Donald Trump Is New US President: Angry America’s Victory

He started out as an outsider and had all the great centers of power pitted against him. However, he had the most important thing in his favor: the popular vote from the country that invented globalization and which then fearfully withdrew into its borders once it realized its effect. He was not the only winner in the American election. The other one lives in Moscow, and his name is Vladimir Putin.

Angry, insecure Americans who are disappointed with the elite chose a president whom they mistook for one of them: a billionaire with a quick tongue whose public morality is disputable. He is also averse to paying taxes, and is a liar, a xenophobe and a racist. Seventy-year-old Donald Trump will hold the briefcase containing the nuclear codes, along with the fate of the United States and a large part of the planet. He started out as an outsider opposed by all central institutions of power — finance, lobbies and mass media. However, he had the most important thing working in his favor: the popular vote from the country that invented globalization, and which then fearfully withdrew into its borders once it realized its effect.

He was chosen by an America that dreams of an impossible Arcadia, a “return to the future” of secure and sealed borders, isolation from a stormy and treacherous world, and the rhetoric of the home with a garden and a grill.

The comparisons to Brexit are all justified. There is even the stamp of the same backward utopia that the British pursued little more than four months ago.

Trump managed to come across as “new” with his candidacy ostensibly opposed to an establishment of pompous rites, that is growing more and more distant and enclosed in its shell, out of touch with the core of a nation that pulsates with resentment, anxiety and fear.

At any rate, he was perceived as newer than Hillary Clinton. Her long and much-discussed association with power made her the very embodiment of the hated leading class. It would be too easy to conclude that the United States was ready to have a black man as a president but not a woman. The truth is that eight years ago Barack Obama was the candidate of change. He was perfectly suited to overcome the unhappy Bush era that culminated with the wretched wars in the Middle East and the beginning of a severe recession. Hillary was, instead, simply the wrong candidate. Her nomination was the result of a dynastic succession and from a logic in which familial dynamics play a bigger role than party dynamics.

Even her indisputable professional competence turned into a boomerang once voters began to demand that the keys of power be taken away from those too accustomed to handling them. When the Democrats chose her, they did not realize that picking the former first lady and former secretary of state meant choosing the past. It did not carry with it the flavor of novelty, and symbolized the immutability of the ruling class.

To think that the party received a signal when a radical like Bernie Sanders unexpectedly showed resistance to Hillary during the primaries. After all, these are times of radicalism, sharp messages and clear-cut positions. Trump fully grasped today’s zeitgeist and bent it to a political plan that is disconcerting to the point of being a provocation — almost pushing the limit of what we’ve come to call civilization. What would it have taken to defeat him? An opponent capable of representing a break with the past, inspiring hope for younger generations that would encourage them to dream without exceeding the bounds of the rules that constitute progress.

Now it is up to Trump, the man of discord, to try to stitch back together the connective tissue of a nation torn and exhausted by a poisonous campaign. He is unlikely to succeed without shedding the skin he has worn up to this point, though this is only an internal issue; the rest is of far greater concern to us.

If he keeps the promises he made at his rallies, he will lead America toward a splendid isolation that could diminish its leading role in the world’s crisis, starting with the Middle East that is so close to us. In such a scenario, it would be Europe’s turn to handle the situation, despite us having demonstrated thus far that we are incapable of doing so. There would then be a vacuum waiting to be filled by a willing candidate. And then there is the other winner of America’s election. He lives in Moscow, and his name is Vladimir Putin.