THE election victory of businessman Donald Trump is something unexpected and not just because a few days before election day all surveys showed Democrat standard-bearer Hillary Clinton leading the way.
In the last day of the campaign period, Clinton vowed to be a healing president, uniting all people while Trump continued his attack against Clinton and the media whom he accused of being phony for predicting her victory over him.
Observers said then that in order for Trump to become president, he must win the swing states like Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and others, making it a tall order.
As election day started, the CNN conducted an exit poll and showed that 70 percent of the voters were white, less than 20 percent were African-Americans and less than 15 percent were Asians.
When I saw the numbers, I immediately predicted that the exit poll results in a way favored Trump. True enough, the swing states started to unravel and showed Trump winning.
In the final analysis, Trump won the votes of the electoral college, garnering the magic 270 votes while Clinton won the popular votes because she won over the bigger states that have bigger populations.
So why and how did Trump win over Clinton? One must remember Trump’s campaign promise to make America great again. That promise rang loud to the white Americans who comprised a significant number of voters on election day.
They remembered the heyday of the ’50s when white Americans were dominant in the community through the arts and sports before the African Americans emerged and sidelined them to observers and fans.
With Trump, the white Americans saw a light at the end of the tunnel and win back their supremacy in the community and the world. They also supported Trump’s plans to build a wall in the boundary between the US and Mexico.
They believed Trump’s assertion that Mexicans entering the US through the boundary are criminals, rapists and drug dealers, a view denounced by many who considered Trump a racist bigot.
Trump’s controversial remarks caused even Republicans to move away from him, but his outsider status clicked with the voters. I think that Trump reflected the underlying sentiment of most white Americans who wanted a return to America first for them.
Though he insulted his soon-to-be-predecessor Barack Obama by questioning his birthplace and was more respectful to Russian President Vladimir Putin and even insulted persons with disabilities, Trump still managed to win the highly divisive elections.
Again, that’s because many Americans want to regain their pride and their supremacy and they saw Trump as their only hope. It is going to be America for the Americans.
Such defiance has even drawn some respect from our own President Rodrigo Duterte who has been cursing and insulting the US and Obama.