Taking Donald Trump to have set a goal of winning the presidency, his actions can be explained by rationalism. The narrow margin by which Donald Trump won against a disgraced, unrelatable candidate lends credibility to the theory that Donald Trump executed a well thought-out plan in order to ‘steal’ the presidency. One must ask themselves if there is conceivably another path to the presidency aside from that undertaken by Trump. On the Republican side, there were 16 other candidates, each of whom had a higher chance of winning than Trump. Each represent a strategy that Trump could have taken and lost with. One prime example is John Kasich who certainly had the experience and temperament to be President. Such a strategy would have failed. Now consider the general election. Trump did not have traditional supporters such that it is quite inexplicable and unprecedented what he achieved. And that he won on such narrow terms, losing the popular vote in fact, suggests that any less rancour could have lost him the presidency.
The only thing that is more surprising than Donald Trump’s rise to the top is the continued uproar from intelligent people, many who turned into writers on the topic. To begin, notice that the markets which has been widely afraid of the Trump presidency has effectively given him a pass. That a motion passed by the poor and uneducated could line the pockets of the capitalists is rare. So we begin Trump’s presidential days with a highly positive result. I remind you that Donald Trump has consistently been underestimated; now he is being underestimated as a leader. To believe that someone who was able to win the election of the United States is incompetent is more a statement against democracy than is against the man. Every indication so far since his election has been positive and supports the theory that Trump will be a reasonable president.
Now we must discuss briefly the major issue of most intellectuals with Trump: his apparent racism and his apparent sexism. Part of the discussion here needs to be in the context of the first paragraph - whether Trump could have been elected on a different platform. The other part, which I will easily concede, is that it is unacceptable to be sexist or racist. If Trump introduces racist or sexist policies, which he will not, his presidency will be quickly invalidated. I will quickly write a blog post condemning such policies. To be clear, I also believe in the same socially liberal views that most of my readers will, and I believe Trump will support these measures more than other Republicans. On the issue of racism, it is important to recognize that the United States has the worst race relations in the first world, created by a large contingent of minorities that never had the choice to come to the United States. Be certain not to flip causation: it may have been inherent racism that elected Trump, it is not Trump that created such racism. I am not supportive of potential increased public racism because of Trump, but be reminded that the racism existed anyway. That it is more evident today should be an opportunity to create measures to address it. In any case the Trump victory in fact had little to do with racism: the same racism existed when Obama was elected and more Latinos and Blacks voted for Trump than for Romney. As for sexism, concerns were largely outside of the political sphere. That is not an excuse for such comments but we will hope that they do not continue in his period of public office. Trump polarized the electorate by racial and gender lines, thus revealing the divisions in the nation. He did not create it nor did he exacerbate it from an underlying perspective. To accuse a candidate of that prior to his taking office is too harsh.
This is hardly supportive of Trump’s actions, but we must consider that he acted in a certain way to achieve the goal of presidency. The market and the electoral college has approved him as president. It is time that the intelligentsia give some credibility to the half of electorate that voted for him, lest they attack democracy itself. If he ruins the trust of the electoral college and market, that should be in the next article, not this one.