A president – but no leader

THERE IS no joy to claim in this US presidential election, but there are many lessons for us all to learn. In nearly 50 years of voting, I have seen the pendulum swing back and forth from Republican to Democrat, and while we felt disappointed when our candidate lost a presidential election, we always felt election results reflected the struggle to create a balance between the right and left; the conservatives and liberals.

But the election between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump changed the election process like never before for many people like me. It was the first election that I voted against someone rather than voting for someone when I voted for Clinton. It seemed impossible to imagine Trump could receive even one vote, and the horror of realising that he received enough votes in the Electoral College to win an election even though he didn’t have the majority of popular votes seemed downright scary.

Trump’s presidency was far worse than I had imagined. His lack of character, his divisive rhetoric, his constant dismissal of facts, his penchant for hyperbole and his need to destroy opponents through character assassination shocked me.

As an anthropologist, I am most disturbed by the feeling that Trump worked like an archaeologist, excavating prejudice, racism and ignorance that I thought we had buried too deep to find. Maybe liberals are idealists. Silly us. We thought that electing black president Barack Obama meant we had overcome most of the prejudice and racism that define the US.

Under Trump, divisiveness and prejudice felt as palpable as the inordinate amount of bird bones that archaeologists discover at excavation sites. When it came to Trump, we asked ourselves every question imaginable, except for the most important one: why? Why would someone believe Trump's tirades rather than experts' facts? Why did Americans decide to devalue the presidency by making it one long episode of Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice?

Trumpites are quick to discount any negative descriptions of their hero. They threw support in his direction because they said “he is not a politician. He is a business person." His business acumen proved questionable. He came to the White House with a slew of unpaid bills and bankruptcies to his credit, but these too were all conveniently overlooked by Trumpites.

Myopic vision shows that before covid19, Trump did make headway with the economy, but it doesn’t consider the economy was trending upward by the end of the Obama administration. It is convenient for Republicans to forget the dismal state of the economy that Obama inherited when he came into office. Certainly, the economy loomed large in the minds of American voters. For Republicans, it outweighed the covid19 crisis as a factor in their voting choice.

Whenever people tell me, “But Trump did so much for the economy…” I am reminded of a story my Romanian mother told me when I was a child about how a whole wheelbarrow full of money couldn’t buy a loaf of bread in Germany where she lived as a displaced immigrant during World War II. “Hitler came and changed that,” she said.

That anecdote always made me mindful of the power struggling economies have to drive politics. Trump’s questionable character never mattered to his supporters. They had no problem with Trump lying or firing advisers. They allowed him to undermine the media and cast doubts on the electoral process so that Republicans now question the electoral process all because they say he was good for the economy.

I fear the hardships of this covid19 pandemic can drive the world to dig up more Donald Trumps. We rise to the level of our leaders, and Trump made people feel a warped sense of power. He popularised rude, crass behaviour. Now, many people feel spewing anger, hatred and misinformation is just “telling it like it is.” Empathy and understanding suffered greatly under Trump’s reign of confusion. Bullying triumphed.

Trump supporters believed everything Trump said. They never felt any need to question him. He didn’t need facts or experts’ opinions on anything, and neither did his supporters. His word was good enough. We wouldn't accept the tirades and bullying Trump engaged in with our own children

How empowering that must feel for someone to tell you that only your opinion counts in this world. It might make you a president, but it can never make you a leader. When it comes to power, Donald Trump gave us all a lot to think about in our fragile world.