“Men will not look at things as they really are, but as they wish them to be–and are ruined”
Machiavelli: The Prince
“Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone. Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business, complicated. Thank you very much.” Said Donald Trump as he started his victory speech. Not exactly the most eloquent of men at the best of times, he was clearly overwhelmed by his victory. An emotion that surely grew as everyone finally grasped the sheer magnitude of his victory.
It seems that maybe, just maybe the United States America may have made a choice and thereby clearly spoken et el!
After all, lime most other people of the world, they too merely wanted to ‘make their nation great again’ and were over and done with the status quo, even as the pollsters and pundits had treated the very idea of his outright victory as a joke. A stance that was echoed by many players in the mainstream media who preferred to think of Trump voters in terms of genteel contempt, at best. In fact, few candidates in recent American history have been so vilified and pilloried as ‘The Donald’ has been. (as he is called by his followers).
From misogyny to xenophobia it did not matter how unsavory the accusations were, as far as Trump was concerned they were all gist to the media mill. The very idea that he would become the 45th president of the United States of America was considered sheer anathema by many segments of the free press as well as large parts of American society, so much so that protests erupted all over the nation once his victory was announced and they continue even as these words are being written.
Nevertheless, Trump emerged triumphant after arguably one of the most divisive electoral campaigns in history. But beating the odds by charging though them like the proverbial bull attacking a red flag is a standard Trump maneuver as can be evinced by even a cursory perusal of his life.
There are many questions in the media regarding his contempt for foreigners.
However, if anyone has watched a few episodes of the NBC hit “Apprentice” they would understand that many contestants and prospective employees were from racially different back grounds such as Mexicans, African Americans, and the like.
Donald Trump is against ‘illegal emigrants’ per se, not legal residents and actual American citizens irrespective of their race. This slight fact seems to have been glossed over by the mainstream media.
Similarly, referring to the Hitler analogy earlier, many people seemed to have made a ‘connection’ between the infamous Nazi dictator and the Donald. Alluding to his respect for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin (Who seems to have acquired an expansionist tendency of gobbling up territories around the Russian border) as well as his anti-foreigner stance, while some people have even taken his Teutonic roots as ‘proof positive’ of his true intentions. But here again, even a cursory examination of the facts would serve to be quite an eye opener. Hitler was obsessed with the concept of ‘Lebensraum’ or greater land for people of Germanic origin; it was this single purpose foreign policy goal that led to the most terrible war in human history.
Herein lies the fundamental difference between the two. Trump does not desire war with his neighbors nor does he intend to grab their land. On the contrary, he intends to keep his southern neighbors ‘out’ of his country by making a wall all across the border. Besides, Hitler was a hard-core ideologue, while Trump on the other hand is a well-established business man who has time and again reiterated that ‘war is bad for business’ Therefore classifying him as some sort of modern day Hitler who would unleash world war III seems superficial, at best. (End of Part-I)