On the rise of Donald Trump
It is the puzzling story of how the New York property magnate and sometime reality TV personality Donald Trump came out of nowhere in July 2015, announced he would run for the US presidency for 2016, didn’t sound serious even to his friends, but who is now just a single victory away from a most improbable job: the US presidency.
Think back to the string of gaffes, silly utterances, family and personal scandal and air of blundering incompetence and buffoonery we’ve seen of Trump since late last year.
Many politicians and candidates much more distinguished that Trump have melted away over offences or blunders that pale into nothing compared with Trump’s.
Gary Hart in 1988, over his affair with Donna Rice.
Howard Dean, over a rant he made in a video. Just a rant. Rick Perry in 2012, over simply forgetting a fact during a Republican debate. Mitt Romney, over being caught by a microphone dismissing the 47 per cent of Americans on welfare. Edward Kennedy in 1980, over an accident involving the death of a woman passenger.
How can Trump blunder 20 times more than these men put together and yet in early October 2016, he is still within a margin’s error of Hilary Clinton, one of the world’s best-known, most highly-regarded, most experienced in state matters and most personally competent? How is that possible?
How can it be that Trump’s wife Melania in a prime-time television speech during the Republican convention read a speech with words plagiarised from US first lady Michelle Obama and even something as embarrassing as this has no effect on Trump’s momentum besides the fun and mockery he attracts over it on social media and in the mainstream media?
Even when nude photos of a potentially future first lady Melania Trump leak on the Internet, Trump’s support increases, not goes up in smoke?
There must be something we are missing out here that explains all this.
Most of the US and other Western media that spend much of their time denigrating Trump do not seem to understand the major changes underway in society and technology in the 21st Century.
There was a time until the mid-1990s that a handful of newspapers, news magazines, television news networks and universities set the national agenda and tone for the United States.
A handful of record companies and film studios controlled more than 80 per cent of the films and music albums that were released onto the market.
An endorsement from a former president, a respected sitting senator or state governor, a retired naval admiral, a prominent New York or Washington newspaper was enough to swing the election for the preferred candidate.
It was a world of top-down institutional certainty.
Enter the late 1990s and the spread of the Internet in the West and Japan. In came the music-sharing website Napster that turned the music industry on its head.
Amazon followed, showing the way to a new online approach to retailing books, music, electronic gadgets and clothing.
Then there followed something we now know as social media. Society that had once been homogenous, with tens of millions of Americans and Europeans watching one TV programme at the same time or listening to Top 40 hit songs on radio became fragmented.
New online newspapers and news sources like the Drudge Report, Politico, the Huffington Post and hundreds of others from Facebook pages and blogs appeared on the scene.
More and more, people left the big stage and theatre and social media platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook became absorbed in small silos and groups of followers, friends and like-minded colleagues.
More and more people around the world feel empowered by social media. More and more of them live all day within the confines of their peer-to-peer groups. The predominant tone on social media is one of informality, fun, leisure and a lack of seriousness.
When the media and political elite in New York and Washington point out Trump’s lack of basic foreign policy and foreign lands and their leaders, they assume the American public even knows or cares about those other countries.
Most Americans don’t know the capital city of their northern neighbour Canada.
So when I see the major legacy newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today endorsing Hilary Clinton and urging Americans not to vote Trump, I realise that they don’t see that their mindset is still one of the 1980s when an authoritative paper or TV network endorsed a candidate and the voters followed.
Today, it’s no longer that way. A 21-year-old American is much more likely to make up his or her mind on whom to vote by reading what their peers say on SnapChat and Instagram than what a newspaper in New York says, newspapers most of them no longer read in the first place.
The reason the UK vote to leave the European Union is the same reason and amid the same circumstances that Trump continues to hold steady in spite of all his blunders and outrageous statements.
The US economy has recovered from its steep fall that started in September 2008 but most of the growth today is in the hi-tech industry and companies.
When Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple report their usual huge profits these profits are computed as part of overall US GDP. However, when the handful of these Silicon Valley and other publicly-traded giants are put aside, the per capita growth in the United States is shown to be quite anaemic.
Americans are struggling economically, so much so that the desperation is driving them to try out anything that can produce real change.
Trump’s rise holds lessons for us all, beginning with politicians and including the media and corporate establishment.
Even if he loses the election in November – something even better, more seasoned politicians than he have lost before – there will have to be a lot of soul-searching in America.
If America can come this close to electing a Donald Trump, then anything is possible in this world.
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