Tanbou Commentary on the Reelection of Donald Trump

The deadly mixture of racism, sexism, xenophobia, greed, and alienation has carried the day in the United States presidential election of 2024. If I were organizing a presidential contest of candidates who don’t want to be president, there wouldn’t be a better candidate than Donald Trump. He had done everything necessary to disqualify him or to make him unattractive to the voters. The Vanity Fair magazine cover of November 6, 2024 says it all: “34 Felony Counts, One Conviction, 2 Cases Pending, 2 Impeachments, 6 Bankruptcies, 4 More Years, The 47th American President.” Without mentioning the litany of insults and vulgarities Trump spread around against his opponents up to the last day of the campaign.

Many media outlets, including the New York Times and CNN, have designated the economy or inflation as the main cause of Trump’s triumph. It’s hard to believe that, considering that Trump and his campaign have offered no serious proposals to attract the voters beside proclaiming the word “tariff” repeatedly, which the candidate called “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Unmindful that many economists have warned that the extreme tariffs Trump threatens would most likely be inflationary. In fact, while the economy’s negative effects are real among the working class and the most disadvantaged, its overall performance has been relatively moderate by comparative measurement coming out of the Covid pandemic; the inflation has rather stabilized during the six months preceding the election. In brief, the economy has been used as a pretext to hide most innermost, often heinous, emotions behind the pro-Trump vote. I would presume that a huge number of the Trump voters would have benefitted from the economic policies advocated by the Harris campaign.

Evidently, people’s emotions and willingness for change were being manipulated with great success by the Trumpian propaganda machine, aided by Elon Musk and his 2 billion subscribers on X (formerly known as Twitter), that are being fed a copious menu of conspiracy theories and outright lies—not to mention foreign services using manipulative techniques to instill fear and mutual hatred among the US populations.

The fabricated stories about Haitians eating dogs and cats, Venezuelans’ so-called powerful gangs that are sowing terror in US-American cities and villages, invasions by hordes of menacing immigrants, etc., all help foster an environment of fear of the Other that says as much about the country as the disseminators of such falsehoods.

On November 6, half of the country woke up with the horrific realization of a looming Trump presidency, with its specters of oppression and retribution. For immigrants living in the US, there is a sense of betrayal, as they ask themselves how this harbor for the despairing, the recipient of their most ideal aspirations, founded by conquerors, religious fanatics and refugees from life’s hardships alike, could let this happen?

I was quite taken aback in 2020 to see so many more US-Americans still voting for Trump after he had proved his incompetence and his blatant disregard vis-à-vis the rule of law; this feeling was amplified after noticing the ease with which he was able to defeat many other Republican presidential candidates during the 1924 primaries. Naturally, this apprehension reaches nightmarish proportions today, in the actualization of his being reelected as the 47th president.

Although the choice of a candidate who advocates such an open preference for hateful methods and ideology says as much about the country and its voters, on another level I understand how people from the working and downtrodden classes may have voted for Trump as a rejection of a sociopolitical system that has let them down, creating illusory value systems that devalue both their productive and existential worth. For these voters, Trump is a vehicle, an instrument to get back at a system that excludes and exploits them. The lyrical expressions and exhortations to “save democracy” the Democrats lavished on the electorate didn’t mean anything to them; they would vote for the Devil himself if it gave them leverage to stick it to what they perceive as the “elites”, the urban and suburban educated and techno-financial classes that control the economy and big parts of the mass media. In the past, many of those working class electors might have voted Communist.

There are also, of course, influential voters and donors of the wealthy, billionaire class, motivated exclusively by greed and the imperative of control and power; for them, ethics, the suffering of Others, the graciousness of civic duties, generosity toward another human being, have no value at all. The fight for change must be directed toward those. For the others, political education and a praxis of what I would call humanist engagement—advocacy for a better world, for better schools, better medical coverage, care for the environment, comradery with neighbors, and so forth—would be a good approach.

The discourse of multiethnicity and of inclusion espoused by Kamala Harris and her campaign rang hollow when they refused to let Palestinian representatives address the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, while allowing Israeli representatives to do so. This throwing cold water on the “joyful” ambiance by the campaign could have been one of the consequential ‘missed opportunities’ that the Democrats failed to recognize. Showing respect and some kind of solidarity toward a people facing ongoing genocide by a powerful army—while respecting US obligations to its alliance with Israel—would have been the right thing to do.

No, it’s not just economic anxiety alone that explains the embrace by the electorate of Trump’s imbecilic non-program that relied on fear, exploitation of people’s hardships, hatred of “different” human beings, male dominance, patriarchal prerogatives, and the super-rich’s immorality and greed.

It’s not economic anxiety alone that made people choose, faced with a binary choice between a highly qualified woman—Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024—and “the most unqualified man”—Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024—1 voted for the latter, ignoring all factors of disqualification, like vulgarities, demeaning of others, sowing race hatred, cause of physical and emotional harm to vulnerable people, etc. These are all traits a healthy citizenry wouldn’t normally want in its president. Seeing the contrary, that’s when alienation comes into play.

To the Trump voters, I would say, perhaps you should reconsider how you accomplish your civic duty of voting, how it should relate to the plight of your community, to its longing for better conditions of living for all, toward its complétude, its completeness of being. Alienation is not a form of virtue. To use a metaphor of the great Haitian poet and storyteller Jean-Claude Martineau, let’s all root for the bull to eventually recognize there’s someone behind the toreador’s red cape, and that it: Was in the end only an instrument / In a last effort of its eyes / Veiled in dust and blood / The bull discovers the toreador.2

Indeed, behind the red cape there are the architects of Project 2025, who want to overhaul the entire US federal system to benefit a retrograde political ideology. In this respect, the reelection of Donald Trump may mark a departure from a democratic capitalism with the presumption of civic good to that of an instinctual capitalism, society’s being subjected to the whims of billionaires and their minions of the political class.

After the election, once again, I resort to the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners—Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) to comprehend the United States of 2024: How ordinary people, accustomed to democratic rule and principles, can choose fascism by means of free choice and agency. This irony is evident in Donald Trump’s reelection. It shows the activation, the actualization of the excellence of manipulative techniques in real time. It shows how a mediocre TV character, hyped up by the media, and expertly packaged as agent of change, can create illusory inferences that impose on reality to the point of electing him president of the United States!

We are certainly far from the European pogroms of 1930–1940s, but it is wise to remember that ordinary people can contribute to the ordinary process of evil: “[T]hey could slaughter whole populations—especially populations that are by any objective evaluation not threatening—out of conviction,’ as Daniel J. Goldhagen observes in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, lamenting that “the historical record, from ancient times to the present, amply testifies to the ease with which people can extinguish the lives of others, and take joy in their deaths.”3. Mass deportation, mass induction of pain or mass dehumanization, is not that far from mass extermination, after all: it sometimes starts with the first (one of President-elect Trump’s campaign promises).

It’s not just the immigrants who feel the trepidation of this election. Gays, trans people, women of all races, the majority of people of color, as well. Women of all races in this country see in it the assault against their reproductive rights, the patriarchal machismo and misogyny in action. Black women, who saw Harris’s candidacy as a conduit to breaking both the sexist and the racial glass ceiling, feel devastated by the idea of a Trump administration. Waikinya Clanton, founder of the organization Black Women for Kamala said to a New York Times reporter: “This isn’t a loss for Black women, it’s a loss for the country. America has revealed to us her true self, and we have to decide what we do with her from here.”4

What to do with her is to engage in civic questioning, willing to tell truth to power, participating in the collective discourse, in the pursuit of humanist finality. Many may feel the election is the end of a road. Even in the worst-case scenario where Trump would institute a dictatorship, I would remind people that there is always life during and after a dictatorship, or any authoritarian regime for that matter.

History—as the history of United States itself attests—is cyclical, with good and bad times, but the sun always returns to the horizon, always open to new possibilities, new ways to realize the future while enjoying the present, with all its contingencies and spaces for grace.

As I wrote in a poem lamenting yet another Trump triumph eight years ago, there’s always space for hope:

A democratic election can go right or left
But the struggle for a better world is an on-going pursuit.
Our aspirations will remain
As long as our dreams live on;

.......

The struggle for a better life is our collective fate,
And life offers always an opportunity to reinvent our being.
We must not return to the darkness of years past;
Our path to the beauty of being together remains illuminating.5

Et la vie continue.

—Tontongi for Tanbou,12 November, 2024

Footnotes

1.	MSNBC news anchor Joy Reid made this point on November 6, 2024, the day after the election.
2.	Jean-Claude Martineau, a.k.a. Koralen, Flè Dizè, (Boston 1978). Our translation from Haitian.
3.	Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners—Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
4.	Erica Green and Maya King, “For Black Women, ‘America Has Revealed to Us Her True Self”, (New York Times, November 7, 2024)
5.	Last part of my poem “A Word of Wisdom to the Disappointed Voters” written in the wake of Hilary Clinton’s defeat and Trump’s triumph in the November 8, 2016 presidential election.