Let me put it bluntly. It feels as if the asshole of America just unclenched and took a giant dump on the world.

What else can it possibly mean when a country that voted twice in a row for a black man for President just chose a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate? If Barack Obama was meant to symbolise his country inching to a “post-racial” America, now it has basically elected a “birther”, once dismissed as the paranoia of kooky ultra-rightwingers. Alt-right can hardly be called “alternative” when it is moving into the White House. It cannot get more mainstream than that.

At the end of this election America will have to look into the mirror and wonder what it stands for anymore. The contrast was always clear. When the crowd at an Obama rally booed that man in a military uniform with a Trump sign, Obama shushed them and said the man had the right to support his candidate, and his military uniform demanded respect. Trump took that moment and spun it into a flaming lie saying Obama had gone unhinged on his supporters. It was so outrageous, so easily disproven, that it was ludicrous. No rational person could fail to see through that.


Yet it did not matter. That’s when you realised the terrifying truth. It was not about rationality and reasoning and winning debates. Clinton did all that and in spades. She ran an election campaign with few gaffes, while Trump blew up every other day on Twitter. She raised the money, she had the ground game, she had the party behind her, she followed all the conventional rules.


What we saw in this election is what Pressthink described as a “retreat from empiricism”. It quotes philosopher John Stanley as trying to explain why Donald Trump could go from strength to strength, even though it was clear he was just making up facts as he went along.



Pressthink writes, “Stanley made the point that fact checking Trump in a way missed the point. Trump was not trying make reference to reality in what he said to win votes. He was trying to substitute ‘his’ reality for the one depicted in news reports.” A nameless Bush adviser had explained this a long time ago. “We are an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too… We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Now even George W Bush is not voting for Donald Trump, but it’s too late. Trump has taken Bush’s idea of a “reality-based community” and triumphed.


It’s an anti-establishment vote, absolutely. Hillary Clinton was the ultimate example of the establishment. The Republican establishment too stands humbled and humiliated and must now come to King Trump on bended knee.


It’s an anti-media vote, for sure. Almost no major newspaper endorsed Trump. Even papers who had not endorsed a Democrat in decades, said Trump was unqualified to be President, a danger. The electorate gave them the finger.


Chetan Bhagat tweets "I saw @nytimes and @HuffingtonPost lose balance and go all out in Trump hate. If you so clever and right, why don't people listen to you?"


Trump's success does not make Trump's views right. Bhagat mistakes winning for being right. Civil rights would have lost at the ballot box as well in America. But that's cold comfort to the loser.
This was not just a repudiation of just Hillary Clinton. It was a repudiation of what America had stood for in the imagination of so many, including mine, despite its long and ugly history of slavery and imperialism. This was a repudiation of the “I have a dream” America. This was a repudiation of Black Lives Matter. This was a repudiation of shattering the glass ceiling. This was a repudiation of melting pot America. If the preliminary numbers of voting breakdown are right it will look like a civil war happened at the ballot box.