America under Trump still waits to be healed

America under Trump still waits to be healed 

The Tablet, 

Editors

08 November 2017 A year has passed since Donald Trump astounded the world by winning the 2016 presidential election. It has been one of the most fraught 12 months in American history. It is a cliché to say that the United States is a deeply divided society, but those divisions have been made more intractable by the way Mr Trump has exercised the presidency. Instead of bringing the nation together, as presidents of left and right have done for generations, he has increased its fragmentation. It is as if there was a collision in the American collective psyche between mutually incompatible but deeply planted versions of what America is about. Mr Trump managed to win by appealing to one that traditionally felt excluded and condescended to, over the one that felt it had a natural right to national leadership.
As one commentator put it this week, the election result was as if one half of America was raising its middle finger to the other half. Many who voted for Mr Trump seem to have had few illusions about him. They knew he was a loose cannon – impetuous, bigoted, paranoid, vain and inconsistent – but his very awfulness was a kind of revenge on an Establishment they despised and which despised them.
How have America’s leaders allowed this resentment to grow? Hillary Clinton’s abuse of many of his supporters as a “basket of deplorables”, who she dismissed as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”, only showed that the contempt was mutual. Those who voted for Mr Trump were an older, mainly white, poorer, more male and less well- educated section of American society, and they tended to disdain anyone who differed from them. The pace of change, and the decline of older industries on which they had relied for jobs, had left them feeling neglected, alienated, unrepresented and uncared for.

Whether the election was won in a fair fight or was subverted by Russian influence this huge swathe of the American population would still have felt failed by the system. So one rational response to Mr Trump’s arrival is to regard it as a symptom of a deeper, possibly even incurable, malaise. American capitalism is a system of winners and losers. What happens when the losers turn on the winners? Trump happens.
He has made little progress on policy, held back less by the checks and balances built into the constitution but by the inability of the Republican Party to know what it wants. It technically controls the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives and is well set to control the Supreme Court as well. But is it populist or ideological? Conservative Christian or crudely white nativist? Free market or protectionist?
A cleverer man than Donald Trump could mould this state of uncertainty to his agenda. But his slogan, “make America great again”, only shows the way if it is clear what greatness consists of. Moral leadership in the world? That’s certainly not on Mr Trump’s agenda. So his presidency may turn out to be a hiatus, full of sensation but devoid of lasting significance. Except for what it says about the United States of America.
(Pic: President Donald Trump delivers a speech at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea on November 8, 2017. Trump called on the world to abandon support for Kim Jung Un's regime, saying the director has turned North Korea into a hell that no person deserves. Credit: Lee Young-ho/Pool/Sipa USA)