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Trump and the commonsense in electoral power

Nov 12, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

As I devour the news all over the world about what Donald Trump will do when he settles into the White House, a consensus is emerging that he will mellow as the years wear on and that the things we fear he will do, that he promised on the campaign trail, will never see the light of day. I disagree.
The pattern of electoral politics since elections began hundreds of years ago is that there has never been a leader who was able to implement all of the promises made. Some didn’t even get in a majority of them. That is the reality of life and it will be with life forever. No politician will ever get all his campaign desires translated into policy.
But some of the promises are worked on early in the months of power because the leader, aware of time constraints, wants to make sure there is early satisfaction among his/her constituencies. The issues that brought you to power must be given early green lights. This is commonsense in electoral power. A hypothetical example should suffice. If a government passes a law that bans all vehicles on the roads on Sundays and you defeated that government in an election in which you promised to repeal that law, you have to.
Commonsense is at work here. You came to power on the strength of that promise to cancel the law, then, you cannot survive if you do not do that. We’ve come know to Trump. It is wild thinking to believe that Trump will get through with all the desires he enunciated during the campaign. But he will implement many of them. His repertoire is full of unworkable, unpalatable things. We will be happy to see the stillbirth of many of them, but many others America will have to live with.
Several items in his arsenal will become policy. Trump will renegotiate trade deals that previous US administrations signed. Even if conclusions run beyond 2020 when the next election is due, he will start the process. It is not just an election promise to rural America where jobs have disappeared; it is the ideology in Trump that will drive him in that direction. He believes America has lost out in these trade arrangements.
Deep in his mind, Trump believes that if you scrap these trade deals, then American companies will have to restart operations in the US itself and employ American labour. Driving this particular ideology is the Freudian underpinning of race. Trump thinks that these trade arrangements have benefitted non-white people in Mexico, China, and other Third World states. So what we are talking about is a double whammy – he believes the trade patterns take away jobs from the US and provide jobs to non-white foreign countries.
Trump knows that he does not need the Latino vote, and he didn’t get the Latino vote, so he will order Homeland Security to start deporting illegal migrants. He will be uncompromising on that issue. It is self-deception for anyone to think he will put this issue on the backburner. The obsession with illegal migration is a spin-off from his trade ideology – meaning that he accepts the mirage that illegal Mexicans are taking jobs away from rural white folks. I will not dwell on the early extirpation of the Affordable Care Act, because I dealt with that in my column yesterday
In the area of foreign policy, Trump is going to create serious problems for the world. He is not an intellectual. He cannot bring deep, analytical thought to international relations. So what he is going to do is to react emotionally to controversial foreign situations. This is where Trump is going to have to juggle his campaign promises. He told his supporters that Japan, South Korea and other countries have to pay more for the security America provides them with, and if they don’t, then America will not guarantee their safety. But this feeling lies in deep contradiction with his desire to see America rule the world.
So what will face him is a contradiction that will carry a hard choice. Since he will show the world the power of the US, and since he knows he cannot do it without those very allies whose security the US bankrolls, he will drop one campaign promise so another one can be successful. He will avoid irritating American allies in exchange for their support for American military action around the world. Ignoring the consequences because of his intellectual limitations, Trump is going to flex American muscles around the world. The world should be prepared for this from 2017 onwards.

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