Will the elephant follow the mahout and trample everything on its way?

The fear about Trump comes from his campaign promises, the people he is surrounding himself with, and his supporters. 

Donald Trump’s unimaginable victory in the US presidential election has plunged millions into a state of fear – fear about the uncertainty about their lives during the next four years of the Trump presidency. It would be irrational to expect Americans under threat to put their fears aside. Fear in the face of perceived impending doom is a rational response. The memory of Trump’s hateful rhetoric, his vitriolic campaign, the promised actions that he would take against certain groups if he were to win are still fresh in people’s mind. This was the most bitter and divisive US presidential election. It has fractured the country. 

In the past seventeen months leading to the election on November 8, then contender Trump, one rhetoric at a time, sowed the seeds of fear. People against whom he was making these comments took him seriously and literally but hoped, based on the polls and his highly offensive comments about women, immigrants, African-Americans, LGBTQ, Muslims, that a Trump presidency was not going to be a reality. But he has won the presidency. 

After Brexit, reports of hate crimes against immigrants in Britain increased by as much as 57%. In post-election United States, people are apprehensive about Trump’s next steps in carrying out the terrifying campaign promises and the role his victorious and emboldened supporters would assume.   

In post-election US, groups targeted by him during his campaign are being subjected to the wrath of his supporters. Just days following Trump’s election, there has been a spike in social media stories and news reports about violence and hate speeches by Trump followers. 

A day after the election in Minnesota, a state Trump did not win, a locker-door of Minnesota high school with an 18% per cent non-white student population had profane, racist and anti-immigrant graffiti. 

People of alternate sexuality also made the hate list. Left on the window of a car in North Carolina was a note saying "Can't wait until your 'marriage' is overturned by a real president. Gay families = burn in hell.”

On November 10, 2016, New York Times reported, “At San Jose State University in California, a Muslim woman complained that she had been grabbed by her hijab and choked.”  

Same issue of NYT, quoting campus black student organisations, reported that two male students of Babson College parked their Trump flag adorned pickup truck at Wellesley College in Massachusetts outside a meeting house for black students, and spat at a black female student.  

 What Trump realised from day one of his candidacy when he attacked the Mexicans by calling them criminals, drug dealers, and rapists and promised to build a wall along the US-Mexico border was that to sell a dream, he must exploit the fear of a nightmare.  

Within hours of the election result, The Independent reported on November 11, a woman perceived to be Hispanic-American, wrote that an “older white man” threatened to sexually assault her and threw water over her hours after the election result. 

During his campaign, Trump promised that he would deport 11 million illegal immigrants. On Sunday, on CBS channel’s 60-minutes program, Trump said his priority was to deport undocumented immigrants with a criminal record – which he estimated would include 2 to 3 million people. The source of these numbers is unknown. While immigrants should not have any problem regarding the deportation of criminal immigrants, they are fearful about being wrongly identified and deported. Mass deportation is still on the table. What would happen to the children under Obama’s DREAM Act? Would they be targeted? 

Starting with a call for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, Trump’s anti-Muslim campaign evolved but did not change much. He insulted a “gold star family” (family of a fallen soldier) because they are Muslim. Other than some murmurs from the GOP leadership, no reprimand came for candidate Trump. 

Post-election actions by his supporters are symptomatic of the hatred they harbour against targeted groups. So far, he has not denounced such actions. The GOP leadership is apparently satisfied with his “Stop it” comment to his supporters. 

Except for Trump’s promise in his victory speech to “bind the wounds of division” and “come together as one united people” any difference between candidate Trump and President-elect Trump is still not clear.  

The fear about Trump comes from his campaign promises, the people he is surrounding himself with, and his supporters. 

Candidate Trump said there must be some kind of punishment for having an abortion. And as President-Elect, he has appointed as head of his transition team, VP-elect Mike Pence, someone who is notorious for his extreme views against abortion and women’s reproductive rights. Pence signed a draconian anti-LGBT “religious liberty” bill into law in Indiana. Will the Trump government let the hard-fought women’s rights and LGBT rights erode? 

Ben Carson, who compared homosexuality to paedophilia and incest, is vice-chairman of the transition team along with Newt Gingrich, who, in the past, compared LGBTQ rights to “gay fascism”.  

Steve Bannon, the alt-right Breitbart News Network executive chairman known for having white nationalist views was named chief strategist and senior counsellor to President-elect Donald Trump.

Fear percolating in any society is real, but it is filtered. Donald Trump ratcheted up that fear because he knew it would help him. He has keenly understood what social scientists have been saying for many years that fear unites people, that it makes them hold tight to what they are familiar to and grow disdain for the unfamiliar. In their common desire to be protected, they become united. But what he did not realise, and probably still doesn’t, is that it works both ways. The fear about the uncertainty associated with his unhinged behaviour may also unite the other groups fearful of him. 

His plainspeak, his ‘folksy appeal’ and anti-establishment grandiloquence was a carefully crafted persona to sell a product — himself. It not only catapulted him to the highest office of the land, it also gave legitimacy to the voice of the hatemonger in his base. Before the election, the fear was what would Trump’s emboldened supporters do after a Trump loss in an election he was calling “rigged”.

Now that he has won, the fear is if they would continue to spew hate against these groups. 

“A lot of people have laughed at me over the years,” he said in a speech days before the New Hampshire primary. “Now, they’re not laughing so much.”

No members of the marginalised and targeted groups are laughing at Trump, they are scared.  Is that how he wants to govern? Perhaps the more important question is: Will the Republican-controlled House and Senate go along with Trump’s decisions that will widen the divide and allow this state of fear to continue?

(Based in Minnesota, US, Gautam Raychaudhuri is a social and political observer by night and a cubicle-dweller by day.)

Related Stories

No stories found.
The New Indian Express
www.newindianexpress.com