What next after Trump victory?

• Amit Roy
• 22 November, 2024

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By: Amit Roy

WHY did Donald Trump win? In a way, this is a silly question.

It’s like asking why New Zealand beat India at cricket – and at home, too – in the recent Test series?

The answer is that the visitors got more runs.

It’s the same with the US presidential election – Trump simply got more votes.

The Republican received 312 electoral college votes while Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, got 226. Trump also won the popular vote – 74,684,966 (50.4 per cent) to 70,958,387 (47.9 per cent) – which he didn’t in 2016.

Although the polls had predicted that the presidential race was “too close to call”, Trump won all seven “swing states” – Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.

Americans deserve the kind of president they vote for, but why is it they don’t see themselves in the way sensible people the world over do?

For an answer I consulted the late Oscar Wilde, and chapter 3 in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891. This exchange between Sir Thomas Burdon, “a Radical member of Parliament”, and the Duchess of Harley, “a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper”, with an intervention from Lord Henry Wotton, at a lunch hosted by Lady Agatha, anticipated the civilisational values of the American electorate in 2024.

“They say when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas….

“Really! And where do bad Americans go when they die?” inquired the duchess.

“They go to America,” said Lord Henry.

Now it would be churlish to suggest that only “bad” people voted for Trump, but clearly American political culture is work in progress. It is probably the case that the Americans will not vote for a woman president, not now, maybe not even in our lifetime.

Last Tuesday (5), as Americans were voting, I had dinner with a Bengali friend of mine from the US. He had already voted for Harris before flying to London.

“We Bengalis are meant to be progressive – if we don’t vote for her, who will?” he wondered, slightly tongue-in-cheek.

To be sure, “progressive” and “liberal” have become dirty words in America.

The next day, as it became clear Trump was not going to challenge the result this time or call for his boys to storm the Capitol, I had lunch with an English peer who had lived and worked in the US for 20 years.

“It’s a wonderful country,” he declared. “Full of warm and generous people.” And that also appears to the view of the five million people of Indian origin who have made a huge success of their lives in the US. Many of the big companies – from Microsoft to Google – are headed by Indians. That is yet to happen in the UK. A friend who works for Merrill (Lynch) said he and his banker friends were all inclined towards Trump.

The conventional wisdom that is applied to India, for example, also holds true for America. It is said that India lives simultaneously in several centuries, that the bullock cart co-exists with nuclear reactors. There is the America of Nobel Prize winners and cutting-edge science, a country that has sent men to the moon and brought them safely back, and sunkissed California beaches, alongside the Wild West.

One should not look for logic when it comes to issues such as gun control. Trump fights for the right of Americans to possess guns, even though he himself was very nearly the victim of an assassination attempt. It is difficult to understand a people who have suffered tragedy upon tragedy, and yet will oppose any attempt to prevent their recurrence.

The Gun Violence Archive counted at least 647 mass shootings in 2022. The non-profit organisation defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which at least four people are shot, not including the gunman. One estimate says more than 3,000 people have died in mass shootings since 2006.

On October 1, 2017, the highest number of fatalities from a mass shooting was recorded when Stephen Paddock attacked a crowd of concert-goers on the Las Vegas strip, killing 58 and injuring 850 others, and then taking his own life.

Trump is unmoved that increasingly children are the victims. At the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, 17 were killed and 17 injured.

At Robb Elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, 21 were killed and 17 injured.

On April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, the perpetrators, 12th-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 12 students and one teacher.

And the response of America’s president-elect, who will be sworn in on January 20, 2025?

On February 10, 2024, Trump promised thousands of members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he returned to the White House.

Addressing the association’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he said: “During my four years nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield.”

Casting himself as “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House,” Trump pledged to continue to protect gun owners’ rights. “Your Second Amendment right will always be safe with me as your president.”

He could have said: “I will fight anyone who tries to assassinate me, but I will also fight, fight, fight for his right to bear weapons.”

In UK politics, the right has used Trump’s campaign and victory to attack the left.

In 2019, ahead of Trump’s state visit to the UK, David Lammy, now foreign secretary, described the US president as “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic” and “no friend of Britain”.

In 2015, Boris Johnson, as London mayor, said Trump’s claim that parts of the city were “no-go areas” showed “quite stupefying ignorance” and made him unfit to be president.

Boris said he wouldn’t ban a Trump visit, but added: “I would invite him to come and see the whole of London and take him round the city, except I wouldn’t want to expose Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

They could argue that what they said before still holds true, but in the interests of “the special relationship” have to be pragmatic in office.

Is Trump a good friend of Britain, which is supposed to be its closest ally?

The special relationship has long looked like a one-way love affair.

If Trump forces Ukraine to negotiate a peace treaty with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin by ceding territory captured through Moscow’s aggression, he will have undermined Britain’s security – and that of western Europe.

The hard truth is that Britain’s interests and those of Trump’s America are not the same.

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, had a perfectly good relationship with US president Joe Biden, but considers Trump to be a “friend”. But he may still impose curbs on visas for Indians and tariffs on imports from India.

Most people I know are shocked and upset that Trump has won. “I thought Kamala Harris would squeeze through,” a neighbour confided.

What will happened in four years? If James David Vance, now the vice-president-elect, runs and wins in 2028, his wife, Usha Bala Chilukuri, born in 1986 in San Diego, California, will be the first First Lady of Indian origin. Her Teluguspeaking parents emigrated to the US from Andhra Pradesh.

Usha and James, who have three children, met at Yale. Perhaps she will have a moderating influence on him. In Hillbilly Elegy (2020), a film about her husband based on his memoirs, Usha was portrayed by the actress Freida Pinto.