Trump as US President?

Before 2016 I never thought someone like Donald Trump could become US president. It was also unimaginable then that American democracy would be in crisis. In the middle of the 2016 Republican primary season, I attended a Bible study meeting in Australia. Before the meeting started we chatted about the news. I was asked if Trump could become American president (I was the only one present who spent years in America). I replied without hesitancy: “Trump had no chance.” I knew US politics reasonably well. I still paid attention to major US political developments although not in detail. In the US, a general election usually involves well-known politicians: governor of a big state, senior senator, senior minister, etc. When Obama and Bill Clinton ran, many questioned their lack of experience (one was a first-term senator and the other a small state governor). Trump had never run any public office before. How could he possibly win? In addition, I was not impressed by his mean attack on other candidates in primaries. 

The election of Donald Trump was a shock to me, and to many others as well. I remember right after the 2016 election former speaker Paul Ryan said something like: There is a voice in the wild that no one paid attention to. Trump did. But I still did not understand why and its meanings. At the time my main concern was International Relations (IR). In the meantime, I kept the Trump question in mind. Gradually I began to understand that there are two problems. One is globalization. A key Democrat constituency are blue-collar workers. Many Chinese mistake the American middle-class to be all white-collar workers. Most middle-class Americans are in fact blue-collar workers. There is data that shows globalization greatly improved the size and living standard of the middle-class in developing nations (including China). In contrast, the living standard of the middle-class in developed nations was stagnant. Some even lost their jobs. These are supported by [1] and a book by Victor D Hanson. I have not had a chance to study them in detail. However, news reports seem to corroborate them. 

Another major factor is culture. Late famous political scientist Samuel Huntington’s last book before he passed away is Who Are We? [2]. This book was controversial and I have written a commentary [3]. WaPo has published an op-ed on Samuel Huntington [4]. It is not particularly illuminating but shows the Trump era is related to Hunting’s book, which I agree to a certain extent.  Globalization and immigration have negatively impacted middle class Americans’ lives which were not their own fault. Political elites did not see these changes (there are other changes as well but they are not as important). 

References: 

1. Jeffrey Rubin, The expendables : how the middle class got screwed by globalisation, Random House Canada. 

2. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, Simon & Schuster, 2005.  

3. On Race Politics in America  https://jiahan1.wixsite.com/my-site-1/post/on-race-politics-in-america  

4. Samuel Huntington, a prophet for the Trump era. Washington Post, 18 July 2017.