Translated by Sasha Reiter
Trump has achieved his objective. Perhaps he was the first to be surprised upon hearing his nomination in the convention of the Republican Party. “An unreal moment” defined by his son, Donald junior, and the astonished expressions of the leaders of House and Senate, were more eloquent than a thousand words. The establishment were the old leaders of the party which militated great men like Abraham Lincoln, the first republican to reach Presidency, who opposed and abolished slavery. Today they look with embarrassment at the monster who came out of their own bowels, from the dark reactionary of a party who no longer knows what its future will be.
The Republican convention was realized in the greatest Trump fashion: a large and very vulgar display. The speech of the possible first lady, the Slovenian Melina Trump, third wife of the magnate, created a lot of talk about the entire phrases copied from the one given by Michelle Obama in 2008. In this light, the words that she addressed to her acolytes and the country, Trump now officially the candidate, were riddled with lies told with a conviction that only those accustomed to lying know how to express.
An apocalyptic country, a distressful president and a future of terror emerged from the phrases of Trump, who with impassive serenity, wisely manipulated detailed data.
Listening to him was enough to understand how easy populism can be, and on the contrary, how difficult it can be to govern seriously and honestly. This, even to a population known for its fastidious love of the truth and its need for positive messages.
Trump lied about the country’s situation and he lied about his private life and his business success. Neither one nor the other are difficult deceptions to uncover. Despite this, a large portion of voters have decided to believe him. They believe him because deep inside, like many other populations in the world, they need to look for a culprit against which to channel their frustrations, their anger and their fears and also believe in a savior in which to deposit their dreams. They dream of the arrival of a messiah, a good father, a blue prince, someone who thinks and acts for them and who miraculously resolves all of their problems. They fear terrorism, the deterioration of life, the loss of jobs and all that is diverse. Many of those voters don’t look farther out than their lives, than the confines of their cities, they do not know of macroeconomic figures and much less do they worry about understanding the real causes of their troubles.
Trump knows that and he manipulates those feelings. The god that can carry him to Presidency asks for sacrifices and he offers them: he proposes the immigrants, the Muslims, women. He knows that in his country, male chauvinism is prevalent and he does not skimp personal and political offenses to an opposing woman.
Trump knows that those who will vote in his favor, will be those same people that he himself, with his irresponsible and rapacious manor of handling his companies, has contributed to impoverish. He knows he must throw dust those eyes that could see him and discover in him one of the causes of the deterioration of a capitalist system in crisis, of the profound disparities between the wealthiest and the poorest, of the loss of jobs, of the homicides that can be perpetrated by the psychically unstable murderers thanks to the ease with which they can buy weapons.
Trump is one of the large protagonists of an obsolete capitalism, rapacious and harmful, but nevertheless, today can establish himself as a champion of those who have been and still are the victims of this savage and dying system. He can do it because he has never had a political office or public responsibilities.
One more time and in this occasion with a high degree of international danger, the political crisis is shaping itself as it has been handled so far, a policy that has been moving away from people, that has enclosed itself in gilded halls, international organizations whose initials are foreign to many, cold and incomprehensible statistical numbers to those who are not familiar with figures if not daily problems. It is the political snobbery, distant, that has driven the majority of the British to vote for the Brexit, that feeds the nationalist xenophobes around the world, that in Latin America has given life to tremendously corrupt and harmful governments.
It would be too simple to dispatch Trump as the prototype of an ignorant and immature America. That would avoid any criticism and consequent adjustment in politics. The success of Trump, like the success of Sanders, personalities extremely diverse and nevertheless similar, reflect the same desire: that of the politics of listening and knowing how to express in words, concepts that many repeat in their homes and day to day places.
Also, a policy that knows to keep pace with the speed of our time. The information, which has disintegrated as a result of social networks, becomes more immediate with every moment. Society does not tolerate waiting, quickly changes a page on the internet if it takes more than a few seconds to open, voraciously chews the tragedies that happen around the world, confuses some cadavers with others and, in front of such bloody events, prefers to close its eyes and lock the doors of its houses, cities, countries.
Trump represents the people who wish to return to a linear and toneless world: the whites with the whites and the blacks with the blacks, the women in the house and the men at work, the marriages only between people of the opposite sex, the police on the street with the right to kill and the criminals or possible criminals in jail. The harmony of the simplicity in contrast to an everyday, ever more complicated, diverse, confusing, without borders of any kind, without distinctions and with equal rights for all.
For this reason on its own, threatening.
Sadly, Trump and many others like him represent the real danger. To have Trump as President of the United States could mean irreversible damage to the peace, to the environment, to tolerance. We know it and we also know that the risk of him achieving this is high.
It depends on the capacity that we, the others, have to build a diverse economic model and a new form of making and communicating policy. The time has come for us all to assume our part of the responsibility.