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Thank you America, for voting Trump

November 9, 2016 at 2:50 pm

Supporters of President-elect Donald Trump of Republican Party in New York, US on November 9, 2016 [Mohammed Elshamy / Anadolu Agency]

Against all odds, Donald Trump’s bigotry against America’s minorities has catapulted him into the White House. He is the president-elect of the United States. His extremist vitriol and open bigotry appealed to evangelical – and very pro-Israel, Zionist – Christians, ultra-right white extremists and even the white middle class. Dissatisfied with the Obama administration, the Republican and Democratic Parties and their personal economic circumstances, the majority of voters plumped for Trump, an outsider with no political experience whatsoever.

Political commentators predicted that Trump’s election campaign would fizzle out sooner rather than later; his ever-growing support caught some hard-line Republicans by surprise. He never stopped making controversial statements at any point in his campaign; even accusations of sexual assault could not stop him.

In effect, Trump’s popularity represents the success of bigotry and much that is wrong with mainstream politics in the United States. It has also helped to reignite a long-discredited American xenophobia.

While strategists in the US are now scampering around trying to figure out how to manage the situation, we need to ask if he should really be contained. Perhaps a Trump presidency is what the world needs, to give a boost to the drive for meaningful liberation.

The US presents itself as a bastion of democracy and capitalism, protector of the free world and the guardian of the international human rights dispensation. Its PR machinery, including the mainstream media and Hollywood, has pushed this facade for decades and it has taken the bigotry of a billionaire businessman presidential candidate to bring it into question.

Trump may still just be the president-elect, but his victory at the polls is already exposing the true nature of the modern-colonial Islamophobia under the stewardship of the new American empire, even though George W Bush and the US establishment were at pains to argue post 9/11 that their War on Terror was not a War on Islam. Donald Trump does not pretend as much; he has said that under his presidency, he would look at a ban on Muslims entering the United States and that all Syrian refugees would be sent home as they might be Daesh operatives. The fact that his views hold so much currency now, having been accepted by American voters, speaks volumes about the real nature of the US.

The Islamophobic rhetoric used by the Trump campaign has woken up many liberals and even conservatives. It has raised awareness among oppressed peoples around the world that we are witnessing a global descent into disorder of the highest proportion, where war is going to be used increasingly as the go-to tool for resolving political conflicts. This will have far-reaching consequences for human life. The global south has begun to realise that the US empire wants complete control and domination over land and people.

Claims of non-racial, multi-racial inclusivity and mutual respect by the US elite are meaningless, rhetoric intended to pacify those without representation. All of this will soon begin to crumble, though, because a Trump presidency will expose the illusion of international human rights and the myth that America wants to spread democracy.

President Trump will unmask, attack and obliterate these myths, which will demonstrate clearly that the American empire and the leadership of the modern-colonial (aka “free”) world, can only be sustained through a combination of deception, insincerity and violence. He will show that we live in a world governed by the idea of coloniality, the continuation of power arrangements that emerged from colonialism and still manifest themselves long after the colonies were granted their “independence”.

The Trump White House will show that we are far from independent; that we are not free; that the oppression under which we labour has merely changed shape. This might be just the spark that is needed for the world to recognise what is happening, and reawaken the global conscience. It could be the missing link between those who are marginalised and awareness of their hellish condition.

We may now start to understand that everything we know about ourselves and the world has been constructed for us by Eurocentric thinkers to further a neo-colonial agenda of dominance and subservience. Thank you America, for voting Donald Trump into power.

https://youtu.be/4UM0XXLkyQM

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.