Donald Defeats Everyone: GOP, Media and the Pollsters
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
Westfield, IN
First, he beat his opponents within the Republican Party (GOP) during the primaries, a long convoluted process through which each party elects its nominee for the Presidential elections. Then, he turned around and extended the same harsh treatment, which he earlier had reserved for his rivals, to the GOP establishment including the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan who eventually had no choice except to endorse Donald Trump.
As the tension between the two of them escalated, reports of implosion and polarization within the GOP emerged constantly in the media. Would the party be able to rescue itself from the devastation caused by internal conflict? No one knew. Suggestions were made to contain the damage, pundits recommending how the party has to be more inclusive in order to win the future elections-as this battle is considered to be lost-how it has to reconnect with the minorities and how it cannot stay relevant when it has confined itself in a shell comprised of white voters only, all of which seemed logical and reasonable till the day elections were held and the television screens turned redder and redder.
While jabbing the GOP establishment with one hand, Donald Trump kept the other one free to throw some real hard punches at the media.Through his infamous late night tweets, he scoffed at both the NewYork Times and the CNN, criticized them for their lopsided coverage and accused them of becoming a party. Dumbfounded by the tactics, people thought Donald Trump was on a suicide mission, determined to shoot himself on the foot-and not just one, but both. How can one win if his target is as much the referee as the opposite team? The media outlets were so enraged that they virtually ran a separate campaign against him.
He was still not done yet. After he clutched the nomination in July, he punched the pollsters on their faces proving almost all of them to be wrong. The lead went up and down but the red line always stayed below the blue- irrespective of the reality. In one sweep on November 8th though, these organizations who claim to gauge the pulse of the nation, were sent to the classrooms to learn how to conduct a reliable study. Donald Trump was telling them for months that their results did not reflect the sentiments of the people. But no one believed him till they saw the results on Tuesday night.
Finishing up, he gave a big blow to the Democratic Party knocking them out of the White House, their only stronghold. They already had lost the majority in the Congress and the Senate during the Obama presidency. Unable to stand up and fight for another two years, the Democrats found it was they, not the GOP, who needed to learn some lessons. They have to ask themselves how they lost contact with the blue collar white workers of the Midwest and how the party has exclusively become the party of urban elite without representation of the electoral college from the Midwest.
A year and a half ago, as Donald Trump began his journey to the White House, newspapers called him a buffoon, a man with empty (and sometimes frightening) rhetoric whose popularity could never be translated into votes. Media ignored how the size of his rallies was growing and how enthusiastic his supporters had become.They projected him as a person who was good only at making political enemies: Donald Trump provided them enough fodder too to stay indulged.
Women disliked him, more so after the Access Hollywood videotape was leaked in which the President-elect was making lewd comments about females. Muslims railed against him after his proposal to ban all of them for sometime from entering the US. How he disregarded the family of Captain Humayun Khan, the fallen American soldier, did not help MrTump to gain support from the troubled community either. The ones living in America became afraid too. Would they be captured, incarcerated, or would they be made to register again, a mark assigned to them for identification purposes? When it came to African Americans, he angered them as well by his incautious attitude. But to be honest, the Hispanics got the worst of it as Donald Trump referred to them as rapists and criminals.
Even so, the truth is after making all these irresponsible, demeaning and derogatory comments, he has painted almost every swing state red with his own hands: Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Is it blatant racism? I am not too sure about it.
I think more than racism, the blame goes to the Democratic party candidate. As much as I would have liked her to win the elections as the first female president of the USA, and as much as Donald Trump made me nervous, she was the weakest candidate the Democratic Party could have nominated, a candidate who might not have defeated Burnie Sanders, as we know now, in the primaries without the support of the party’s establishment.
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