After the first polls closed Tuesday night, millions of Americans huddled around their TVs, posted up at bars, and bathed in the cool light of their phones. Many of us, those of us who followed the polls and listened to the experts, figured we knew what was about to happen. Donald Trump, the man accused by many women of sexual assault, the man who has promised to build a wall along the Mexican border and ban Muslims from entering the country, was going to get stomped. And not just in the electoral sense—he was going to be humiliated in the most dramatic fashion possible, a sort of cathartic moment of national awakening.
Instead, it was the naysaying media who got humiliated. Pundit types, pollsters, the vast majority of liberals and lefties who write things on the internet—almost none of them saw this shit coming.
Vice News
4: Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino-gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
The Intercept
Donald J. Trump was elected 45th president of the United States on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton in a stunning upset that reverberated around the world. Trump carried at least 279 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 218, although Trump appears to have narrowly lost the popular vote. Donald Trump has never held elective office. He opened his campaign in 2015 with a speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. Trump has proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States. He openly mocked his opponents, reporters, Asians, African Americans and the disabled. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault, and he was heard in a 2005 videotape boasting about sexually assaulting women. Throughout the campaign, Trump drew the enthusiastic support of white nationalists and hate groups. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana, cheered the outcome of the election. Duke tweeted, “This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.”
Democracy Now
2: Trump Victory: What now for the far-right movement?
In the rural Texas Panhandle, the night of the United States presidential elections was joyous. This is Trump country and one of the most conservative regions in the US. All the polls were wrong, and unlike the images of those at Clinton headquarters on Tuesday night, faces here were bright and cheerful.
Behind the happiness, there is, however, a question on many minds: what will happen with the re-energised far-right movements?
Cody Nevels, a self-asserted “white nationalist” with nearly 20 years of far-right activism under his belt, told Al Jazeera that he supported Trump “heavily”, and was elated to see him win the election. Trump’s win is “a validation for us”.
“It’s almost a weight off our shoulders because we fight so hard just to be heard.”
Aljazeera
1: The Guardian view on President-Elect Donald Trump: a dark day for the world
The unthinkable is only unthinkable until it happens. Then, like the sack of Rome, it can seem historically inevitable. So it is with the global political earthquake that is the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States. If he is true to his campaign pledges, which were many and reckless, Mr Trump’s win will herald America’s most stunning reversal of political and economic orthodoxy since the New Deal in the 1930s, but with the opposite intention and effect. It halts the ailing progressive narrative about modern America and the 21st-century world in its tracks. It signals a seismic rupture in the American-dominated global liberal economic and political order that had seemed to command the 21st century after communism collapsed and China’s economy soared.
The Guardian
