By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ There are a lot of ways to look at Donald Trump’s stunning victory, and perhaps even more ways not to. Among the latter are to demonize Trump and stomp one’s feet about ‘populism’ and start calling every Trump-supporter a nazi or fascist. But beyond the inevitable sour grapes and name calling, there is one error that leaps off the charts: pretending that Trump’s win was some kind of capital offense against Democracy. Or that it was a fluke, an aberration, a miscarriage of what surely is right, good, and just.
In fact, Trump’s resounding win was democracy at its finest, and I will explain why. For months leading up to the election, I personally have witnessed a barrage of biased media overkill against Trump that has unabashedly violated any pretense of objectivity and professionalism. Make no mistake about it, this was not by any stretch of the imagination a rational and entirely defensible signature statement of traditional Liberalism, of which I was an enthusiastic participant for years and years. Instead, it was a ruthless smear campaign.
It was so bad that I started responding sharply with posts of my own, which wound up, I supposed, defending Trump. But the reason was not a passion for MAGA; it was that the Left Wing media: The New York Times, New York Daily, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, AOL, Huffington Post (the worst), The Atlantic – the list goes on and on – which simply refused to allow for fair play debate. They all followed the same agenda: defeat Trump at all costs. By any means.
That was not fair: what it was, was an agenda built around several highly selective narratives, mostly involving race, gender, and transgender issues. And the ‘community’ most responsible for creating this inflexible divide – which the American media bought into totally and sponsored nonstop – is what we call the WOKE.
For purposes of meeting publication standards, I hesitate to articulate my true feelings about the Woke, but I am entitled to give my opinion that this way of thinking does not promote the sense of real inclusion, idealism, and even love, that ever so briefly was true of the ‘60s. In fact, it is a rigid, doctrinaire culture bent on force-feeding its agenda on other people with no tolerance for dissent.
Even tenured faculty members with longstanding records of competence and good will to all have found themselves under threat of being fired if they refuse to knuckle under. Corporate employees who want to keep their jobs had better shut up. It is Putinism that Putin himself would find impressive. This is NOT democracy. The Woke invented ‘cancel culture’. It tries to intimidate people who challenge its premises, even if those people themselves are liberals through and through.
The American media, university campuses around America, and the Woke have become one and the same. Very strident, very much in the public eye, and very determined to condemn or frighten into silence anyone who disagrees with them, the feeling that began to emerge – as it was designed to – was that THIS was how most Americans felt. IN other words, most of America was Woke.
Not quite.
As President Biden fell apart in front of the world, these people knew they had to do something quick. For the sake of holding onto the vast amount of money that the Democratic Party had at its disposal, they nominated Harris. There was no competition, although in retrospect maybe there should have been. Kamala was the Vice President; therefore, as heir apparent and part-guardian of the Party’s treasure chest, she was thrust forward.
And then began – I swear I have never seen anything like it – this frantic airbrush campaign to turn Kamala Harris into Presidential timber. I watched the media tricks day after day after day. When you saw photos of Trump, he was made to look like a mass murderer. Harris was canonized. America’s Guardian. It was nothing less than a smear campaign against Trump and a trip to the Great Makeover Factory of a culture that invented the idea of ‘reinventing’ yourself. Almost overnight Kamala Harris was reworked and reconfigured from a mostly do-nothing Vice president with an unimpressive past (remember she was put on the ticket in the first place as part of a Let’s Make a Deal gambit between the Woke and the Democratic party regulars – Kamala on the ticket, ‘Progressive’ willingness to tolerate Biden) and, largely because of Covid, it worked.
But not this time. If Kamala had proved to be a larger than life superstar, maybe the outcome would have been different. If she had been Jackie Onassis or Tina Turner she might have won. But Kamala – and get this straight guys – it has NOTHING TO DO with her race or gender – the fact was that Kamala was not especially likable, and her ideas did not impress the American public. Therefore, in the end, despite all the build up and the ballyhoo, she lost. Overwhelmingly.
Get this straight. The American people who elected Trump – millions of them as it turned out – are not crazed fascists or racists nor enslavers of women. Ok, they may not be elite professors and well-versed sociologists, but they are not animalistic fools and brutes. The truck driver who runs his 18-wheeler thought the Kansas night is not a Nazi. Nor is the welder or plumber or bus driver or big crane operator who does his or her job day after day in all kinds of weather and just wants a fair deal from their employer and a reasonable insurance policy without being taxed death. I am not trying to romanticize these people as ‘honest proletariats’ or ‘noble savages’. They are nothing but ordinary people. But, as we found out, they have a hidden strength. Not loud. Just decisive.
What do they believe? Probably nothing too profound. They follow their mother’s and father’s example, and they still celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas and the 4th of July without liberal guilt. They are uncomfortable around gays, but tolerant, and they are patriotic but not fanatic about it. They care about their local sports teams. Rightly or wrongly, they still believe in God. Their real gods are their children..
These people are in fact just like people everywhere. At heart – and in general practice, worldview and behavior – they are not much different than a bunch of Germans, Czechs, Englishmen, or Italians – they just want to enjoy life. Nor are they – male and female, black and white, gay or straight – afraid of hard work and doing the next right thing.
These are the Americans who voted for Donald Trump. THESE people were the ones who, on Tuesday, reaffirmed Democracy – not by being fascists or slavering nationalist ‘populists’ but because they were strong enough to resist the snow job of the biased media, and the rest of it: the race-baiting, the fostering of antagonism between male and female, straight and gay. They responded to the proven basics of traditional living. Not reactionary or blind drunk shouting slogans and singing patriotic songs – and not inclined to go to rallies in support of Palestine or Rodney King – just people and their families who want to get on with it.
Trump saw that. Kamala didn’t. No knock on Kamala. She was out of her league. The next time, another, different woman, black or white, who understands the people of the nation and feels their pulse, will succeed. I wait for that moment. But for now, we have a democratically elected leader, and we ought to follow him. And give him the respect he deserves.
To fight back from defeat at an advanced age – a defeat he would surely have avoided without Covid – to survive two assassination attempts without missing a beat – this is a good guy. And also a Great Man – whether you want to admit it or not. Tonight I am happy for Donald Trump. I hope he will be successful in his dreams for America.
Finally, I would like to make the point that this victory for Trump was not a triumph of radical populism or rampant nationalism, with racism, sexism or xenophobia at its core; on the contrary, it was a rejection of the radical left, of Woke totalitarianism, and a statement from the mostly busy and silent majority that traditional values are NOT the values of exclusion and hate. One of these days, a great woman, black or white or otherwise, will come along, and she will get the same votes Trump got today.
