President Donald Trump becomes the second American in history to regain the White House after losing it, a feat last achieved in the 1880s. In a historic election, Trump, burdened with numerous criminal indictments and convictions, defied immense odds to win and become the 47th President of the United States.
It was not more about Trump winning the presidential elections but more about the Democrats losing it. The prognosis of Donald Trump’s win was generally underestimated and, at times, treated with indifference, but that is what defeated the party in power in the elections.
It is easier to place blame on President Joe Biden for stubbornly clinging to run or for Kamala Harris’s inability to strike a conversation that will resonate with the electorate or to applaud Trump for a message well recalibrated.
But this election is like most others. While personalities are amplified, voters have issues and pick a candidate whom they trust is most likely to resolve them.
It is not about personality or character, but an election is a process that seeks a problem fixer, and Trump impressed the majority of voters by fitting that bill.
He won the popular vote by over 11 million, unthinkable even a day before the elections.
True, after the midterm elections of 2020, when the Democrats stemmed a seeming loss of both houses and narrowly kept the Senate, there was a false anticipation that repeating the same wave of defiance would pay huge dividends in 2024.
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They were dead wrong. American voters were hurting because of runaway inflation, porous southern borders, and bankrolling Ukrainians and asylum seekers instead of fixing domestic problems and unemployment.
In TikTok, in particular, American voters were venting their anger and frustration about the cost of groceries, lack of mortgage bailout, and discrimination towards tuition forgiveness.
At the same time, non-college individuals were left empty-handed, allowing asylum seekers to pour in on their neighbourhood, and some were lodged into Five Star hotels.
Building the asylum seekers’ homes and providing them with food stamps, laptops, smartphones and upkeep allowances while their citizens were struggling to make ends meet.
Many voters were fed up seeing their congressional representatives quick to approve billions of dollars to fund a distant war in Ukraine but not doing the same to their people.
All these dynamics were well understood but highly underestimated by those in power. Their insensitivity to the plight of the poor did them in.
President Biden, too, made his sleek contributions to their humiliating defeat at the ballot box. His decision to linger on in the presidential race when his popularity was hovering around or below 40%. Nobody has ever kept the US presidency with such dour approval ratings.
It took a coalition of Democrat leaders and major donors who froze their donations to convince President Joe Biden that the writing was on the wall.
Either out of exasperation or loyalty to Kamala Harris, he endorsed her to run for the presidency instead of himself.
Kamala Harris had 107 days to cobble together a coalition that would propel her to the mission impossible: beating a former president who had over two years’ head start on the campaign stump and had amassed a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars was not a stroll in the park by any standard.
Trump’s message revolved around what he would do in his first hundred days. He promised to undo the Biden policies on his first day in office.
Transgender public schools will be denied public funds, or they retract their gender alteration excursions. NGOs and hospitals that were receiving federal funds to assist abortions will be cut off.
Maria Stoppe, who is also in Tanzania, is being denied federal grants to assist in family planning.
During his first term, Trump issued many similar presidential directives, which were carefully calculated to ingratiate and motivate his political base.
The aim was to encourage them to turn out in large numbers and vote him back into the White House.
Trump tapped in on the frustration and anger of those regarded as the base of the ruling party, the Democrats. He brainwashed them with many economic feel-good promises.
He promised to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants whom he blamed for upping crime rates, making America unsafe and stealing jobs from Americans.
On the first day of his sworn-in office, he will make America safe, create jobs everywhere and end the Ukrainian war. As his strategy to revamp employment opportunities in the US, he will revert to the historically failed policies of “import substitution!”
Import substitution is a policy which is accompanied by tariffs on imports.
It was a policy tested all over the world, including Tanzania, during the Nyerere era, but it ended up protecting domestic manufacturers. Deprived of competition, they became too lazy to innovate and sold their produce at above-market prices with quality below world standards.
Ultimately, import substitution bled those industries, and we were forced to breastfeed them with government subsidies to keep them artificially afloat until we couldn’t bear that drain anymore.
We dumped them for whoever was interested in them, but later, we realised that whoever bought them was more interested in buying plots of land located in prime areas.
Today, such factories are nowhere to be seen, and in their locations, real estate imposing infrastructures that are in tune with market demands stands.
Tax cuts, tariffs, deregulation or regulatory rollbacks, and stricter immigration policies will spark inflation, higher prices, and throttled economic growth.
US stocks climbed after the Trump presidential win in hopes of deregulation and the dissipation of fears of tax hikes. The threat of a large supply of Treasuries helped push down bond prices, driving the yield on the benchmark 10-year note above 4.3% in recent days since July this year.
Tariffs will eliminate the purpose of AGOA, which was designed to give preferential treatment to goods and services from Africa.
Trump will provoke retaliatory tariffs, inflate prices, and keep inflation trending upward. Ironically, local jobs created may not necessarily go to Americans because they are ill-prepared or may not like them.
He proposed imposing 200% tariffs on China, and China is likely to do the same for American imports. Trump has toyed with the idea of replacing taxes with tariffs. While tariffs would shower the Taxman with plenty of cash, the cost of doing business in the US would become exceedingly unbearable.
Trump has argued passionately that illegal and legal immigrants are taking jobs from American citizens, but study after study has indicated the American job market is not heterogeneous.
Low-paying menial jobs an average American wants no part of, meaning illegal immigrants are likely to pursue and do them because they see no other alternatives.
Besides, remote workers overseas are snapping up high-paying American tech jobs on a wage-competition basis, with India and North Korea heading the list.
North Koreans are doing it illegally, but they are difficult to flush out. Mass deportations will not solve these glaring flaws in American distorted labour markets.
In a specific case of the State of Florida, which Trump calls his homeland, the state governor removed illegal immigrants whom he blamed for the same reasons Trump is, but Americans never filled those vacancies.
Farm owners were left to count and absorb losses after fruits and other vegetables were not harvested and abandoned to rot on the farms.
Those unwanted illegal immigrants were welcomed to liberal-governed states, where they were issued temporary work permits and swiftly absorbed into the labour markets.
Trump, in this election, has something for everybody. Elimination of tax on tips, social security benefits tax deductions, and overtime pay tax reliefs are also on the cards.
Senate Republicans do not see eye to eye with House Republicans on tax cuts without offsetting tax increases, budget cuts, or a combination of the two.
Senate Republicans are less sensitive to sustaining budget deficits than their House Republicans. A middle ground will have to be sorted out.
That holistic approach may have rewarded him with the White House, but governance will prove difficult without disappointing his new fractious political base.
For example, Trump has promised to provide Israel Premier Benjamin Netanyahu with the tools he needs to finish the job in Gaza!
Trump’s Muslim support in Michigan came with an expectation he would force Netanyahu to end the war and allow Gaza to rebuild. Trump cannot appease the contrarian sides of the equation.
He will disappoint some of his new political allies. Trump is on record as saying he will cut taxes or at least restore those he initiated during his first term.
That means the budget deficit will grow, costing the economy a whopping USD 5 trillion in the next decade, according to some estimates. Frugality is not in the popular president’s semantics at all.
He will combine tax cuts and huge spending to keep his new-found tent happy. He has promised child tax credits to encourage more babies in the US and boost declining population growth.
He is very much determined to keep SALT—State and Local Taxes—handouts at USD 10,000 or double them.
He is also weighing in to terminate the Biden administration’s cleaner energy initiatives, which will attract the objections of his fellow Republicans, whose states are the main beneficiaries.
Perhaps Kamala Harris’ worst moment sneaked in during an interview with a popular women’s TV talk show, THE VIEW. She was gently asked what she would have done differently from the Biden Administration, and her answer, in my considered opinion, diminished her election fortunes.
She confided this to the electorate in her own words: “Frankly speaking, I don’t know what I could have done differently.”
It is easier to see that she was ambivalent about annoying and antagonizing President Biden. Still, elections are abrasive, and one needs to rub superiors’ shoulders the wrong way at times and distance oneself from a very unpopular president.
She was too respectful to her boss, Biden, to cut off the umbilical cord that tied her to him. Unwittingly, she chose Biden over the presidency. It partly narrates why she lost.
Kamala Harris’s campaign team brought people who never agreed on a strategy to confront Trump, who focused his attention on the grumbling of the electorate.
Some of her advisers preferred to target Trump’s erratic character, while others saw it would backfire. Others wanted her to pitch her election clarion on the economy, while others on democracy.
As she tried to accommodate competing tactics and strategies, she mish-mashed everything, leaving her message devoid of clarity, policy reform specifics, and conviction.
It is easier to apportion the blame to her for a bungled election campaign. Still, as I have said from the beginning, the electoral map this time around was against anyone who served in the Biden administration and was looking for something new: an agent for change.
Both parties did not deliver on that, but at least Trump’s first two years enjoyed the Obama stimulus package coattails.
Most of those who voted for him late, pushing him to the finish line unchallenged, reminisced of those two years with nostalgic euphoria, little knowing Trump had nothing to do with them. He claimed credit and earned it from Obama’s toil!
Trump never offered details of his election pledges. Just like in his first campaign, he promised to abolish the Obama health care and replace it with something beautiful, but even he had no idea what it was.
When it came to the Ukrainian conflict, he bragged that had he been president, the war would not have happened without considering in his four years at the White House, the war was going on unabated.
He also rambled that on day one, he would end the Ukrainian war, but when the CNN anchor asked whether he would capitulate on Russian terms, he said he wouldn’t! How can he secure peace in Donbhas without Ukraine accepting total defeat? Beats the odds.
Trump has no sustainable plan for America. Most of his fleeting plans are to placate a disparate coalition he has destroyed to meet his parochial personal interests.
What is least discussed is that the presidency has gorged the Trump family’s coffers with untold riches.
After becoming president in 2020, his new media companies and those of his in-laws and siblings have become instant speculative billionaires.
Many ethical experts see a conflict of interest resurfacing once more, but nothing will be done until a criminal act is proven.
Tanzanian evangelicals, just like their counterparts in the rest of the world, are delighted that in the White House, they now have a tireless advocate of the sanctity of marriage.
What they do not know is that the Trump presidency is not about religion, spiritual renewal, or reawakening but about cashing in on government largesse for personal enrichment. We will know whether grocery prices will drop or rise two years from now.
In two years of the Trump presidency, I will visit all seven battleground states that helped Trump’s emphatic win to investigate whether the cost of half a dozen regular eggs is back at USD 0.99 cents, at USD 3.99 today, or has soared.
In my estimation, the cost of basic groceries, such as eggs, fruits, vegetables, and bread, will double within two years if Trump has his way with tariffs, as portrayed in the campaign trail.
Undocumented immigrant workers are around 8.9 million, contributing taxes of almost one hundred billion dollars per annum. Private companies are now being formed to win government contracts that will carry out what Trump calls the largest deportation in human history.
If he is successful, the American economy will sputter, with the cost of living and doing business in the US shooting up stratospherically, hurting the voters Trump promised to redeem and shield!
The good news is that judicial restraint will thwart Trump’s lion’s share of the deportation pledge, particularly among Liberal states, ironically, where his decisive voters hibernate.
More good news informs me Trump will not ban Tanzanians from earning green cards. Still, bad news shoots last: only delusional people expect their living standards to improve whether the US turns blue or red.
The gospel truth ought to come out fast: neither party cares for the electorate. Although Republicans and Democrats have swapped power in the last 248 years, the US keeps dovetailing into indebtedness, over-expenditures, and mass poverty.
The Trump victory was a cry for ending poverty in the US, and I know poverty is the currency that keeps the electorate on the leash of the ruling class.
No politician will eradicate poverty lest he finds his relevance thrown in the dustbin. Trump, too, is a case in hand.
