by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
Going over the social media networks, my eyes got stuck at a news video from Massachusetts in the USA, the home for a slew of world-famous universities and regarded as one of the cradles of the country"s culture. The video shows a procession of SUVs snaking through the road with the Republican Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump"s pictures mounted on the top of their cars.
They screamed: "We"re gonna burn every bloody• ..." I thought it was nothing but a digital trick. After all, hasn"t the Republican Party repeatedly said that they are not racists and all that they want is "to make America great again"? But, going over the 2016 campaign, and the unexpected turn that the Trump lobby has given to it to outgun the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the candidate with the best handicap, I had little doubt that the rules of the game of politics have changed beyond recognition.
It may be difficult, if not impossible, to de-link democratic arguments from hateful rants and unashamed bigotry. In the election season, Trump has shown that anything goes -- be it the charge that Barack Obama"s birth certificate was faked to hide his allegedly African origin, the IS being a creation of Democratic President Barack Obama, the Clintons having criminal history, donors to Clinton Foundation having terrorist links, chief of Federal Reserve Janet Yellen being in cahoots with the Obama administration for keeping the interest rates low so that the market doesn"t collapse during his tenure, and of course if he can occupy White House there won"t be a single Muslim allowed to enter the US.
The trouble with Trump is, he is given to spinning and so it is difficult to pin him down on anything he said previously. It was since 2011 that he kept relentlessly pointing finger at President Obama"s nationality issue, doubting if he was really born in Hawaii, or in Kenya, his father"s country of birth. But as soon as Obama made public his birth certificate last week, testifying to his spotless American nationality, Trump was ready with another delusional rant that he had been misled by none other than Hillary Clinton and her campaign"s "misrepresentation" of Obama"s nationality during the Democratic Party"s presidential nominee election in 2007. Obama and Clinton were the top contenders during the 2007 Presidential campiagn.
To Yellen too, he was now-on now-off, having changed his views earlier this year on her "dovish" monetary policy and praising it for being pro-business. But he has now turned 180 degrees and is condemning Yellen again for acting as a "stooge" of the ruling dispensation. Trump does not admit that he is a "white supremacist" but his rallies are marked by scenes similar to the video described in the beginning of this article. Trump claims to be a committed "nationalist" and is all praise for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, for his supposed nationalism. The billionaire businessman has made sensitive commentators coin a new phrase, Alt-Right – thanks to his low tastes and insensitivity.
It means an alternative variety of conservatism that treats liberal conservatives as chicken-hearted. And if given a chance, they"d resurrect the Ku Klux Klan. With Trump"s progress, the Alt-Right has swamped the social media networks. Clinton has understood the threat to the protected culture of the Ring Road that surrounds Washington DC (much like our own Lutyen"s Delhi) which is emerging from Trump"s wild and nativist supporters. They are almost all white, generally male, and mostly never went to college. At heart, they"re not residents of a cultural cocoon; they are blissfully disconnected from all the ideas of a modern nation state that have evolved over the past two hundred years. Trump"s is not the Republican Party that we know. It is not even a political entity.
It is just a tsunami of paranoid abuses which, as Clinton observed, has found in Trump a "public megaphone". Till recently, Clinton was so far ahead in the race that the gap seemed unbridgeable. But, with a little seven weeks to go for the election, the gap is closing. Last week, in two swing states, Ohio and Florida, not only was the race tight but Trump seemed leading. It is worrisome for America"s elite society controlling the Ring Road.
Though Clinton is supported by all those who have a stake in globalised post-Cold War America, she seems to lack in the dragon spirit of Obama. In his 2008 election, Obama did mobilize everyone opposed to his predecessor George W. Bush"s militaristic values.
So far Clinton has targeted Trump personally, saying that half his supporters are "deplorables". But unlike Obama"s famous "Yes, I can", she fails to enthuse voters, white and black and brown. She recently had a bout of pneumonia, which gave Trump an opportunity to doubt her physical ability to strand up to the campaign, not to speak of the job.
Will the outcome of the November poll impact on India? Sure it will. A big chunk of I o Will the outcome of the November poll impact on India? Sure it will. A big chunk of Indian Americans has made large donations to the Trump poll kitty and a few considered close to the saffron family have been offering prayers in temples. They want Trump"s victory because he is an Islamophobe, like what they too are.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi must be a worried man now. Unlike Obama, Trump is neither the
type to encourage strangers to address him by first name, nor is he merely Islamophobic. He is prejudiced towards foreigners and other faiths. This is a dreadful fact that may alter the general order of a US-centric world in 2017.
The author is National Editor, Lokmat group
