BY THE TIME you read this, all of the important appointments in the new Trump administration will have been made, and the shape of the disaster that awaits us will be clear. Maybe the new president never did, as New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz suggested, appoint cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. But with the appointment of fast-food mogul Andrew Puzder as secretary of labor, vulture capitalist Wilbur Ross as secretary of commerce, and Wall Street vampire Steven Mnuchin as secretary of treasury, Trump certainly spit in the face of the low-income white voters who put him over the top in the industrial Midwest.
Which brings us back to the recurring question: Why did so many blue-collar white people vote for a greedy, self-dealing billionaire in the first place? One answer is that Trump very effectively pushed the buttons of racial resentment (mostly about immigrants and Muslims) that are especially sensitive in less-educated, white areas. There is certainly something to that theory. But it doesn’t account for the fact that, as New York Times polling whiz Nate Cohn has noted, “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters.”
I would argue instead that Trump won primarily because he finally named the shadow that has hung, unacknowledged, over American life for at least the past 25 years: globalism. On June 28, 2016, during one of candidate Trump’s rare attempts to stay on message and give a serious public policy statement, he said, “Today, we import nearly $800 billion more in goods than we export. This is not some natural disaster. ... It is the consequence of a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.”
As the old saying goes, “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” You don’t have to buy into his definition of “Americanism” to acknowledge that when Trump talks about international trade deals that serve the interests of a global elite at the expense of workers, he is right. This is the essential truth about the U.S. economy that the corporate media and establishment politicians of both parties have connived to conceal for decades. So 2016 was the year that the American people finally heard somebody say it: Bernie Sanders said it in the Democratic primaries, and they voted for him in numbers that surprised even the candidate himself. Donald Trump said it all year and, despite his many disqualifying flaws, they made him their president.
Hillary Clinton was once a good woman who wanted to do good things for her country, and she probably still is in many ways. But when she was First Lady, her husband led the fight for NAFTA ratification, gave favored trading status to China, and deregulated Wall Street; in the years since, she has never disowned that legacy. Later, as secretary of state, she paved the way for the now-dead Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, and out of office she amassed a vast personal fortune giving secret speeches to her colleagues in the global elite. Meanwhile, wages for U.S. workers continued to stagnate or decline, as they have for decades, and a plague of despair spread across the middle of the country.
Donald Trump doesn’t deserve to be our president. His personal behavior and his business conflicts of interest alone should constitute impeachable offenses. But Hillary Clinton deserved to lose.
If we are lucky and we do our jobs as citizens, the Trump era may be brief. But the truth about corporate globalization is now out there, and it can never be covered up again. In addition, thanks to the Sanders campaign, a mass constituency and funding base for economic, racial, social, and environmental justice has been mobilized. Paradoxically enough, the long-term outlook for fundamental social change in the U.S. may be better than ever.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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