A Slap in Trump’s Face

The defeat of Roy Moore, the “candidate on horseback,” serves as a warning signal for the U.S. president and his fanatic ideologue, Steve Bannon.

The amazing defeat of Republican Roy Moore, the “candidate on horseback” who was running for a Senate seat against Democrat Doug Jones, serves as a loud warning for Donald Trump and his fanatic ideologue, Steve Bannon. Alabama has been the most overwhelmingly red state for over 20 years, the one where Trump annihilated Hillary Clinton with 70 percent of the votes. For the Republicans, having lost it means that the cloak of invincibility and inevitability, which the president has been donning since his victory, is now torn. As of last night, Emperor Donald I is naked.

Moore was the worst possible candidate for any election. He is a vulgar individual who was twice removed from his judgeship for violating the Constitution, a man who is pursued by allegations of having sexually abused even 14-year-old girls and had the gall to claim that families were more solid in times of slavery. In a less reactionary state, his candidacy would have been out of question.

However, this is exactly where Trump and his “consigliore” Bannon made a huge error in judgment. The president supported this unfit candidate by siding with him unhesitatingly in order to demonstrate how charismatic he is in an easy playing field like Alabama. This is the price he paid with his own narcissism, with the vanity of someone who thinks himself capable of turning any ass into a thoroughbred.

At a different time, this race would have brought no more than 25 percent of all voters to the polls. Trump, bursting into this strictly local election, lent national relevance to the result and created a resonance that now brings the future of the Republican majority in the Senate into question, a majority which is reduced to a single vote out of a hundred. The shadow of this outcome looms over the midterm elections in November 2018.

Therefore, unfit candidate Moore’s defeat is also Trump’s. It may be too soon for prophetic statements such as “the tide has turned,” but the slap Alabama inflicted on the president demonstrates that rational, young, educated, female, urban and ethnically diverse America did not die on November 2016. Trump and his grotesque candidate have awoken the “other America” from its slumber.