President Trump

Legal eye

We can analyse to death how Trump clinched the US presidency against the many ‘only ifs’ out there. The bottom line is that he understood the electorate a lot better than the Clintons, the Democrats, the pre-Trump Republican Party and almost all the media.

All politics is local, Tip O’Neil had said. Trump got that. He knew how to motivate the disgruntled white American. He knew which pejoratives would leverage the biases that are alive and well in the US even if ‘polished’ Americans are ashamed to acknowledge them. And he understood partisanship.

Those shocked by the ‘upset’ thought Trump was functioning in some parallel universe that he had created for himself, and his claims, words and actions made sense only to him and his cult. Trump wasn’t the candidate of the college-educated professional middle class that dominates the media and can generate noise and wield influence disproportionate to its size. As this group helps shape mainstream narrative, it can mistake its own rhetoric for reality. It turns out the joke’s on the pundits. It was Trump detractors who were in a bubble.

The US presidential election is not about the popular vote. The parties understand it, the candidates understand it and so do the people. Notwithstanding who won the popular vote, Trump won the election squarely. If the playing field was skewed at all, it was against him as he was fighting Clinton and the media that had endorsed her. To say that the result has shocked the US is saying that it has shocked those who believed the media’s punditry. It has certainly not shocked all those who voted for Trump across the country and delivered him the presidency.

Didn’t Bill Clinton win the 1992 election on the slogan ‘it’s the economy, stupid’? This time it was Trump who spoke to the blue-collar white American hurting economically in a globalised world. In times of scarcity, political correctness and generosity of spirit disappear. This American is angry at jobs being shipped out of the US. He is angry with the immigrant who he believes is willing to work for less and is either stealing his job or keeping the wage low. And he is looking at minorities and coloured diversity as an unwelcome intrusion into his culture.

The past always looks pristine. The disgruntled American has nurtured an image of a golden period when things were hunky dory. Trump promised to take him back there. He told this American that if elites weren’t corrupt, they would put up trade barriers to retain blue-collar jobs at home. That if they weren’t divorced from his pain, they would keep immigrants out of local job markets. And if they cared about the security of Americans they wouldn’t allow Muslim migrants from badlands to settle in America making it more coloured and susceptible to terror.

When Trump’s words agonised Mexicans or Muslims or Blacks, he spoke to a constituency that mistakes political correctness for hypocrisy. This ‘native’ white constituency perceives the immigrant as a threat to its physical and economic security and culture. So Trump’s attacking immigrants and minorities was seen as candour. Political correctness is about hiding bias from plain view in everyday life, not erasing it altogether. When entrenched as a social value, it helps create a society where legal equality has a fighting chance in the absence of economic or social equality.

In times of insecurity and distress, political correctness is the first casualty. We saw that after 9/11. Subdued prejudices came to fore and intolerance grew. And we saw a similar expansion of intolerance this election season. Those who thought Trump’s encouragement of racism and intolerance would cost him the support of college educated Republicans were wrong. While this lot was embarrassed enough to disavow Trump and his conduct publicly, racism seen as political incorrectness was no deal breaker in the privacy of the polling booth.

Trump understood partisan politics better than Democrats and prominent Republicans who withdrew their support in face of Trump scandals. A month back mainstream media was projecting the possibility of Democrats winning the presidency and acquiring control of the Senate and Congress. Now we’ll have the executive and legislature controlled by the Republican Party, which isn’t Paul Ryan or John McCain’s party anymore. It is Trump’s party. So for a few years at least, there might be no effective institutional check on the Trump presidency.

So what does a Trump presidency mean? It could mean one of two things. We could find that the rabble-rousing, fear-mongering xenophobe on campaign trial was a shrewd tactician who did what he had to, to get the job. But as the ‘marketing’ phase is now over and he has the job, he will approach it with the sense of responsibility and restrain required to get it done. He will pursue ‘lite’ versions of the promised health care, trade and immigration reforms, sharpened societal divisions will slowly heal and intolerance will begin to recede with time.

But if President Trump and Candidate Trump are one and the same, his term will be a nightmare for the US and the world. The flow of people, goods and money across borders has a lot to do with technology that has made the world smaller and interdependent. Can a determined president reverse the hands of the clock? Can he defeat the logic of demand and supply? It is much easier to provoke anger by highlighting miseries and pointing fingers than to quell it by providing solutions. Will banning Mexicans really make blue-collar whites prosperous?

We are living in an age when ideology is dead. There is growing angst all across, sans grand systemic solutions. The Tea Party, Sanders ideologues, Brexit, ultra-nationalists in Europe and even Isis are all manifestations of this angst across continents, cultures and religions. The threat of use of the stick to bully or force other nations and societies to get in line with Trump’s diktat, as promised on the campaign trail, will further destabilise the world. Even irresponsible use of the bully pulpit by the US president could light up fires across the world.

Muslim majority states like Pakistan, fighting their own existential wars against extremism and terror, will be most vulnerable to a hate-mongering US presidency. Just as white blue collar Americans are being told by demagogues that their prosperity and culture are under threat from immigrants and Muslims, Muslims have been riled up by their right-wing demagogues against the US-led West for plotting and pursuing evil designs against Islam and Muslims. Let us hope that President Trump will not legitimise this narrative with his actions.

If he does, voices of rationalists within Muslim majority states and societies will be drowned out by radicals and extremists. Post-9/11 it took Pakistan many years to recognise that terror wasn’t a foreign-sponsored conspiracy, but the product of decades of bad policy choices made by us. Reduced US footprint in our neighbourhood finally created the needed space to initiate military ops in North Waziristan. Many of us still disclaim responsibility and agency and blame the US for forcing terror infrastructure upon us during the good Afghan Jihad of the 1980s.

The Middle East and Afghanistan are already struggling with the consequences of ill-conceived US wars post-9/11 that broke down existing governance structures (however flawed) and created vacuums filled by terror groups. While well-oiled institutions in the US and centuries of continuity make the US better placed to absorb the shock of a volatile and divisive US presidency, weak states in the Muslim world aren’t as lucky.

If President Trump chooses to frame the problem of terror as a conflict between Islam and the West, the world will be in deep trouble for a long time.

The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.

Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu