the fundamental problem that what *is* does not give rise to an *ought*. To that extent the Trump candidacy is incredibly instructive in that the terrible phenomena of who and what Donald Trump is, did not necessarily dictate to people they ought to vote against him. It didn't happen because on some basic level, the Trump candidacy was not based on some points system of ticking off correct answers to questions posed by the media, rather, it was made up of a stronger desire to tell the media to go fuck itself for asking such questions. The Deplorables know they are some kind of something that the elite in the media do not like; some might have even looked up the word deplorable; but ultimately they would have worn the term as a badge of honour as they voted for Trump. In that process, the media did an adverse job, simply because it allowed itself to be the insulters in chief.
The election of Trump, then, can’t be reduced to a “failure” of the “broken” press—to lean on two worn-out descriptions of the craft. Nobody would ever say the American electorate “failed” or proved itself “broken” because it voted in numbers large enough to place a political monster in the White House. So the election of Trump doesn’t render the many journalistic findings published during the campaign worthless. Journalism at its best can only provide a set of traffic advisories. It is not and it can’t be an autopilot for life’s trip. Voters are free to read or ignore the press corps’ findings and even, as the Cook Report points out, absorb and agree with those reports and then cast ballots that contradict what’s been reported and what they believe. Being stupid is an inalienable right in a representative democracy.
There's a line in the Batman movie where Alfred offers to Bruce Wayne that some men do despicable things, because they just want to watch the world burn. What this election shows is that it's not just some men, it's roughly about half the American population.
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