Trump wins: Americans don’t know what’s coming

Alameen Templeton
Americans don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for by voting Donald Trump as 47th president of the United States, but he’ll be showing them soon when he unveils hundreds of actions and laws he’s prepared for his White House return.
Associated Press reports Wednesday: “When he arrived in Washington 2017, Trump knew little about the levers of federal power. His agenda was stymied by Congress and the courts, as well as senior staff members who took it upon themselves to serve as guardrails.
Nation in the dark
“This time, Trump has said he would surround himself with loyalists who will enact his agenda, no questions asked, and who will arrive with hundreds of draft executive orders, legislative proposals and in-depth policy papers in hand.”
No one outside Trump’s close, inner circle know what those policies and papers are and Trump has also kept Americans in the dark too about them, although he had plenty of time to lay them on the table in months of manic electioneering that veered from the absurd, to the comic, to the downright depraved.
The election race went down to the wire with Kamala Harris’s Democrats breathing down Trump’s neck into the final straight. Trump got over the line finally with a win in swing state Wisconsin after taking Michigan, home to America’s biggest Muslim population.
Most Muslim-Americans chose to vote for independent Green candidate Jill Stein rather than Trump or Harris as neither Red or Blue candidate was willing to call out the Gaza genocide. Stein’s support was seen as bleeding votes away from Harris and, in effect, supporting Trump, an open racist and Islamophobe.
Worst, worster or worstest?
But Harris was seen as a turncoat, a pimp, a sellout. Trump, for all his eccentricities and absurd lies, was seen as more reliable and truthful than Harris’s “yes, but” approach to the Gaza genocide. Still, most Muslim-Americans couldn’t stomach voting to an open racist like Trump; hence, the support for Stein.
Associated Press said Trump’s victory was “an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the US Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts”.
His win in Wisconsin cleared the 270 electoral votes Trump needed to clinch the presidency.
AP says Trump’s “victory validates his bare-knuckle approach to politics”. Outsiders might say his appeal is a major indictment of the American political system and American voters in general.
Demagoguery has become the standing order of the day in the American political process, where outrage and personal insult have become more persuasive than clear policies and moral leadership. Undercurrent of violent racism
America’s plunging global standing and Trump will find himself facing a very different world compared to the vista that faced him in 2016 when he started his first stint as Potus – president of the United States.
AP says Trump “attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal – often misogynistic and racist – terms as he pushed an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The coarse rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters – particularly men – in a deeply polarized nation.”
While that may speak to to a deep undercurrent of violent racism that has always cut a path through American politics, but it is unlikely to appeal to the rest of the world.
Trump has vowed to pursue an agenda centered on dramatically reshaping the federal government and pursuing retribution against his enemies, real or imagined.
Trump in his victory speech claimed he’d won “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
But he will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on January 20, including heightened political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.
Gaza won’t ‘go away’
Chief among these is the Gaza genocide. Trump has told Israel he wants the Gaza campaign “finished” by the time he takes office, but it will take more than wishful thinking to solve the crisis that has spread in violent profusion into Lebanon and is threatening the entire Arabian region.
He’s promised to end the Ukrainian conflict “in a day” – Republicans see it as “Biden’s war” and bemoan that profligate weapons aid America now finds itself to maintain in a vain bid to “weaken Russia”.
Iran and China will probably remain on his radar, but how he approaches those two, self-inflicted crises remains to be seen.
America’s ballooning federal debt of about $35trillion will be weighing on him, with interests payments set to outstrip America’s defence spending in the near future.
Despite Trump’s open misogyny, his win is his second against a female opponent following his drubbing of Hillary Clinton in 2015.
Harris took over a Democrat candidate after it turned out she and the coterie surrounding the Oval Office had been lying all along – Biden was cruelly exposed as doddering and feeble, unable to express himself or to juggle more than one idea at a time in the first presidential debate.
Jailbird in the Oval Office
Harris “struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration”, AP says.
Trump is the first former president to return to power since Grover Cleveland in 1892. He is the first person convicted of a felony to be elected and, at 78, is the oldest person elected to the Oval Office.
His advancing years have many of his supporters privately worried he may be even more feeble than Biden, come 2028.
Trump has plans to swiftly enact a sweeping agenda transform nearly every aspect of American government and Republican majorities in Congress and the Senate means he has a clear floor to do as he pleases. Federal courts are now filled with judges he appointed; the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, has already issued a ruling affording presidents immunity from prosecution.
Trump’s language and behavior has sparked growing warnings about shocks to democracy that his return to power will bring. “Trump has repeatedly praised strongman leaders, warned that he would deploy the military to target political opponents he labeled the ‘enemy from within’, threatened to take action against news organizations for unfavorable coverage and suggested suspending the Constitution,” AP notes.
Dire warnings
Some of his closest aides during his first presidency have refused to endorse him second time around. These include former Vice President Mike Pence and John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff. They have issued dire warnings about Trump’s return to the power.
“In 2016, I declared I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he said in March 2023.
His campaign often veered into the absurd, with Trump amplifying rumors that migrants were stealing and eating pet cats and dogs in Ohio.
“As he prepares to return to the White House, Trump has vowed to swiftly enact a radical agenda that would transform nearly every aspect of American government.
“That includes plans to launch the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, to use the Justice Department to punish his enemies, to dramatically expand the use of tariffs and to again pursue a zero-sum approach to foreign policy that threatens to upend longstanding foreign alliances, including the NATO pact,” AP says.