The Inevitability of Donald Trump

From the day he announced his candidacy to the day he became the presumptive Republican nominee, almost no one believed that Donald Trump could win the Republican primaries. Pundits did not imagine that there was any way that a man so unhinged and bombastic could take the helm of a major political party. Yet here we stand today, in the midst of a Clinton v Trump race, wondering where it all went wrong.

It’s hard not to feel like the whole world is going crazy at the moment. Between the rise of far-right parties across Europe, the historic Brexit vote in June, and now the success and nomination of Donald Trump, there is a noticeable rightward, nationalistic swing across the western world. There are many easy culprits that people have blamed: demagogues and racism. Anybody participating in these movements is immediately labeled a racist, and no further thought goes into it. To a certain extent, this is understandable. Many people have recorded the crowds at Trump rallies, and some of the things said there resemble things that might have been yelled during a Confederate Lynching Convention. That being said, there is a deeper foundation that this movement is built on that pundits rarely talk about. There is a large swath of America, and the western world in general, that feels like they are losing control of their lives.

Times have not been easy for inhabitants of industrial America over the last few decades. The inevitable push of globalization has pushed factories and jobs overseas, and no similar work has filled in that void. Though unemployment has generally gone down over time, it’s been replaced by underemployment and discouraged workers. Communities that were once filled with the hope of the American dream now fear that they have no way towards a more prosperous future. Then, as any Star Wars fan would know, fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hate. This hate generally has two targets: the ‘Washington elite’ that are perceived to be causing this whole mess in the first place, and many groups of minorities, who seem to be receiving undeserved preferential treatment from the aforementioned Washington elites.

Donald Trump knows this, and these themes are incessantly present in his speeches. See if you can recognize any of these:

• “We’re going to take down the political establishment”
• “We need to end this political correctness”
• “We’re going to build a wall to keep the illegals out”

All of these target the perceived threats that these disillusioned people face, whether it be big government, political correctness, or illegal immigrants. Donald Trump is not alone in this rhetoric; the Brexit campaign was largely run off of fear: the fear of the EU having too much control over British life, the fear that people weren’t going to be able to speak their minds for much longer, and the fear that immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan were going to come in and take over the country. This shows that Donald Trump is not necessarily as unique or unbelievable an individual as he may seem. He’s saying exactly the thing that people want to hear, and they’re eating it up. Who could blame them? When disillusioned liberals heard the hopeful message of Barack Obama in 2008, they rallied around him as well.

That being said, it is very clear that Donald Trump is just taking advantage of these voters. He is a millionaire born and bred, who has lived most of his life in New York City, a place which many of his voters despise. He recently changed his hardline view on immigration in order to get more voters, and has given money in the past to the Clinton Foundation, which he now vehemently opposes. On top of this, he is dangerously low in the polls for late August, and has less than a 25% chance of winning the presidency according to many news outlets. If he loses, though, his voters will still be there, and they will still be angry and afraid. This can seems scary. After all, who wants to have a large group of angry people making up a good portion of the country?

However, instead of a burden, this should be seen as an opportunity to deal with their problems with a method that differs from Trump’s. This deep anxiety doesn’t have to be stoked with an even deeper distrust of minorities and politicians. Instead, it can be met with consideration and concern for the issues that these people face. Rather than writing them all off as redneck racists, talk to them, and figure out what specific problems they feel the need to be solved. While some problems may boil down to, “These immigrants are coming in and taking our jobs”, others may be, “I feel that my community is progressively getting worse and nobody seems to care”. Create programs that help out people who lost their jobs to factories overseas, and give these people a greater chance to participate in their government. Make government more transparent, and community involvement easier to partake in. Once people feel they have control over their lives, they are much less likely to blame boogeymen for their problems, and that is better for everyone.