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PROLOGUE: TRUMP’S VICTORY AND THE DEAFENING SOUND OF THE SILENT “MAJORITY”

Full disclosure: Like many people I know, I’ve been processing Trump’s re-election with a mixture of shock and resignation. Shock because until the results started coming in, I’d dared to hope for the seemingly impossible. Resignation because in spite of that hope, deep down I knew the result was inevitable. 

Every Arsenal fan knows what I mean.

Anyway, on Saturday, I listened to Steve Banon on the BBC (Radio 4) touting Trump’s win as not only the biggest political comeback in US history, but also a vision of the future. In his view, the world is basically caught up in two political outlooks; an ultra-left wing, liberal and globalist outlook on the one hand and an ultra-right, nationalist conservative outlook on the other. He went on to assert that given Trump’s comprehensive victory “across virtually all key demographics apart from atheists”, the mainstream media would do well throwing away their old lenses that view Trump as a racist misogynist and instead smell the coffee of a nationalist majority. 

I will dive into Steve Banon’s view of nationalism in a separate post, but I thought it worth contemplating some of the assertions about Trump’s win that have been swirling around. Even the mainstream media, long accused of being involved in a grand scheme of tarnishing Trump’s image and spreading propaganda against him, has of late been characterising his win as nothing short of staggering and comprehensive. Almost every political pundit and host has been asking how pollsters got it all wrong, what swayed traditionally Democratic voters such as Latinos towards trump and what that really says about America. But was Trump’s victory really as comprehensive as everyone seems to be claiming it was?

As it stands however, Trump has 74.8m votes to Kamala Harris’ 71.2m. While the outcome already known due to the electoral college system Americans use, over 6 million votes remain uncounted, mostly from California, the nation’s most populous state. I have avoided posting my more comprehensive thoughts on Trump’s win thus far as I would like to have the data inform my position rather than use my position to explain the data. Nevertheless, given that California is also one of the most liberal, it’s safe to assume that Kamala’s final total will be a lot closer, if not more than Trump’s. 

But what is more intriguing here is that Trump’s 74.8m votes are almost identical to the 74.2m votes he received in 2020. Again, it’s probably best to wait a few more days (or even weeks) and make analyses based off the actual data, but what this actually means is that while there may be some people that voted Biden in 2020 and now voted Trump, the more significant (and consequential) demographic are the people that chose not to vote this year. It wasn’t the passionate extremists on the left or right of the political spectrum that decided this election, but the deflated centrists. In a contest that had Democrats warn that democracy was at risk if Trump won, and Republicans insist that America’s way of life was under threat by the migrant crisis they insist was caused by Democrats, there appears to have been a significant number of Americans that felt so unheard and unseen by either party that they stayed home to make the point. For better or worse, their silence is reverberating across the globe.

Img; RAWPIXEL

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Written by Ganzi Isharaza (1)

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