The Detroit car repair shop owner shook his head impatiently at the British TV reporter, who’d just asked him, almost incredulously, how America could have elected “a man like Trump” as its 47th president.
“You guys over there in England just don’t get it. Sure, we know Trump is a jerk. I knew Trump was a jerk when I voted for him yesterday. But he’s OUR jerk. And even jerks can get things done. I’m something of a jerk myself. But I run a great little business here in Detroit.”
As a neat encapsulation of what’s just happened in the US, that random vox pop – a street interview with the common people – is hard to beat.
Trump won because he convinced America he could DO things. Kamala Harris lost because she saw the race to the White House as a popularity contest.Yes, most voters preferred her on a personal level. She’s decent, upbeat, and (provided you overlook that infuriating, endless laugh) likeable.
Donald is a lying, vain, boastful, narcissistic, misogynist. Yet even though this is a man who was caught on tape boasting of “grabbing women by the p****”, women voted for him in their millions. He also made a shameless racist attack on Harris during the campaign, questioning her ethnic self-identity. Yet people of colour voted for him in their millions.
He’s a convicted felon – the first such disgraced person ever to be elected president. Yet law-abiding, law-respecting, upright citizens voted for him in their millions.
Americans are nothing if not pragmatic. They looked at Harris, they listened to her, and all they saw and heard were vague slogans and unfocused promises. Trump told them he’d fix things. Inflation. Wars. Illegal immigration.
Derided abroad for his MAGA slogan (Make America Great Again), many here failed to grasp that simple patriotic sentiment plays incredibly well in the US. It was catnip to a huge swathe of the electorate.
Harris made the terrible mistake of believing that celebrity endorsement could form a central plank of her campaign. She and her team couldn’t see that voters HATE being told what to think by multi-millionaires with egos to match their bank balances.
Sure, they’ll listen to their songs and watch their movies. But they simply refuse to be patronised by them.
Hey-ho. Fasten your seatbelts. We’re in for a bumpy four years.
