Trump's Declining Empire - Between a Soft Landing and a Hard Fall

The real question for Trump’s foreign policy is not how to remake America but for what kind of world

The real mystery of Donald Trump, the former US president and now president-elect, is not his personality or even his politics. And neither is it – as many grieving American liberals seem to believe – how Trump, “bombastic, profane, and frequently untruthful” (according to the largely pro-Trump Wall Street Journal), could possibly have amassed so much popular support. 

That question is actually very easy to answer: Firstly, he could because the Democrats are just so incredibly awful in every way imaginable, from genocide to alienating elitist snobbism. There was a reason pre-election polls showed that “a majority of Americans believed the US was on the wrong track”; and they were right, even if they may well find out soon that there is more than one way of losing one’s way. And secondly, like it or not, much of America-as-it-really-is recognizes itself in Trump: obsessively individualistic yet deeply conformist, naturally anarchic yet intuitively authoritarian, and, last but not least, violently aggressive yet thin-skinned, too.

In short, the Democrats are turning into outsiders, at least for now, and deservedly so, while Trump vibes with his people, whether he or they deserve that or not. That says more about them than about him, but none of it is terribly complicated; it just takes a certain degree of disillusionment to acknowledge.