World reactions
The BBC tells us about some world media reactions to the election of The Pussygrabber.
Media across the world have reacted to Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election with a mixture of shock, disbelief and anxiety. There is also a large measure of uncertainty as to what the future holds.
In the US some heavyweight papers have published leader articles that are unprecedented in their contempt for the future president.
The New York Times says Mr Trump “is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history” and “has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people”.
The Washington Post sees little cause for optimism about the vote, recalling that Trump “has promised to deport millions, rip up trade agreements and international efforts to fight climate change, each of which would hurt many people”.
The Los Angeles Times asks in its editorial “How did that happen?” The paper says “the campaign, and the candidate, played to the worst in America, and it has left the electorate scarred”.
The election of a misogynist racist ignorant narcissistic hatemonger has no silver lining then?
The Miami Herald says in an editorial: “The losers, still stunned, must acknowledge that Mr Trump managed to read the mood of much of the country better than they did, tapping into the frustrations of people who had come to believe that the government was no longer working on their behalf or even understood their problems.”
Oh horseshit. Trump appealed to racism and hatred because that’s who he is. People voted for him because that’s who they are. There’s no connection between people’s belief that the government isn’t working on their behalf and voting for Trump. Trump isn’t going to work on their behalf. He’s a very rich thief and cheat, and he thinks everyone who isn’t also a very rich thief and cheat is a Loser. That’s not understanding people’s problems, it’s dismissing them with contempt.
“How could this happen?” is a similar headline on the website of German daily Die Welt. It says Trump is as “unpredictable as a hurricane”.
The main German public service news programme Tagesschau tries to provide an answer, saying Trump “owes his electoral victory mainly to white male voters” who voted for “the political outsider”.
The French business daily Les Echos is forthright in its assessment: “Racist, populist, male chauvinist, arrogant and unpredictable. We do not know what is most terrifying in the personality of Donald Trump.”
The Washington correspondent of Spain’s El Pais stresses that Trump “goes to the White House with massive support from white voters discontented with elites”.
If they don’t like elites it wasn’t very clever to vote for Trump. Ignorant racist bullying isn’t the antonym of “elite.”
Papers in Italy agree, with La Stampa seeing the result as “a hurricane of discontent” that comes “from the belly of the nation”.
Russia’s state-run rolling-news TV channel Rossiya 24 carried Trump’s victory speech live instead of its 0800 gmt news bulletin.
The station aired an animated graphic, showing Trump dancing ecstatically and making faces at Clinton, who is sitting despondently.
“The epic defeat of Hillary Clinton… is a resounding slap from the people to the US political elite” is how the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta paper sees it. “No less resounding than the slap that Britons earlier gave to their authorities at the referendum on EU membership”.
Uh huh. It’s also a “resounding slap” (or a blow to the head with a brick) from the people to the poor, the non-white, the female, the foreign, the non-straight, the disabled, the non-cheaters – to the intellectuals, the artists, the eccentric, the teachers and bus drivers and nurses, the gardeners and house cleaners and fast food workers. None of those people make up the real elite.
Latin American newspapers are surprised but also anxious about the news.
A front-page opinion piece on Argentina’s Clarin calls Donald Trump “an emerging neo-fascist”.
“The phenomenon is not a one-off,” it continues. “It correlates with many European ultra-nationalist figures, and is growing at a serious moment for the world.”
Other than that…
You need to check out your midwestern and southern angry white male dictionary. The definition of elite is “anyone with a bigger vocabulary” and “anyone who is able to recognize that Donald Trump is an ignorant, racist, sexist bully”.
Fair enough, but shouldn’t the actual media be using a more standard definition? Shouldn’t the actual media avoid buying into that horrible definition?
Looking at you NPR.
Yeah, I know. Elite used to refer to people who managed to have a lot more money, often without working for it. It didn’t mean people who had worked to educate themselves and now work to help educate others. I’m not sure why the media never does anything to correct the misimpression – but then, they don’t correct the misimpressoin that Hillary Clinton is a radical leftist, or that churches are allowed to do most of what they want and atheists are fine with that as long as they do it in their own space with their own money, etc. Media just reports what people want to hear, and my mother, for instance, would tune in much quicker for a media that called someone like me an “elite”, and made it a dirty word, then for someone who might point out to her that the people she revered, the Ronald Reagans and the Richard Nixons, were much more of an elite than those she despised, like the college professors who taught me things she hated, like evolution.
I wasn’t sure which ‘aftermath’ post to say this on ,anyway-
I may be from Britain but I feel terrible about this and would just like our US cousins to know ( Not trump supporters obviously) that decent people are not laughing at you we are worried and concerned for you .
Aw thank you. I know. I have a lot of UK friends and have been talking to many of them on Facebook, so I know.
But you have every right to laugh at us as a country. We’re contemptible as a country.
Well after brexit I don’t think we can claim any moral high ground. Just like us you have just found out that the population of contemptible’s that you always knew were there is larger than you thought.
Exactly, to quote Stephan Lewandowsky…
Here is part of Angela Merkel’s congratulations to Trump.
“Please accept my congratulations on your election as President of the United States of America.
… Germany and America are bound by common values — democracy, freedom, as well as respect for the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. It is based on these values that I wish to offer close cooperation, both with me personally and between our countries’ governments.
Partnership with the United States is and will remain a keystone of German foreign policy, especially so that we can tackle the great challenges of our time: striving for economic and social well-being, working to develop far-sighted climate policy, pursuing the fight against terrorism, poverty, hunger, and disease, as well as protecting peace and freedom in the world.
…”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/09/angela-merkel-congratulates-donald-trump-kind-of/
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/angela-merkel-germany-donald-trump-us-election-warning_uk_582313c5e4b020461a1e8713
Merkel sounds like the sort of leader the 2016 Massey lecturer Jennifer Welsh (http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/masseys) says democracy needs to survive. Merkel took a big hit in popularity for her response to the refugee crisis but, if I understand Welsh correctly, understanding this the way Merkel does as a global problem is the right response for ‘liberal democracy’.
No, fucking Miami Herald. Trump tapped into 63% of the white, male, wealthy electorate. That’s what got him elected, you shitgibbons. Not “much of the country”.
Yeah, James Garnett, and the other thing the media still seems to be missing is that Hillary got more votes. Which means Trump wasn’t tapping into anything like most of the country. He was benefiting from an archaic electoral college system designed to give results like this.
‘Shouldn’t the actual media …’
What ‘actual media’ would that be? A media that would PAY actual journalists to do actual reporting? A media that might even edit and fact check, rather than cutting and pasting from PR handouts?
I see much of the handwringing (I won’t call it ‘analysis’) going on starts from the presumption that Brexit and President Pussygrabber are abberations. I see them more as culminations. A natural end result of the process started by Reagan and Thatcher of valuing selfishness more than the social good (“there’s no such thing as society”). So now we get to the point where people’s principle rationale in voting is their own sef-interest.
I’ve always tried to vote for the candidate whose policies would, in my opinion, lead to the sort of society that I’d like to live in. When I hear of people’s reason for voting to leave the EU, though, it’s all about me, me, me. *I* don’t like immigrants, the paperwork affects *me* (that one’s in for a shock if he thinks his paperwork will reduce), *I* don’t directly benefit from that EU grant, so it’s not necessary.
You get similar things from Pussygrabber voters: it’s all about them, not about the wider society.
I’ve been railing against neoliberalism for thirty-odd years, wishing for a politician to stand up and say “this is not right”. Then, when one finally appears, why did it have to be bloody Corbyn? (Don’t know enough about Sanders to comment.)
PS (echoing tiko72), I don’t think Americans are stupid for electing, any more than I think my fellow Brits are for listening to Nigel the Fascist or for voting to drive the bus over a cliff. I think we are the victims of 30+ years of an insidious, seductive, superficially successful, yet ultimately deeply corrupt, economic mistake.
Well the trouble with that is that it’s not at all clear how Trump is good for the self-interest of most of the people who voted for him.
I don’t know; I’m still trying to get my head around it all. Perhaps we have a problem understanding it because we think rationally. Perhaps he is not good for the self-interest of those who voted for him, but they don’t see it that way, because they see things viscerally.
Ah, what do I know? I’m just a biochemist turned computer programmer turned photographer turned house husband. I just want the selfishness to stop, to live in a world where the people at the top actually care about those that they govern – and not just in terms of how they can persuade them to vote for them.
Same here. That’s what’s so hideous about this – it’s naked brutality without a shred of veiling.