Even if Trump loses

Today is the great day, the historical day in which America chooses between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The wait will be over after the sun has set, when every American will know who will be the person in the White House. Although in most polls Hillary has the lead over Trump, the winner will not be decided by the popular vote, but will be chosen by an anachronic Electoral College where, once more, Florida will play an important role. It must be reminded that today, just as in 2000, the man who won by a majority of the popular vote, Al Gore, was not the one who became president, precisely because of the undemocratic Electoral College that still gives an enormous and even unfair advantage to just a few states over all others, a chink in the armor of a republic that has long claimed to be a democratic example for the rest of the world.

A famous motto during the times of Nazi Germany, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” (“Germany, Germany above all else”),  is essentially the same thing as Donald Trump’s motto "Make America Great Again". It should be clarified that the German phrase is actually the first stanza of a song, a song which as a matter of fact became the national anthem of Germany since 1922 and thus predated the rise of National Socialism to power.

It is commonly believed by many in America that Adolf Hitler, the well known German dictator, seized power without popular support and ruled Germany without popular support, against the will of many Germans who could not oppose his iron fist. This would put the blame solely on one man for all the atrocities such as the Holocaust that were carried out under his rule, with most of the Germans of that era remaining innocent and blameless for the actions of a single man. However, it is an historical fact that Hitler could not have gotten to where he got without the support of many, and we are not talking merely the support of his closest collaborators such as Goebbels and Himmler. He had ample popular support. Nowadays it defies the most basic common sense and logic how a man who had clearly laid out his views and plan of action in his manifesto Mein Kampf was not be taken seriously at his word by the Germans who adored him. Donald Trump’s incendiary, racist, scapegoating rhetoric is frighteningly reminiscent of the hate-filled rantings of Adolph Hitler. Both men should never have had a chance, not even remote, of becoming the rulers of their countries. But with the support of many Germans, Hitler was able to accomplish his main goal, and Trump is getting closer and closer to realizing his own goal.

Just like Hitler, Trump has the ability to convince people, especially unemployed and underemployed Americans, that he can bring them out of their misery. The USA is barely coming out of the Great Recession, a prolonged period which by the way was brought about not by a Democratic president but by a Republican president, an economic slump surpassing another economic recession in the 1980s brought about by yet another Republican president which is only topped by the Great Depression (yes, a Republican was in the White House when the US economy crashed), but Trump has been able to convince many that he and he alone can turn the USA into an Utopian paradise. Back in the 1920s, we find that it was a period of extreme economic hardship for Germany, and just like many Americans today they could believe anyone who could be very convincing. The German people were disoriented by the World War I as they could never imagine Germany losing. They badly sought answers for the defeat and one young lad convinced them that he had all the answers. Just like Trump has done today.

Leaders don’t get selected for the diplomas and work experiences during the tough times. It is actually a disadvantage to have high pedigree and conventional backgrounds in those periods. In tough times, people go for unconventional leaders as they believe that the conventional leaders failed to deliver. Thus, his lack of degrees and strong professional career is not an impediment. And one thing that has characterized the Trump appeal is his anti establishment stance. It is a proper time to recall that, at the end of Vietnam war, oil crisis, Watergate and Iran refugee crisis in 1970s, US elected two unconventional leaders, Carter and Reagan, outsiders who were thought of as an antidote to the prevailing rot in politics. Here Hitler had a very precise advantage. He was an outsider, not part of the establishment, and he was mesmerizing. People wanted to believe what he said was right. Although he was an Austrian, he was always impressed of Germany, fought for Germany and many Germans didn’t realize he was an Austrian.

With his xenophobic rhetoric and his racist remarks, starting off with the Mexicans against whom he has promised to build a separating wall, Trump has shown to every American what he is made of. His negative traits that recall similarities with some questionable figures from the past should have kept him at the very bottom of the Republican candidates who aspired to become the next president in 2017. And his similarities to Hitler himself are well known to many. Yet he trumped them all, with the support of his tens of thousands of supporters, hijacking the Republican party for himself with the help of his many supporters and managing to become elected in the primaries as the Republican candidate for the presidency.

The squashing of the Republican party by a demagogue who has resorted to many lies in such important issues as unemployment, who has made a commitment of tearing up trade agreements that may become impossible to bring back one destroyed, and whose backers who nowadays have jobs may end up in the unemployment lines, all these things have been considered by the so called pundits as things that should have kept the Trump phenomenon as something limited to the entrails of the Republican party, something that would fizzle once the actual presidential race got started. But yet again, Trump defied has defied all the odds, and in the eve of the presidential election there are some who actually give him a possibility of having a shot at taking over the White House.

By tomorrow, Donald Trump could very well be president elect of the USA. The surprising results of the Brexit vote in England where all the forecasts predicted a rejection of Brexit, and the surprising defeat of the Colombian peace deal painfully hammered out between a Nobel prize winner and the FARC guerrillas that proved the expectations of most all analysts wrong, are sore reminders that people do not necessarily and overwhelmingly vote for the most logical choice. But what if he loses? Could that be the end of one of the most remarkable flukes in the political history of the US?

Not by a long shot.

Trump’s claims that the election is rigged and his refusal to accept defeat in case he loses are already setting a fire that may not be quelled in case Trump is defeated. There are experts who believe that his accusations alone could inflict long-standing damage on the US political system itself by eroding trust in the probity of the electoral process, eroding the credo of American democracy that has rested on the cherished principle that the transfer of power from an outgoing president to a successor was widely seen as legitimate and the possibility of fraud was not even mentioned. Electoral fraud used to be something that took place in third world countries, but not in the USA.

Trump has awakened a monster, the monster that in the past used to hide behind the flag of the Confederacy and the cross burning rallies of the KKK. He has shown all his followers that it is alright to be a racist, it is alright to be a woman hater, it is alright to be a liar, it is alright to be demagogue, it is alright to be a xenophobe, for all these traits are no longer an obstacle to anyone who aspires to become president. As a matter of fact, as Trump himself has shown by his example, an individual who has all these traits in his persona may actually end up gathering hundreds of thousands of followers as extremist and as blind as he is. And these Trump followers, with their base instincts awakened and human rationality thrown overboard, are not likely to go home and give up on the crazy dream Trump has given them. The very least that can be expected is a fractured society.

A man such as Trump was not supposed to get this far. He was once considered as the most unlikely candidate to seize the nomination of the Republican party for the presidency. Nearly one century ago, neither was Hitler. They were considered as small insignificant threats, nothing to worry about, and yet history is proving that in politics anything can happen, anything.

So, even if Trump loses, a horrible genie may have been let loose out of the bottle, a genie that even Trump himself may be unable to control, much less put it back inside the bottle.

But what if he ends up winning?

Well, for starters, if Trump ends up winning, those Germans descending from the generation that hailed Hitler in his rallies and backed him up in his seizure of absolute power and who have been bedeviled ever since by the entire world with the perpetual reminder and reprimand “Shame on you”, could very well end up looking back to America saying to Americans exactly the same thing: “Shame on you”.

And then what?

That’s where more history books remain to be written. We will soon find out.