It is deja vu.
It is not that I am expert enough to have predicted a Trump victory. But in May this year when Trump won the Republican nomination I posted:
I have made this point before. Attacking Trump head on only fuels his anti-establishment support. It is only by occupying the ground he occupies that some of his support can be captured.
Attacking Trump – from any direction – only seems to strengthen his support. That suggests that his support is coming from those who feel that their fears are completely unrepresented by any of the other candidates. The 2016 election is dominated, I think, by the avoidance of worst fears and not by the meeting of aspirations. It could well be that nobody will be able to take away from Trump’s support unless they can articulate the same disdain for establishment politics and political correctness that he does and address the worst fears that exist.
The current headlines in the US media are now about how and why Clinton will trounce Trump. It all sounds exactly like the reasons given over the last year for why Trump couldn’t win the Republican nomination. Some of it – especially in the left leaning media – HuffingtonPost, Slate, Politico and Washington Post – are more like wishful thinking rather than analysis. They have not learned from their past mistakes and still haven’t understood the strength of the anti-establishment wave. Bernie Sanders is the only other candidate from either party who has begun to understand the mood abroad. To take away the “politically incorrect” territory from Donald Trump may be beyond Hillary Clinton.
My prediction for November is that Clinton support is more likely to collapse than that Trump’s campaign will implode. And therefore I will not be at all surprised at a very close run election and even if Trump wins.
And from the results it is pretty clear that the entire main stream media missed it and are still missing it. They are also still missing the point that they have themselves contributed to the resentment and anger that the Trump voters have now demonstrated with stunning effect. They (WaPo, HuffPo, LATimes, BostonGlobe, Politico, CNN and even the NYT) have been living in their own little bubble of virtuosity and sanctimonious blather that their vituperative attacks on Trump have been entirely counter-productive and have only cemented his support. Looking at the editorials today, they are still living in their bubble. They are still in denial about their own role in their own defeat. They have imbued political correctness with such a halo that Trump supporters have been invisible to the pollsters. Election models have been discredited soundly.
(As I have written elsewhere, election models are like climate models. They
- have pre-determined outcomes,
- are based on data manipulation,
- are biased to protect the “establishment”, and
- just plain wrong.)
I don’t expect even Trump the buffoon to be all bad. There are many silver linings to his dark cloud. But one thing is sure. President Trump is, at least partly, a reaction to Obama’s failures. His failure to let the US economy to be the engine for global growth, his failure to curb profligacy in government, his failure with Obamacare and his many failures with foreign policy. To that extent it is Obama’s fears of action which have enabled Donald Trump.
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