In divided America, a United States no more
Manjit Bhatia considers what Donald Trump’s stunning victory, amid a polarising wave of anti-establishment sentiment, means for the country’s hallowed institutions
America is in trouble. Terrible trouble. It’s been in a headspin for the past eight years. Now, with the election outcome many in the world were dreading, it has spun out, tail dragging the head down into the dark pits of despair and who knows what else.
There’s an America – still, if only in name. But there does not seem to be a United States. Not after the 2016 presidential election. This has been the dirtiest, most vulgar and, to borrow what has become an awful cliché, the most divisive campaign in living memory, or at least in the last 50 years of US elections.
From that dark pit, it’s hard to know and even see how Donald Trump would now continue to claim, much less build, an America that can be great again. Can the Phoenix rise from the ashes?
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Looking at the map of that country on The New York Times website, I saw a sea of red. So red, so angry, yet so bewildering that American voters chewed up the blue of the Democratic Party and spat it out to the far corners of who knows where.
Until the polling booths opened on November 8, most of us decent folk thought that Trump – with a mouth and head as filthy as the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s – was a goner; that he had no chance of becoming president. Just hours after the booths closed and counting began, it was becoming clear Hillary Clinton would be trumped.
So much, then, for Trump saying the entire election was rigged in the establishmentarian Clinton’s favour.
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