It wasn’t the prettiest fight. It wasn’t the cleanest. It wasn’t a fight for a higher cause. And as it turned out, it wasn’t even a close fight.
But Donald Trump is no saint and he isn’t complaining.
In the weeks ahead, he will be coronated and will formally take on the title of, as he grandiloquently points out, “The 45th and the 47th President of the United States of America”. One win clearly wasn’t ever going to be enough for Trump.
Trump didn’t just defy the odds with his epical victory, but he dodged bullets, indictments, jail, and even defied history.
There was, of course, Kamala Harris too. The queen of the American ‘establishment’: the liberal echo-chamber that is the mainstream press, the tenured titans of ivy academia, gender jihadis and the “tinsel town toleratti”.
But for all their pretensions to erudition, the Boleshewokists couldn’t out-think Trump. The best weapons they had were literally below the belt pejoratives like “tiny hands” to politically loaded tired epithets like “fascist-racist”, “orange Hitler”.
Their choice of derogations could have been lifted straight out of the glossary of insults dreamt up by the Indian Opposition to describe Narendra Modi.
In the end, both Modi and Trump won.
This is because, essentially, the liberal cosplay couldn’t hide the fact that both Rahul Gandhi and Kamala Harris were never entirely true to their message.
In Rahul Gandhi’s case, the Indian public woke up just in time to spot the hypocrisy of his adoption of quixotic Leninist pre-occupations: the nationalisation of private wealth and the verbal flagellation of the privileged.
In the United States, voters, it seems, were much more alert. They realised that Left-Liberal Kamala Harris was neither Left nor Liberal.
Harris talked of Trump’s disregard for democratic norms. But when it came to demonstrating her commitment, she failed miserably. Take, for instance, her stand on specific voting laws, such as those relating to doing away with voter ID requirements and her highly partisan formulations for judicial appointments.
On defending global democracy, she fell woefully short too. This was especially apparent when an elected government was overthrown in Bangladesh by an anarchist-Islamist cabal with no respect for democracy or pluralism. The Bangladesh example is most pertinent because the installed interim ruler is thought to be an American puppet close to the Biden-Clinton-Harris caucus of the Democratic party.
When it came to India, Biden-Harris failed New Delhi by refusing to act against Khalistani extremists resolved to upend the mandate of a democratically elected government.
Harris preached human rights from every available pulpit but then didn’t intervene forcefully enough to protect them in woke hobby-horse: Gaza. Harris unequivocally backed Israel’s right to hot pursuit even as her base called for legal, economic and military sanctions on Israel.
Harris’ campaign failed to reconcile its progressivism with the inherent socio-religious conservatism of the Democratic party’s working class, immigrant base. Did Harris really expect her party’s Arab immigrant voters, God-fearing Christian working-class voters to shun doctrinally prescribed injunctions against same-sex liaisons, abortion and gender fluidity?
For all her talk about universalising the right to make informed choices, Harris never questioned the rampant cancel culture that clings to the Left ecosystem’s censorious underbelly. Never once did Harris baulk at the damage being done to the cause of free choice by the partisan anti-Trump propaganda masquerading as editorial objectivity in the mainstream media.
On the other hair trigger issue, gun possession, Biden and Harris did not use their time in office to tighten arms control laws. Worse, as the campaign unfolded, Harris tried to pass herself off as a gun owner.
In the end, perhaps resentful, Harris’s base deserted her. Even women. It is telling that in not even one Blue State has Harris outperformed Biden.
So great has been the erosion of support for her that it’s Trump who has walked away with minority votes — black and Latino men, Asians and Muslim. All of this has meant that Trump has gone on to win even the popular vote. An achievement that makes him look more legitimate than he is deserving.
In the end, it’s not that the better candidate has won. It’s the one who was more upfront. Even if being so meant shedding the fig leaf of political correctness, which as we all know is the mainstay of basic decency in politics.
