Trump’s Ideology

Let’s talk about The Donald.

The latest US President (who knows which one) is not a new phenomenon — not really — but the end product of a people being told they can have everything they want, but in the same breath being told to exercise humility, restraint, and obedience.

People in the US are being force-fed the American Dream rhetoric, but none of it is being realised. Trump speaks to the aspiration of the American who missed out on their chance in the eighties, the American who had a job with prospects and now has no job and no prospects, and the American who has the wrong number of children (read into that whatever you will).

We could look at the 2016 Presidential Election through an electoral lens: scour every state for the latest data and the most insightful statistics — but that’s been done to within an inch of its life. Why? Because it has caused such an upset. The plan to create what would have been the Second American Dynasty after the Bushes — The Clintons — was scuppered by a billionaire who has been bankrupt seven times, wears ill-fitted suits, and has become stronger with every political gaff that would have leveled and buried most other politicians of far greater calibre.

Donald Trump fought the election on ideology. The ideology — whether you agree with it or not — of the American Dream. Trump embodied it. He still does even as president. The ideology goes beyond the Dream itself, too, to the core of American values that many Americans believe to have been lost. The value of freedom of speech, for example, has been shown by Trump in his references to Muslims, Mexicans, and the disabled; gun ownership debate has been truly taken off the table under Trump; and US non-intervention (particularly with regards to the Middle East and Russia) smacks of a USA in the inter-war period. The point is, Donald Trump sweats ideology, but doesn’t necessarily act through it — that’s what makes him dangerous.

Ideology is the trend sweeping the globe — and it is not forced, but it is organic. That’s why Bernie Sanders would have won, folks. Not because he had a mass-movement behind him in a way only Jeremy Corbyn can match, not because the DNC hacked their own voting system in order to maintain a strong political centre, and certainly not because Bernie was raising enough money in donations (averaging at around $36 each) to take on Clinton and the Republicans…

No — Bernie would have won, because he too had an ideology.