Last Wednesday, the 'GMT' part of the world woke up to the news that the President-elect of the U.S.A. is Mr. Donald Trump, in direct contrast to what the polls (and all the world, really) predicted and expected. Since then, there has been uproar in the media everywhere: protests in the States, posts on Facebook predicting the end of the world, doom and gloom all over the place. And Trump is not even in the Oval Office yet.
I still cannot really understand why all this fuss. Elections in the democratic world are held all the time, certainly every 5 years in most countries (or 4 in the case of the U.S.A.) and, like every other competition, there is a winner and a loser. Some, generally close to or just above 50% of the people, "win", and the rest "lose". Why are people protesting now that Trump and not Clinton won? Is it not the whole idea of the democratic process that election results are to be respected? Or is it now the case that when a result does not match the popular expectation, the result is null or will not be accepted? After all, voting is done by the people and for the people. The people get what they choose and what they want. Otherwise, it is the whole way of exercising democracy that needs to be revised, and not only these isolated cases of when people 'do not like' a result.
The same was with the Brexit vote a few months ago - the predictions were that the "Stay" will win, and so did I hope and vote for, too, but the results proved that Mr. Cameron's bluff to hold a referendum had been called by the British and now Brexit is on the cards. From my point of view, the Brexit result truly saddened me, more than anything else. I have been a voter in Malta and the U.K. for a number of years and sometimes I "won" and sometimes "lost". But never was I really sad whenever I lost, except now in the Brexit vote. But this is not about Brexit here...so back to Trump I shall go.
Trump won because the people voted for him. There is widespread talk that those who voted for Trump were the uneducated and the like, which is ironic since such an idea is generating a sort of elitist division between the educated (the infamous "Establishment" being talked about?) and the not. Democracy was born in Ancient Greece, where the right to vote was somewhat exclusive to the learned - in that case, the philosophers - and this was believed to guarantee that the 'best' choice would be made on who would then lead the demos, the people. Society has come a long way since then and voting rights have been extended to everyone, irrespective of wealth, education and gender (and rightly so). This could have worked when political propaganda was limited to sensible debates, the spoken word, genuine manifestos, ideological principles of Left, Right and all in between and so on and so forth. However, it seems that this is no longer working in our age, where debates are mere shows, great speeches have been reduced to Tweets, what a person or party stands for is heavily diluted and often skewed by personal opinions in the social media and the concept of ideology is completely gone. I think that the whole notion of democracy or at least how it is exercised needs serious revision. How? I obviously do not know. Or actually, the desiderata in the mind of the 21st century citizen would be a government per person. Individualism is the religion of the day. I, me and myself. Or a number of parallel governments to which one can belong and not to the other. How is this allegiance maintained and not switch daily from one government to another? I don't know, either. Perhaps I am talking gibberish, given I am sick.
What struck me the most in this whole Trump issue was that during the campaign and prior to the election results, virtually everyone was anti Trump: leaders, Prime Ministers and the like. Now, these very same people and sending messages of congratulations and wishes of collaboration with the new President. I never witnessed such hypocrisy before and this was very disappointing although in a way I was not surprised at all, for I had commented about this on Facebook back on 28th September. I am more looking forward to see meetings between world leaders and Trump than to see Trump himself.
One final word on Trump: I believe he is, in essence, a showman and all of the 'nasty' speeches prior to the election were simply propagandist in nature and served only to attract an audience and 'captivate' people, which he did. Trump the candidate and Trump the President will surely, and hopefully, be two different people and my take is that we will not be witnessing any new Great Walls being built nor mass deportations. I am sure, though, that these coming 4 years will have their fair share of gaffes, quips and diplomatic manoeuvres characterised by comicality.
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