Daily Times

After having consumed an adequate amount of roast beef sandwiches and some decent filet mignon, for want of anything better to do I have over the last few days watched a great deal of local TV. Considering my interest in politics, most of the TV programmes I watched were about the upcoming elections for the United States (US) presidency. The US election system is quite different from what we are used to in Pakistan. The most important difference is the ‘primary’ system that goes on for many months, and where every state has a local election to determine which presidential candidate is its favourite. These primary elections award ‘delegates’ based on votes received, and that then determines the person that will go on to represent the two major parties in the general election come November. These state-by-state elections will be over sometime in June of this year, and by then both the Republican and the Democratic parties will most likely have decided upon their candidate. The reason why I say most likely is that there exists a serious possibility that in the Republican Party, no one person will have won a majority of delegates through the primary election process. This could then lead to a ‘contested’ convention’. What that is, is something worth writing about if and when it happens.

On the Democratic side the primary election is between Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Hillary Clinton, former first lady, US senator and US Secretary of State. Sanders is putting up a serious challenge to Clinton but previous primary results and polling about future primary contests suggest that Clinton will most likely win enough delegates to become the Democratic candidate for president. On the Republican side, Donald Trump is ahead in the number of delegates won over past primaries but there seems to be a strong anti-Trump movement in the Republican Party that could deny Trump a majority of delegates over the remaining primary elections. As mentioned above I have spent much of my time in the US watching TV news and from what I have seen and heard it would seem that Trump is clearly the reincarnation of Mussolini if not of Satan. Here I must confess that I have not watched or listened to TV channels or talk radio that supports Trump. Sanders — for some in the left wing of the Democratic Party — is perhaps a mixture of Lenin and a biblical prophet. But even Trump’s most avid supporters do seem to not impute any positive divine attributes to him.

What seems to be driving many US political pundits as well as those elsewhere entirely batty is the continuing popularity of Trump among voters. Trump has lost a few primary contests but generally he has done quite well so far. Before every primary contest in a new state, Republican Party ‘establishment’ as well as many in the press start predicting that Trump will suffer a rejection by voters that he will not be able to recover from. That has been a recurrent hope that has frequently been dashed in the past. As a liberal I, of course, oppose Trump, and as a Muslim I am particularly horrified by his anti-Muslim statements and his generally anti-immigrant stand. That said, I can also truly understand why Trump has found so much support within the Republican Party as well as in the general public. We can bring up many issues like loss of jobs, an inadequate recovery, and unequal distribution of wealth and stagnant wages that can explain support for Trump’s vitriolic brand of populism.

Most polls have suggested that a bit more than 20 percent of the US population believes that President Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. As far as I am concerned, these are the people that form Trump’s support base, but his support at present does seem to extend beyond this group. Trump supporters are definitely ‘angry’ at what is happening in America but more than anything else they are angry about the fact that Obama was elected president of the US not once but twice. Indeed there is a definite undercurrent of racism involved. Of course, most supporters of the Republican Party, and especially of Trump, will deny any racist motivation. The fact remains that among many people in the southern states of the US (the old Confederacy), and among a certain strata of white Americans elsewhere, racism is alive and well though it goes by different names in different places. Sadly, racist ideas among these groups have hardened during the tenure of the first African American president in US history. Whether we will see a change after Obama leaves the White House is difficult to predict at this time. Here I would like to make an important point especially for my readers. Racism or not, Obama won the presidency of the United States twice and by a majority of votes cast. Clearly, a majority of Americans are decent people and racism is not a part of their political ideology.

So what makes a proto-fascist like Donal Trump thrive in American politics? There exists a significant number of people in the US that find Trump an attractive candidate. Many different points of view have emerged to explain the Trump ‘phenomenon’. The next few months will demonstrate the depth of Trump’s support. Whether Trump gets the Republican nomination or not, and if he does what happens to him in the general election remains to be seen but for many years the rise of Trump will be discussed and studied. Many have thought that the US political system was immune to the rise of populist demagogues. We will find out whether that is still true. There might be some early indications that the Trump support has peaked, but then many of us thought the same in the past. Also what makes Trump run for president is an interesting question that will be examined extensively in the future.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)