The meltdown over Donald Trump’s victory is no surprise. Some people were sent hysterical by the man.
In the hours following his win, my Facebook feed was full of friends in various levelsof distress because “misogyny is back”. One colleague was “frightened”. A friend of a friend needed consoling.
One person warned me Trump was a danger. Why?, I asked.
Because, came the reply, he would take the world to the brink of war.
At this stage, the brink of war would frankly be preferable to what’s actually happening in the world, which is that we have two wars under way.
Both of which run the risk of growing into something bigger.
The Trump hysteria seems a little irrational. Sure, he’s talked big, threatening tariffs, promising to end the Ukraine war, suggesting Israel strike Iran’s nuclear sites.
But Trump’s a big mouth. He hasn’t done everything he’s warned before. It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s bluff.
Sure, Trump started the trade war with China. But Biden kept it going. And Biden ramped it up by slapping a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. On the trade score, these two are even – as bad as each other.
The four years under Trump were actually better for global peace than the four years under Biden. Under Trump, no new wars were started.
Under Biden, two new wars with frightening implications were started: the invasion of Ukraine and the Middle East conflict. Both pushed up prices in NZ.
The relative peace under Trump was no accident. It happened because he’s unpredictable.
As with any good dealmaker, no one is quite sure how he will react. So no one pushed the boundaries. He’s not a regular, predictable, establishment world leader like those before or after him.
That’s why Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia during the George W Bush years, then invaded Crimea during the Barack Obama years, did nothing during the Trump years, and went back to his shenanigans, invading Ukraine during the Biden years.
Trump agreed to the Afghanistan withdrawal and kept it orderly.
Biden stuffed it up terribly, and undermined US credibility.
If history is anything to go by, Trump may actually be the better bet for keeping peace.
Donald Trump may actually be the better bet than Joe Biden for keeping peace. Photo / AFP
If there’s a lesson to be taken from Trump’s massive win this week, it’s that hysterical warnings about the bloke don’t work anymore, if they ever did.
That was almost all Kamala Harris did in the last weeks of her campaign: warn what a bad man that convicted felon and dangerous-talking Donald Trump was.
Voters didn’t care. They picked the orange guy over her in staggering numbers.
Why they did that, we don’t really know.
Maybe voters preferred his plan for the economy over hers. Maybe it didn’t matter who the governing party was, they were going to get punished for inflation no matter what they said. Maybe it was an anti-woke vote. Maybe it was an anti-illegal immigration vote. Maybe it’s all of the above and more.
We won’t really know for weeks or months, until the data can be analysed.
But what we do know is that whatever it was, Trump being a bad man didn’t matter. Voters either didn’t care at all, or they held their noses because they cared about other stuff more.
In a way, this is a triumph for democracy. Political nerds constantly whinge that politics has become too much about personality over policy. This would suggest otherwise.
Trump has an awful personality. He’s a crook, a liar, a brag, and unfaithful to his wife.
Kamala Harris seems really nice. But his personality didn’t lose him the election and hers didn’t win it. It came down to something else, whatever it was.
All of which is to say, the hysteria over Trump is somewhat unfounded and ineffective. Yeah, he’s a bad guy. But he won. And he might actually be better than the last guy.
