Benumbed. Blitzed. Bewildered. Confounded. Devastated. Discomb-obulated. Disconcerted. Disconsolate. Discomposed. Dismayed. Disoriented. Distraught. Dumbfounded. Outraged. Nonplussed. Poleaxed. Shellacked. Shell-shocked.
No, I have not been looking up the Thesaurus nor playing word games. I had asked some friends, expatriate Nigerians and Nigerians “on ground,” to indicate in just one word how they felt when it dawned on them that Donald Trump was about to be proclaimed president-elect of the United States.
The foregoing is a selection from their responses.
Full marks, again, to the percipient lady of the house. She had seen it coming, right from the debates that preceded the Iowa caucus. As they unfolded, the primaries merely confirmed her premonition. In vain did I point out that bluster and humbug and vulgar abuse might move a lot of people to line up behind Trump, but would not be enough propel him to the nomination.
By mid-May, Trump had won more than enough delegates to clinch the GOP ticket.
Okay, winning the nomination is one thing. Winning the presidential election is a different game altogether, whether Trump’s opponent was Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. Trump had come to the end of the road, I assured the lady of the house.
But the surging crowds at Trump’s rallies, the enthusiasm with which they embraced even his most outlandish pronouncements as if they flowed from Holy Writ, the way he worked them up to denounce with greater vehemence every person, idea, programme, policy or institution he denounced, convinced her that she had it right.
Just wait until they have their first televised debate, I told the lady of the house. Trump will be shown up as the empty suit he is, totally unfit to be president of the United States. And that was precisely what happened in their first one-on-one debate. In manner, speech, comportment and deportment, he looked anything but presidential.
After that debate, Clinton overtook Trump for the first time in virtually every poll.
“I told you so,” I teased the lady of the house, my mojo restored. “In a one-on-one debate, Hillary Clinton will put Trump in his place any day.”
Still, she was not impressed. Her instincts told her Trump would prevail, even without those treacherous emails that dogged Hillary Clinton’s every step. At that point, I thought I should invoke the authority of my professional calling to settle the matter.
“Political journalism is my line of business,” I told the lady of the house portentously, as if she did not know it or had forgotten. “If Trump wins, never trust me again.”
It was when Trump won that I realized I had made an exorbitant wager, rendered all the more reckless by its open-endedness. “Never trust me again,” period, I had said, instead of “Never trust my political judgment again.”
I hope I can still walk it back.
On the eve of the election, the most credible polls had Trump trailing by several percentage points. Nate Silver, the statistics wizard who had predicted with stunning precision Barack Obama’s victories in the 2008 and 2012 elections and the attendant distribution of seats in the United States Congress, scored the odds 76/33 Clinton.
The New York Times revised downwards its forecast from 91/9 Clinton to 81/17 Clinton after FBI director James Comey mischievously reopened investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as U.S. Secretary of State.
That was the point at which Hillary Clinton’s sizeable lead, which had spiked when tapes of Trump spouting demented “locker room” talk about women surfaced and one woman after another came out to report how he had groped, fondled and grabbed them by unmentionable parts of their anatomy — it was at this point that Hillary Clinton’s lead began to shrink.
The race tightened, but not to the point that anyone could with confidence tip Trump to win. Hillary Clinton still held a clear but not insurmountable lead.
A few polls, it is true, had Trump winning. But even the director of one such poll, a professor at Emory University, rejected his own findings as wildly implausible and scored the race for Hillary Clinton. Other polls predicting a Trump win were dismissed as unreliable.
In the event, Hillary Clinton won the popular ballot by some 250 000 votes. But Trump prevailed in the Electoral College, the platform that really counts in the election of president of the United States.
The same Donald Trump whom Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in the 2012 had described as a “a fraud” and “a phoney” who would drive the United States to the point of collapse, will soon have his finger on the nuclear trigger.
“He’s playing the American public for suckers.” Romney said of Trump.
As Romney saw it, Trump had neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. “Dishonesty,” he said, is Trump’s hallmark.
The same Trump who elevated bigotry, xenophobia, demagoguery and misogyny to cardinal virtues. The same Trump who had not paid federal income tax in 18 years, who ran a bogus university that issued worthless diplomas upon upfront payment of fees it would be courteous to call unconscionable. The same Trump who waltzed unscratched through a trail of bankruptcies even as his partners and shareholders faced certain ruin. The same Trump who regularly stiffed his workers.
The same Trump who built his gaudy hotel towers with cheap imports from China as the domestic steel industry languished in terminal illness, and with even cheaper labour from Mexico and Poland, the minimum wage be damned. Even his signature “Make America Great Again” cap was made in China.
The same Trump who . . . But why belabor the point?
The conventional wisdom was that a man with such a political baggage and a threadbare résumé of public service to boot had no business seeking the presidency of the United States and that a critical mass of Americans who believe that decency and integrity and trustworthiness and the values that undergird America’s claim to exceptionalism would see through the bluster and the bombast and mendacity and the megalomania and send him back to the world of Reality TV for which his talents are best suited.
I allied myself with that wisdom, which must now go down as one of the most egregious political misjudgments of this or any era. That a great many among the best authorities made the same misjudgment is of course no exculpation.
Even Trump’s camp was bracing itself for the worst. The mood there was gloomy, saturnine. The campaign was over.
The frenzied crowds had returned to their domains, leaving Trump and his inner circle to contemplate not just the possibility but the imminent certainty of loss, of Trump figuring as just another loser in a long line of those he always took great delight in dismissing as losers.
Trump will now have to do on the American landscape what he was never able to do to his rickety business empire: Turn America from the doomed dystopia he painted in campaign stop after campaign stop and tweet after tweet into a glittering utopia.
He is already learning that you don’t shoot first and aim later. Having now found that the Affordable Health Care Act, the so-called Obamacare, is not the devil’s blueprint, he is saying he will retain two of its most revolutionary provisions: the one that keeps children covered by their parent’s health insurance at no extra cost until they reach age 26, and the one prohibiting denial of coverage to persons with pre-existing conditions.
However, expect no sobriety from the GOP.
Basking in triumphalism, it is frantically looking for ways of eviscerating Obama’s legacy without troublesome recourse to established procedure. It says it has found a way of getting rid of Obamacare through some chink in the Budget process
Expect more shortcuts, and more in-your-face usurpations.
The lady of the house had it right. She had worked in some mean establishments and interacted with a great deal of mainstream Americans across the Midwest. From those interactions she had gained the insights that helped her make the right call, unlike the man of the house who had been cloistered in the Ivory Tower and had interacted for the most part with its denizens.
