Justin Smith offers his thoughts on Donald Trump being elected president
Democracy, huh? What are you gonna do?
While there are people cheering the elevation of Trump, and others almost vomiting with anxiety, we know a lot more today than we did last week.
We now know the polls and the old systems aren’t worth a thimble full of koala wee.
The words we read and the numbers we followed had very little to do with reality.
The shaking of the political establishment is a positive thing.
There have been too many smart-arsed pollsters, political operatives, and backroom thinkers running elections across the world.
This might do the system some good.
The negative is it got a preening, pouting, hating bogan elected as the most powerful man in the world.
And the most powerful American president in the last 50-years thanks to his party’s majority in the Congress and Senate.
I have a friend who put her 10-year old to bed and got asked ‘Is this bad for us?’.
She doesn’t know what to tell him.
And another mate who says he hasn’t felt this way since the Twin Towers came down.
The reactions are extreme but real, and there’s nothing made up party-political about the fear that the result has generated.
Even if we have Australians like Pauline Hanson gulping bubbly for their new hero, the rest feel like America was texting while driving and ran over a small child.
And the real sadness doesn’t come from Trump winning, it comes from the thought of so many people needing him to hate for them.
Trump was just responding to his own nature and doing what he’s always done – working the system to make money for himself and promote his brand.
It’s the people who bit in so hard and swallowed the lot that are the worry.
I don’t care if it was democracy.
It doesn’t automatically make it right.
But I don’t cry for Hillary or her party.
She wasn’t good enough to be president and they should have worked to get a better candidate.
She was good at the standard political talk, but had no plan to fix the gun culture.
She smiled a lot, but had no hope of fixing the cost of health care.
And she had experience, but she carried around that email scandal like a neck goitre the size of a cricket ball.
They all said she was going to romp it – and Australians had little doubt – but in reality, we don’t have the first clue about American voting habits.
We probably know more about the moons of Jupiter.
We’re given the New York Times’ version, but that’s not the America ‘from sea to shining sea’.
And it’s not the America that backed Trump.
But it’s not all bad.
The President-elect gave a very good acceptance speech – something us critics didn’t think he was capable of.
And from hate and division can come great things.
Sometimes we need to see other people suffering and left out before we understand the real damage it does.
And incredible leaders have emerged when the rest of their country took the popular way.
I hope they find one.
jsmith@3aw.com.au – @justinsmith3AW