The amount or tracts — maudlin poetry even — appearing in the local media after the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. President, claiming that people will ‘survive’, are bizarre. It is particularly odd considering that there is a much better chance of world peace under Trump than under the Democrats. The record speaks for itself in this regard.
Those who predicted that the National People’s Power (NPP) would lose the Presidential election rather badly have now taken to saying that we will all have to protect ourselves from the narcissistic and horrible Donald Trump. Probably one spectacular wayward prediction should have made these people a little more introspective about their abilities to presage what’s good for the world, and what’s not.
But no such luck. Here they are predicting everything short of apocalypse with Trump at the helm, while saying people shall, however, survive without burning up, or something like that. When Trump lost the Presidential election in 2020, these people patted themselves on the back saying the world and the U.S. have been able to see off evil.
Now that the American people have decisively re-elected Trump, they have forgotten that they once predicted that the ogre is finished. None of these people who wrote these tracts seem to be able to produce anything like facts to support why they think Trump is bad for the world.
crooks
Their one-dimensional worldview caused them to say that the NPP would be rejected in Sri Lanka because (they supposed) everyone thinks like them. They thought the people would rather have the same set of crooks who had let the country go to seed.
It’s a one-dimensional mindset in overdrive. Politics, however, is never one dimensional, particularly when it’s the ordinary people that decide. It’s the ordinary people that decided they’d rather have Trump over the Democratic candidate, who had, along with the then President, seen through a period of galloping inflation, and unsustainable immigration.
Voters were also sick of woke politics, but more about that later. There was very good reason in other words that the American people decided overwhelmingly to bring back the man they rejected in 2020.
People in Sri Lanka had good reason to reject the conventional political parties at the 2024 Presidential election. But the pundits have decided that they should impart further lessons targeting people, on democracy and how they should vote. They are insisting on castigating the voters in the U.S. for electing Trump.
Perhaps they should get out of their echo chamber for a while and learn that the world is full of possibility. Sometimes the people vote against what the pundits say is good for them, because they are aware that the pundits are one-dimensional thinkers.
Today, almost the entire punditry in conventional media is attempting to tell their readers that this Trump phase is something that has to be seen off. But they have to remind themselves that for the most part they have lost their audience.
Those who voted for Trump in the U.S. and the NPP in Sri Lanka, did so precisely because they didn’t get their information from the conventional media so called, where pundits go to seed. These days they get their news and views from a myriad of sources in social media.
People don’t sit in libraries poring over newspapers and magazines. They switch on their smartphones to know what’s happening, and have basically retired their television sets along with what used to be their favourite newspapers.
It’s in this type of information age that some pundits feign surprise and fret that what they prescribed for the world and for Sri Lanka did not come to pass. Now that they got it all wrong, they seem to insist on saying that people should get together and sit things out because all things bad including Trump and the current Sri Lankan Government they didn’t want, would be transitory, and easily seen off.
The first lesson they missed was that each country has its own imperatives. In the United Kingdom, for instance, they booted out a right-wing Conservative Government and brought to power a left-wing dispensation led by a lawyer, a former public prosecutor.
Now, those pundits in the U.K. who were gung-go about retaining a left-leaning Government in the U.S. are apparently feeling rather contrite that they didn’t have the prescience to foresee that a Trump administration would take over.
MONITORED
Be it Sri Lanka or the U.S. or elsewhere, for that matter, what the pundits didn’t foresee was that elections don’t follow a set pattern. They are not single issue affairs, and certainly just because the country veered leftward in the U.K., there was no possibility that a so-called left-leaning Presidency would continue in the U.S.
Ordinary people in any event are more concerned about pocketbook issues than about how bad someone says Trump would be for the world. They know the latter variety of prediction is for those who don’t care at all about how they fare, but instead like hearing their own voices predicting things that more often than not wouldn’t come to pass.
By the way, when Trump lost in 2020, social media had basically ostracised him and taken him off their platforms. Local pundits in particular saw that election as the end game for Trump.
Their silence is deafening now, when they realise that the same people that de-platformed Trump have as they say, got in line to kiss his ring at his inauguration. Jeff Bezos was there, Mark Zuckerberg was there, Sundar Pichai was there and then of course, Musk is now a Trump insider. The lesson here is not about whether these tech-world tycoons could be relied on or not. Liberal pundits would say they are in it for their own financial gain.
The lesson is in the fact that either way, they didn’t see any of this coming. They thought that social media is what the tech-entrepreneurs say it is, meaning that they are the gatekeepers that decide the content. But free speech has its own dynamic and very soon it was clear that it doesn’t mean monitored speech.
The tech-tycoons have got used to the idea. The upshot of Trump’s second coming is that nobody is compelled to be on his side. Nobody is compelled to follow the herd and follow a particular diktat when it comes to him. In Germany and the rest of Europe, they seem to be fine with that. All European leaders seem to say they will work with Trump, and there certainly is no vibe that suggests they are working with him under duress.
Trump has his own policies as do many other leaders, but one suspects that there are certain positions of his that drive persons of certain political persuasions mad. For instance, they feel he destroyed the woke agenda, and stopped men competing in women’s sports. This has understandably evoked visceral fears among those who were wedded to that agenda. But in most parts of Europe they are pragmatic enough to know Trump’s anti wokeism is popular for good reasons.
The same dynamic operates with politics here. Conventional politics was regarded a lifestyle in this country. But suddenly there were the new conditions that changed all that, and some analysts can’t get their heads around the fact that things have changed so quickly.
They are keen to say something is wrong and what’s happening is the aberration. But people voted for an alternative and change is now the norm. Some of these changes are definitely here to stay in Sri Lanka, and those who have a one-dimensional idea about politics in their head are wondering what has hit them. It’s the same in the U.S. though due to an entirely different set of circumstances. Some look at the Trump second term and ask, what hit them? Nothing, it’s just that they were so detached from reality. Reality is different from fantasy, and they had better get used to it.
