I slept in my bed in the days after 911 and I was scared but don't remember a sense of foreboding that I feel now. If someone is familiar with the Fall of the Roman Empire please fill me in on where we diverge.
- Marty Monaco
If Trump’s stated policies are his gameplan, as it would be in a democracy, this stunning victory is the American brexit. This is the end of the world order in place since the end of World War II and the Cold War. This is a new world now. The map will be reconfigured.
White women made this happen. Obviously they care more about race than gender, race in a white supremacist way.
The clear message to the Global South is, build your own countries, don't come a knocking.
This election outcome has coincided with the rise of China and India as the largest and third largest economies.
A new world order is on the way. The global powerscape will now be realigned.
Sarkozy Says Trump Win, Brexit Show Popular Desire for Change - Bloomberg
The U.S. vote “is a rejection of conformist thinking” on trade and immigration
French President Francois Hollande also weighed in on Trump's victory, adding that he expected "a period of uncertainty."
Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment
Markets plunge worldwide as Trump surges to the White House - The Washington Post
on Tuesday night, investors began to grapple with the possibility that Trump's controversial proposals to rip up long-standing trade agreements, deport millions of immigrants and radically re-engineer the tax code could become reality.
Among Trump's chief campaign promises has been to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement and slap double-digit tariffs on goods from Mexico and China, moves that experts fear could spark a trade war. He also has proposed massive tax cuts for both individuals and corporations that could cost as much as $6 trillion, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Though Trump’s message of isolationism has resonated with voters who feel left behind by globalization, many experts have warned his proposals could wreck havoc on the U.S. recovery.
Moody’s Analytics forecast Trump’s policies could lower employment by 3.5 million jobs and raise the unemployment rate to 7 percent by the end of his term. The firm also predicted the nation would enter a recession in 2018.
The head of Mexico’s central bank has compared a President Trump to a “hurricane” that could damage the country’s economy. In addition to hiking tariffs on its exports to the United States, Trump has made building a wall along the Mexican border a hallmark of his campaign.
The Democratic Party establishment is finished after Trump.
The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level.
Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming - POLITICO Magazine
the crisis is sharpest in Clinton campaign headquarters: not only do they feel like everything is about to go deeply, collapse-of-America wrong
The polling drop since the third debate was worse than they’d been counting on
Bill Clinton complained throughout that Mook was too focused on the ground game and not enough on driving a message-based campaign. Without a chief strategist in the mold of Penn or David Axelrod, the campaign was run by a committee of strong-willed aides struggling to assert themselves in the same space.
Paul Krugman: The Economic Fallout - NYTimes.com
The Washington Post:
The big real estate developer families in New York had long sneered at Trump as a brash, nasty, nouveau riche intruder on a business that took pride in doing things quietly and diplomatically. The banks treated him like an out-of-control adolescent who needed to be reined in and taught a lesson. The politicians humored him, then scrambled to be by his side to catch some of his reflected fame.
Trump relished the idea of running against Hillary Clinton, who he saw as a feisty and strong figure who was incapable of connecting with middle-class voters and who was beholden to exactly the power bases he planned to run against. He successfully took Clinton’s decades-long reputation as a shape-shifting politician whose excessively legalistic language and guarded public persona and twisted it into a searing, angry portrait of an outright criminal, “Crooked Hillary.”
And Clinton, in Trump’s view, ran exactly the campaign he had hoped she would, focused mainly on attacking him rather than offering an alternative vision to the nation’s middle class.
Trump, according to exit poll data, earned the votes of 60 percent of white men and 52 percent of white women.
Bannon saw Trump as the American equivalent of Britain’s vote earlier this year to leave the European Union — another unexpected popular uprising against the elites. Bannon believed that a Trump victory would not be the upset that the media and the political parties thought it would be, but rather as part of a worldwide revolt against globalization, the hegemony of the technology utopianists, and the arrogance of the overeducated.
a worldwide movement against elites in finance, media and politics.
Donald Trump took his father’s total commitment to work, his mother’s love of showmanship, and his mentor, New York lawyer Roy Cohn’s hyperaggressive approach to making deals and settling scores, and combined them into a public persona that celebrated money and ego.
An American Tragedy - The New Yorker
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.
Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies.
the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television
she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.
The alt-right press was the purveyor of constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Trump used as the oxygen of his campaign.
The US has elected its most dangerous leader. We all have plenty to fear | Jonathan Freedland | Opinion | The Guardian
Today the United States stands not as a source of inspiration to the rest of the world but as a source of fear.
Republicans did not just defy almost every projection, prediction and data-rich computer model to win the presidency. They also won the House of Representatives and much of the Senate. Trump will face few checks on his whims. A man with no control of his impulses will be unrestrained, the might of a superpower at the service of his ego and his id.
He seemed to see Nato as a mafia protection racket: unless the little guys paid up, they should be left undefended.
A trade war looms with China, the imposition of tariffs that could imperil the entire global trading system. America is about to turn inward, towards protectionism. The markets have already delivered their verdict on that. They plunged.
He won 63% of white men and 52% of white women. Not all of those were the left behind. A lot of them were people drawn to a message that was, in part and however thinly coded, about reinstating white privilege.
The most powerful country in the world is to be led by its most dangerous ever leader, a figure who could have walked out of a school textbook narrating the darkest history of the 20th century.
Watch out, world: Donald Trump wins the presidential election | The Economist
But then Mr Trump changed the script by taking an early lead in a trio of important swing states, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, which he never lost.
Mr Trump tore through the Rust Belt states, such as Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin, turning red a swath of states that had not voted for a Republican presidential nominee in decades—including Pennsylvania, which last voted Republican in 1988, and Wisconsin, which had been blue since 1984. Mrs Clinton had hardly bothered to campaign in Wisconsin, where almost every poll gave her a solid lead.
Hate Mr Trump as they did, many of Mr Obama’s voters, it seems, just could not bring themselves to vote for the unexciting and reviled alternative that Mrs Clinton presented them with.
The repercussions of Mr Trump’s victory will be enormous—they seem to grow bigger with every passing second of contemplation. Mrs Clinton ran a lavishly funded and highly professional campaign, using the sophisticated voter identification and mobilisation methods perfected by Mr Obama. Mr Trump raised less money, had little organisation to speak of in many states, and relied largely on social media and an outsized reality-television persona to push his authoritarian and protectionist agenda. He was endorsed by only a tiny handful of newspapers and tipped for success by almost no serious pundit. Barely anyone gave him a chance. Yet, soon after the results started flooding in, his eventual victory hardly looked in doubt.
America’s next president will be a man who led a racist campaign to discredit the incumbent, Mr Obama. While campaigning, he abused women, the disabled, Hispanics and foreigners. He advocated using torture, and nuclear bombs, said his opponent was corrupt and possibly a murderer, and swore that, if elected, he would lock her up. Almost half of American voters have now given Mr Trump an opportunity to follow through on that threat. Who knows; perhaps he will.
Michelle Obama is the popular choice to run for president in 2020 after the Donald Trump win
Donald Trump's election as US President opens 'period of uncertainty' in Europe, leaders warn | The Independent
White won.
Trump ran for president as a nationalist fighter for white America. He promised to deport Hispanic immigrants. He promised to ban Muslims from the United States. He refused to acknowledge Barack Obama’s legitimacy, casting him—until the end—as a kind of usurper of rightful authority. When faced with the fetid swamps of white reaction—of white supremacists and white nationalists and anti-Semites—he winked, and they cheered in response. And for good reason.
More than anything, Trump promises a restoration of white authority. After eight years of a black president—after eight years in which cosmopolitan America asserted its power and its influence, eight years in which women leaned in and blacks declared that their lives mattered—millions of white Americans said enough. They had their fill of this world and wanted the old one back. And although it’s tempting to treat this as a function of some colorblind anti-elitism, that cannot explain the unity of white voters in this election. Trump didn’t just win working-class whites—he won the college-educated and the affluent. He even won young whites.
And they did so as a white herrenvolk, racialized and radicalized by Trump.
Trump forged a politics of white tribalism, and white people embraced it.
I see a man who empowered white nationalists and won. I see a man who demanded the removal of nonwhite immigrants and won. I see a man who pledged war crimes against foreign enemies and won. I see a man who empowers the likes of Rudy Giuliani and others who see blacks as potential criminals to control, not citizens to respect.
I Am a Gay Jew in Trump’s America. And I Am Afraid for My Life.
When Germany invaded, my great-grandmother insisted, we stay. Her Jewish friends panicked, fled, but she said, no, it won’t happen here. Then the soldiers moved them to the ghetto. A wealthy friend offered my family safe passage out, but my great-grandmother said: No. We stay.
I am a gay Jewish journalist who loathes Trump with a very public passion. Every week, I receive the emails, the tweets, the private messages: Kike. Faggot. Fucking Jew. Their leader deploys anti-Semitism as a dog whistle, but they hear it as loud as can be. I get death threats. They want to kill me, they explain; they have a plan. And not just me, but people like me. The Jews who want to ruin this country. The gays who defiled it. The journalists who committed treason. All of us will soon get what we deserve, they tell me. They have guns. They have a plan.
Every week, the threats roll in. They know where I live, they say. Trump wants people like me gone. Dead. They tell me how they’ll do it. It’s always with a gun. Liberal gay Jews don’t have a place in the new order, they explain. Sometimes it’s almost nonchalant. People like me, they say, just don’t have a place in Trump’s America. Faggot, kike—I’d never heard those words directed at me before this election. Now I see them all the time. They have a place in Trump’s America.
I am scared. I have never been scared like this before. What do we do? This is not like anything we’ve lived through before. We are being pulled out farther and farther to sea by the riptide of history. The shore is receding. Do we fight the current? Or do we let it draw us out to sea, recognizing that there’s no use in fighting something beyond our control?
A Lament for Hillary Clinton, the Woman
After Tuesday night, it becomes much harder to believe that America is even trying to express its highest and simplest ideals. We are not one nation, we are not indivisible, and we do not offer liberty and justice for all. The days to come will offer plenty of time for fear and pain on a grand scale. But as the results rolled in on Tuesday night, I was struck by a smaller and surprising sorrow: I mourned for Hillary Clinton herself, the woman who dreamed so big and worked so hard and fell so short.
This was her chance, and it looked like a clean shot at last. Instead, she lost Ohio, then Florida, then North Carolina. Her big Manhattan party looked like a funeral.
The Trump Campaign Is Ending as It Began: Bigoted as Hell
From birtherism and the wall to Jewish conspiracies and Somali terrorists in Minneapolis.
With his latest ad, Trump leaned into those tropes, interspersing this slam on “global special interests” with photos of George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, all Jewish. The message is clear—Jewish elites threaten American sovereignty—and blatantly anti-Semitic, with a lineage that includes Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the even more infamous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Trump’s last line was a reference to Minnesota’s substantial Somali population, which includes many refugees. “Here in Minnesota,” he said, “you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state with your knowledge, without your support or approval. … And with some of them then joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world.
The problem with Trump’s rhetoric—the problem with almost all of his rhetoric—is that this isn’t true. The United States has strict procedures for vetting refugees, with a process that can last up to two years. As for Somali Americans, the vast majority are ordinary, law-abiding citizens and residents. While there is a problem with radicalization among some younger members of the community, they represent a distinct minority. And joint efforts between local groups and the federal government have had some success in combating the factors that foster extremism. Trump undermines those efforts with his message of fear and hostility. Worse, he stokes the kind of atmosphere that turns refugees into targets for domestic terrorists, such as the three men in Garden City, Kansas, who were recently arrested for an alleged plot to bomb an apartment complex with a number of Somali American residents.
Trump kicked off his political career with birtherism. He inaugurated his presidential campaign with xenophobia. He grew his base with the promise of a ban on Muslims and a wall with Mexico. Yes, he brought a kind of free-form economic populism to the Republican Party. But his passion has always been this vision of a whites-only America, defined in opposition to racial enemies. Now, with the end of the campaign in sight, his promise is simple. If elected, he will redeem the country from the illegitimate presidency of Barack Obama and restore the pride and dominance of white Americans.
Daily chart: How Donald Trump won the election | The Economist
it appeared self-evident that Mr Trump, a man who has called Mexican immigrants “killers and rapists”, would have been doomed to fail in a general election. Mr Trump proved his doubters wrong—and, if exit polls are to believed, appears to have done just as well as Mr Romney with black and Hispanic voters. It is possible that the prospect of voting Mr Trump was not as repulsive to racial minorities as was expected; though it is also possible that Mrs Clinton's guarded demeanour failed to inspire would-be voters.
Trade unions seemed to prefer him to Mrs Clinton despite his claims that wages in America were “too high”.
5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win | MICHAEL MOORE
Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president.
Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy
Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun.
It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”
Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut.
And there is no doubt in my mind that if people could vote from their couch at home on their X-box or PlayStation, Hillary would win in a landslide.
But that is not how it works in America. People have to leave the house and get in line to vote. And if they live in poor, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods, they not only have a longer line to wait in, everything is being done to literally stop them from casting a ballot.
the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done.
and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!
Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her.
when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones.
picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.
like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing
Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system.
a good chunk of the electorate would like to sit in the bleachers and watch that reality show.
Hillary Clinton Surpasses Donald Trump In Popular Vote Tally: Shades Of 2000? : The Two-Way : NPR
As of 12:33 p.m. ET, Clinton had amassed 59,583,144 votes nationally, to Trump's 59,344,988 — a margin of 238,156 that puts Clinton on track to become the fifth U.S. presidential candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election.
the second time in the past 16 years that a Democrat has lost a national election while winning the popular vote.
