Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, and campaign CEO Steve Bannon, on a tour of Gettysburg National Military Park, October 2016. Evan Vucci/Press Association. All rights reserved. In spite of all the assertions to the contrary, neither Donald Trump nor the Republican Party has won a mandate in this election. In no other civilized democracy does the person who loses the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes get to declare himself the winner. Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory was larger than that by which JFK beat Nixon. The only reason Trump won was because of the convention of the electoral college: a convention that, in today’s demographic scenario, is racist, disproportionately privileging the electoral influence of white-majority states. This is very different from the Indian scenario in 2014, where Narendra Modi did win a mandate with large swathes of young, upwardly mobile voters supporting his reactionary agenda.
The youth in the United States don’t support Trump; people of color in in the US don’t support Trump; the majority of women don’t support Trump. Those, like Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who now hail Trump as “their” President whom they do not want to see fail, are normalizing a stolen election. They are abdicating their responsibility as stewards of representative democracy.
Similarly, those on the left who have spent their energies these past weeks blaming Hillary Clinton instead of venting their anger on the thieves who stole this election should be ashamed of themselves. Six months after the end of the primaries, there are those who still vent that Clinton stole the primary from Bernie Sanders – a primary that Clinton won by 3 million votes. Six weeks after the general election, many of those same people don’t seem similarly angry that Trump stole the election from Clinton – an election that Clinton won by 3 million votes. Perhaps in America, one has to lose an election by 3 million votes to be recognized as a representative of the people? (In my country, India, it’s the other way around).
