“THE LOSER ONE!”With
this illiterate phrase, posted on Twitter on the night of the 2012 presidential
election — at a moment when he mistakenly thought Barack Obama had received
fewer votes than Mitt Romney but had won reelection through the Electoral
College — Donald Trump revealed a few things that we need to recognize right
now.
First, that this is a
man who is easily confused or misled by the news he consumes from television or
the internet. What Trump was referring to in his tweet, posted shortly after
the polls closed on the West Coast, was the fact that Obama had beendeclared the
winner by the news networksas soon as he was projected to secure a majority of the
electoral votes by winning Ohio.
After Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, Italy’s looming referendum on constitutional change has been cast as the next test of populism’s seemingly unstoppable rise across the western world – with some worrying that a defeat for Matteo Renzi, the prime minister, could spell disaster for the eurozone and Europe.
But on a recent weekday in a sprawling American-style shopping mall on the outskirts of Rome, the 4 December vote was hardly seen as a make-or-break moment for the country, let alone one that could sound the death knell of the euro.
Echoing about 25% of Italian voters, 23-year-old Anna, an attendant who runs the Thomas the Tank Engine ride at the mall, said she had not yet made up her mind though she was certain to vote. But she was not particularly worried that the referendum – on measures intended to make Italy easier to govern by reducing the power of the senate – could hasten a general election and open the door to a victory for the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, the second most popular party in Italy.
President-elect Donald Trump’s disavowal of Richard Spencer and his far-right thinktank the National Policy Institute, a day after video of Spencer’s supporters giving the Nazi salute at an event in Washington DC surfaced, has dismayed some of his supporters on the “alt-right”.
“This constant virtue signaling needs to finally end, otherwise our civilization will simply collapse,” a commenter wrote underneath the article of Trump’s disavowal on rightwing news site Breitbart.
People in the myriad “alt-right” communities that have flourished online in recent years are also expressing their displeasure that Trump appears to have abandoned the most extreme of his policies – at least for now – such as building a wall and prosecuting Hillary Clinton.
They also objected to his visiting of the New York Times for an on-the-record meeting on Tuesday, at which Trump described the news organization as a “world jewel”.
On /pol/, the political discussion board of the anonymous message-board 4chan, one poster wrote: “Already reneging on his word before he even takes office?! People will remember that.”
I saw an old man sobbing in the street on Wednesday. I watched catatonic parents at the playground on Thursday, their children swinging back-and-forth, thankfully and innocently oblivious. By Friday, my phone dinged and buzzed with text messages from friends and phone calls from family asking how I was “holding up”—not too dissimilar from the caring epistles I received after my mother died.
Like all of us, I’ve laid in bed every single night since Tuesday consumed by my terrified imagination of the next four years—a pit of worry in my stomach, an anvil lodged in my throat, I’ve become an insomniac. When I look at my one-and-a-half-year-old son, and then at my wife and her expanding belly, which grows each day with our second child, I—like millions of people who call this country home—feel utterly rudderless, unsure what I’m supposed to do to protect my family from a terrifying, uncertain future and an unpredictable leader. Then I contemplate how much more scared others must be: Muslim parents, or Mexican children, anyone who isn’t white. A sense of dread creeps inside of me.
A historian has discovered a royal decree issued to Donald Trump’s grandfather ordering him to leave Germany and never come back.
Friedrich Trump, a German, was issued with the document in February 1905, and ordered to leave the kingdom of Bavaria within eight weeks as punishment for having failed to do mandatory military service and failing to give authorities notice of his departure to the US when he first emigrated in 1885.
Roland Paul, a historian from Rhineland-Palatinate who found the document in local archives, told the tabloid Bild: “Friedrich Trump emigrated from Germany to the USA in 1885. However, he failed to de-register from his homeland and had not carried out his military service, which is why the authorities rejected his attempt at repatriation.”
Some of the most prominent members of the so-called “alt-right”, the white nationalist movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency, gathered in Washington DC on Saturday to plot how the movement can “start influencing policy and culture” under the Trump administration.
There was a celebratory mood as Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute, a nationalist thinktank which hosted the day-long conference, talked about how the “alt-right” would be an “intellectual vanguard” for Trump and the rightwing at large.
But to an outsider, the conference merely served as a shocking insight into the racism, sexism and disturbing beliefs of the “alt-right”.
The event concluded with a 40-minute pseudo-academic lecture called America and Jewish Consciousness, by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic”, and a series of Nazi salutes by members of the audience.
Among the world leaders who congratulated Donald Trump on his surprise election victory was the politician to whom the billionaire real estate mogul and reality television star has most often been compared: Silvio Berlusconi.
The rightwing former Italian prime minister and billionaire media mogul, who was dogged by claims that he used an underage prostitute at his infamous “bunga bunga” parties and counted Vladimir Putin as a close ally and friend, said the comparisons between the two were “obvious” and that Trump would rule with “authority and equilibrium”.
If it’s true that Berlusconi and Trump, two showmen who have railed against immigrants, mocked women and targeted press freedom, are indeed cut from the same cloth, it may also be the case that few will understand liberal Americans’ consternation in coming years like the Italians.
Here, then, are some warnings – and a few words of advice.
