CONNECTIONS October 2016 issue 17 The Presidency

CONNECTIONS Issue # 17
now disengages from the world, who knows
what will storm through the breach?
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The sense that old certainties are crumbling
has rocked America’s allies. The fear that
globalisation has fallen flat has whipsawed
markets. Although post-Brexit Britons know
what that feels like, the referendum in
Britain will be eclipsed by consequences of
this election. Mr Trump’s victory has
demolished a consensus. The question now
is what takes its place.
Trump towers
Start with the observation that America has
voted not for a change of party so much as
a change of regime. Mr Trump was carried
to office on a tide of popular rage
(see article). This is powered partly by the
fact that ordinary Americans have not
shared in their country’s prosperity. In real
terms median male earnings are still lower
than they were in the 1970s. In the past 50
years, barring the expansion of the 1990s,
middle-ranking households have taken
longer to claw back lost income with each
recession. Social mobility is too low to hold
out the promise of something better. The
resulting loss of self-respect is not
neutralised by a few quarters of rising
wages.
Anger has sown hatred in America. Feeling
themselves victims of an unfair economic
system, ordinary Americans blame the
elites in Washington for being too spineless
and too stupid to stand up to foreigners and
big business; or, worse, they believe that
the elites themselves are part of the
conspiracy. They repudiate the media—
including this newspaper—for being
patronising, partisan and as out of touch
and elitist as the politicians. Many workingclass
white voters feel threatened by
economic and demographic decline. Some
of them think racial minorities are bought off
by the Democratic machine. Rural
Americans detest the socially liberal values
that urban compatriots foist upon them by
supposedly manipulating the machinery in
Washington (see article). Republicans have
behaved as if working with Democrats is
treachery.
Mr Trump harnessed this popular anger
brilliantly. Those who could not bring
themselves to vote for him may wonder
how half of their compatriots were willing to
overlook his treatment of women, his
pandering to xenophobes and his rank
disregard for the facts. There is no reason
to conclude that all Trump voters approve
of his behaviour. For some of them, his
flaws are insignificant next to the One Big
Truth: that America needs fixing. For others
the willingness to break taboos was proof
that he is an outsider. As commentators
have put it, his voters took Mr Trump
seriously but not literally, even as his critics
took him literally but not seriously. The
hapless Hillary Clinton might have won the
popular vote, but she stood for everything
angry voters despise.
The hope is that this election will prove
cathartic. Perhaps, in office, Mr Trump will
be pragmatic and magnanimous—as he
was in his acceptance speech. Perhaps he
will be King Donald, a figurehead and
tweeter-in-chief who presides over an
executive vice-president and a cabinet of
competent, reasonable people. When he
decides against building a wall against
Mexico after all or concludes that a trade
war with China is not a wise idea, his voters
may not mind too much—because they only
expected him to make them feel proud and
to put conservative justices in the Supreme
Court. Indeed, you can just about imagine a
future in which extra infrastructure
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