Over a year ago when Donald Trump was fending off his Republican rivals for his party’s nomination, few people thought much about the prospect of him becoming president. He was certainly entertaining and fun to watch, especially when he would make all those other candidates on stage with him look extremely uncomfortable. Jeb, Marco, and Ted didn’t know how to handle such a rare political creature.
Because he was not a career politician, he didn’t speak like them, didn’t obey the rules of polite society when talking about terrorism and immigration. He was so coarse and vulgar, they thought, that he would be quickly dispensed with once his entertainment value wore off. Doesn’t he know that you’re not supposed to say that you support “torture”? The more acceptable term is “enhanced interrogation techniques” or, to be more subtle, he can just use Dick Cheney’s euphemism for torture, by saying that he will be going to the “dark side”?
But allowing one week to let the election results sink in gives one some perspective. How did one of the most formidable political machines in U.S. history get beaten by a political novice, someone who had never run for any kind of office before?
I am not sure you can point to any one issue or circumstance that might have turned the election to Trump, but there just seemed to be a growing perception that Hillary was not someone you could trust. FBI Director Comey’s decision to announce that he was re-opening his investigation into her email server about a week before the election certainly didn’t help, but it was just another reminder that Hillary had so much baggage that to vote for her you had to willfully push that baggage aside and forget about her seeming inability to come clean on so many issues.
My guess is that many people voted for Trump, not because they particularly liked him, but because he represented something new, fresh, someone who had his own money and had a career in something other than politics.
Here was a guy who actually built things, ran a successful business, had skyscrapers all over the world and he was running against someone who had spent her entire life in government. The contrast between a businessman who spent his whole life buidling things all over the world and a career politician who flew all over that same world, but rather than leaving anything behind, simply gave speeches and cashed exorbitant checks for her troubles.
That kind of stark contrast between the doer, someone who builds things, and the talker, someone who simply gives speeches, is what this election ultimately came down to. While there were so many other problems with Hillary’s campaign and her unwillingness to realize that she was no longer campaigning in the 1990’s when she had three or four news networks to worry about, most of the electorage saw her as a relic of the past; a career politican who had made a fortune using her office and influence.
