Goodbye Trump but not quite so
All pollsters and media have failed to read their own society as they predicted a big win for Biden unless their polling was all methodologically wrong
Knowing him well, Trump must be fuming right now after he was repudiated in the election, and why not. After all, he is the fourth incumbent US president in the last 40 years to lose reelection.
But honestly, he should rather be giggling with his typical comic smirk spread across his face.
He has after all made - no, not really made, but laid bare the underlying festering face of racism, white supremism and the anti-progress hardcore values in the US society. And this divided America will have to take into account the politics he so blatantly pushed around and perhaps will even follow in the future.
Those odious elements had been there all the time but Trump had just tore at an old scab. With his characteristic candidness he has spoken the hearts of many Americans and resonated with a large group of followers. Otherwise why would 90% of the voters who had voted him into the presidency, do the same for this man again this time? Why would he gain millions more popular votes this time than before?
All pollsters and media have failed to read their own society as they predicted a big win for Biden unless their polling was all methodologically wrong. Those of us with logical but linear minds would like to think that society's progression should also be a one-way affair. They just fail to recognise that that is not to be in most cases with more right wing thinking talking root in societies including our own.
Interestingly, the mindset of the US society has moved into a hardcore retrograde regimen despite the fact that more and more Americans are now better educated than before.
In 2019, 40.1% of non-Hispanic whites aged 25 and older had a bachelor's degree or higher, up from 33.2% in 2010. Similar upward mobility in education is noted among the blacks, Asians and Hispanics.
What may it mean? Education may not have broadened their minds and more of them had voted for Trump.
That he is the third US president in history to be impeached and marked the first fully partisan impeachment where a US president was impeached without support from the President's own party, that he had lied with every roll of his tongue, that he had paid a prostitute to hush her up, that he had been so blatantly callous about Covid-19 and the deaths of over 2,00,000 citizens, or that his reign had led to an atmosphere where a black person could be killed on the street in front of so many witnesses by the police kneeling on his neck, made little impact on his supporters.
It is palpable why the American media did not like Trump. His lies and berating everyone and so on are all there. But then Trump followed a unique transactional politics, he thought in terms of trade and business, not in terms of regaining America's position as the mighty superpower.
In that sense he even sounded anti-establishment that the media did not like.
Now with Biden in charge what change could we expect? Should we expect much from his foreign policy?
Here a meme comes to mind that shows two bombers, one marked 'Republican' and the other marked 'Democrat'. The Republican bomber is coloured black and dropping bombs. The Democrat plane has popular slogans written on it like BLM and LGBT rainbow and it is also dropping bombs.
So that is a sarcastic assessment of the possible changes. Because of the triumph of Trumpism, the democrats may have to go for populism and cannot afford to be soft on its perceived enemies. They have to go tough on Iran, North Korea and China. Biden will bring Washington back to the Paris agreement which he has promised but will find it hard to pass any environmental law because of the Democrats' lack of control over the senate.
After all, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were no less hawkish in their foreign policy than any Republicans. Remember Syria and Libya.
