Why we deserve Donald Trump

Donald John Trump, the current and 45th President of the United Sates of America, is the man Americans chose. Over Hillary Rodham Clinton, over all propaganda and supposedly over their good sense and judgement. But is it really that obvious? That simply stupid?
A point of view below.

The recently concluded reality show that was America’s presidential elections left a lot of mouths open in its finale. A lot of opinion hustlers were gobsmacked. A whole lot of tweeters were groping for a few handful of characters, forget about 140. And an entire American nation, not to mention those that are American in their hearts, minds, accents and emotions even if not in their passports, was silenced into a comatose pindrop.

They did not ask for this. They did not expect this. Reality shows were supposed to be scripted right down to a punctuation mark and played out with a pretended and pretentious mimicry of naturality. Not this one. This one was really real — with the last second hairpin turn that life is known for.

In its aftermath, a whole lot of editorial column space, digital gigabytes and opinion platform real estate have been and will be spent in rants as well as reconciliation. Some will try to make sense and peace, many will shiver in indignation. Denial comes in many avatars — disbelief, vitriolic expressions of wrath and disappointment, wilful throttling of the obvious and most so, a staunch refusal to acknowledge ‘what is’ because ‘what could have been’ is still sweeter and numbingly comforting. Hope after all is still preferred over grim reality.

But the idea of Trump has been authored by the very people who hate him. The ascension itself of Trump, his victory and his crowning, is a very misleading picture. It is fogging the glass when it comes to really understanding what happened. Trump’s win is an event and like every event, it is frozen — in time and in this case, in history. But we mustn’t focus on the event, except opine on it ex post. The real lens to look through is the path to his win — which is a process. And like every process, it is elastic, instructive (if we want it to be) and definitely revealing of the deeper nature of developments. The path to Trump’s win is paved with the miseries and inequities of the statistical American. The white man who got shafted and has been continuously getting shafted, caught without respite between the grinding wheels of an alien development on one hand and the non stop incremental progress of the privileged few on the other. The solid, comforting and familiar rug of manufacturing, tangible realities and good old middle class Americana was pulled rudely and irredeemably from under his feet; never to come back again despite promises and campaigns and TV ads.
Who is this statistical American? And how can he be so powerful and prevailing that he can thwart, in fact blindside, the most sophisticated and experienced political machinations of a seasoned, grizzly mama bear like Hillary? What powers and intelligence, what inside knowledge and finesse does he have, what aces has he hidden up his sleeves to devise such an upset? To fully understand the statistical American, we need only look as far as the statistical Indian. There is no difference. They are united in their marginalisation, their confusingly furious pace of regression and their deep and accumulating disdain for the ‘establishment’ — that demi mythical monolith of an adversary that remains unassailable till the time the time comes for its demise. The statistical American doesn’t have any insider dope, he has his public humiliation. The statistical American doesn’t have any ace up his sleeve to throw down strategically, he has misery and fury tumbling out in gushing impatience. And most importantly, the statistical American has the freedom to act (which his Indian equivalent is still finding out). And so he acted on November 08, 2016 across the belly of middle America. He acted not by defeating Hillary but by helping Trump climb over the gigantic stockpile of resentment, that was his cross alone all the while, to tower over Hillary. That she was a woman also helped the matter. An unfortunate but real byproduct of senseless fury is the atrophy of logic and the statistical American cannot be blamed for not coolly evaluating various options and future projections while keeping biases, history, personal degeneration and palpably crushing humiliation aside.
To put it very simply, the statistical American chose his way out of his misery. We are all surprised because we never thought, even entertained the wild possibility, that he could.
But the real lesson is not for the statistical American but the smug, universal Indian. Us, that is. We are suddenly discovering the concept of ‘establishment’. We are suddenly discovering the horror of being on the other side of a country with companies like Infosys and TCS. Suddenly wondering whether the forgotten middle class, middle America was indeed not only recognised and acknowledged but also superbly played by a man who we were all this while very busy mocking through smart catch phrases and aggressive hash tags like #ImWithHer. Well we can be ‘with her’ and now, together with her, we are all sucking egg. An orange, bigoted and rather depressingly despicable egg maybe but an egg that has claimed to rise from the mud under the boots of the ‘establishment’ and aimed the message and the hope of that rise at the patched up, struggling and restricted hearts of the great American unwashed. Every time a quip was birthed, a joke was cracked, a witty hash tag or acidic post was put up Trump won another disillusioned, disgruntled and completely head washed follower — not on fucking Twitter but all the way to the White House. The confident cynicism of the upper middle class, its intellectual arrogance and closed door, coterie politics was the vehicle that safely delivered Trump to the Presidency.

Trump is no more a vile man than we are all blind men and women. If anything, we are all Dorian Grays and Trump is our mirror. That is no longer hidden anymore.