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The following are a group of excerpts from the article "How He Won, Inside Donald Drump's Stunning Upset" by Zeke J. Miller in the TIME magazine issue dated 21 November, 2016. These excerpts bring into focus some of the folks who voted for Trump, who after all, are not very different from any other folks.
Chris Reilly, a commissioner in York County, Pennsylvania, has lived in the heavily Republican area north of Baltimore for 28 years. On the day in September after Mike Pence spoke to some 800 folks in downton York, Reilly scanned a panormaic picture of the crowd in the local paper and had a shock. "I recognized one face," he said. That's when the party stalwart knew something was going on.
Then, on a recent Friday, Reilly got word that the county had received 9,000 absentee-ballot applications in a single day. It had to mail them out by Monday but had no money for extra help. So Reilly turned up at the election office on Saturday to stuff the applications into envelopes himself. As he did, he noticed something surprising. The applications were running 10 to 1 male. And when he peeked at the employment lines, he saw a pattern. "Dockworker. Forklift operator. Roofer," Reilly recalled. "Grouter. Warehouse stocker. These people had probably never voted before. They were coming out of nowhere."
Back in Manhattan, at the gilded Trump Tower, the most unconventional campaign in history put its faith in these voters. Hillary Clinton and her allies had run three TV ads for every one that Donald Trump got on air. Her ground operation had tens of thousands more volunteers and hundreds more field offices. Trump had lost each of the debates against Clinton, and he had spent weeks defending himself from a video in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. But only the Trump campaign had a candidate who had struck a nerve. Only the Trump campaign had a message that was breaking through.
"To a person, there was never a doubt that we could come back and win this race," said Trump's communications adviser Jason Miller, one of just a handful of senior staff members who guided Trump through the final weeks. They saw it at the rallies, which they believed were a better measure than the polls. "You go to the Scranton, you go to Dayton and ask those guys, 'Hey do you feel like you have had 2.5% GDP growth this quarter?'" Miller told TIME just before Election Day. "They'll look at you like you have three heads." There were two Americas after all, and one of them demanded to have its voice heard.
For Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager, the initial signs came early. Weeks after the campaign launched in June 2015, Lewandoski booked a stop in Laconia, N.H., a town of about 17,000 that hosts the state's pumpkin festival. "We land at the Laconia airport. I look and I literally have 15 messages, all from the same phone number," he remembers. It was the local police. "We've got a problem at the venue," the officer said.
A cruiser was waiting by the tarmac. So many people had turned out that the roads had been shut down. Two miles from the venue, cars lined the shoulders, because people had parked to walk. When the event was over, nearly 200 people followed Trump's entourage to the airport to send him off. "I said, 'Wow,'" Lewandowski recalls. "This is beyond anything."
For weeks his advisers told him his closing pitch to African-American voters --- "What the hell do you have to lose?" --- could probably be better phrased. But then a black pastor in Charlotte, N.C., came out after a shooting, echoing the same words to reflect his frustrations. "I think he's going to really surprise people with the numbers he gets among African Americans," said Miller. In the end, Trump won 8% of the black vote, according to exit polls, two points more than Mitt Romney got four years ago.
Lewandoski points to another moment when it all came together for him. In the final sprint to the South Carolina primary in February, his cell phone buzzed with leaked word that the Pope Francis had slammed Trump's pledge to erect a wall between U.S. and Mexico. It was "not Christian," the popular Pontiff declared. In the tradition of the Vatican, the news wouldn't become public for an hour or two. Lewandoski advised caution as he searched his phone to find the Catholic share of the state's electorate. "You don't understand," he told his boss. "I'm Catholic. This is the Pope."
But the reality host turned candidate had other ideas. "He just loves Mexico. He's brainwashed," Lewandoski recalls Trump saying. Without delay Trump dictated a response, calling the Pope's words "disgraceful." The next day, the Pope released another statement, making clear he had not attacked Trump and was not indicating a political preference. Trump claimed victory. The reality show was real.
P.S.: The panache for polarization by the political class causes differences in opinion to coalesce into difference of hearts. The moot question is: what gave birth to the polarization in the first place? The simple answer is the indifference and conceit of the well-off, irrespective of their political disposition. There is a sneaking suspicion that the simple answer could also be the right one.
A kind and well-behaved master will always have the loyalty of his serf. A brutal and cruel master will have his resentment. An indifferent and conceited one will bear his retribution. Or, as an anecdote overhead on the not-so-spiritual streets of Ahmedabad revealed: Sir, before I knew I was poor. Now, I feel poor.
When things come to a pass wherein choices are made without heed to the feeling and spirit of man and only in terms of to the material benefits, when even development is defined in purely quantitative terms, the sincere surprise of those at the victory of Trump looks contrived from a distance. It is not out of place to say that the dominant philosophy of the times, materialism, is a direct outgrowth of free-markets being so-not-free-at-all.
What does it eventually lead to? Well, it leads to an ode to the third anniversary of the birth of the vikas-purush who will break the corrupted fetters chaining the salvageable souls along with those tired old cows who were praying for timely and deserved death but now will be forced to spend a few extra years in that hell some call Earth, the one denuded of the last shred of grass, as one famous Chief Minister of Gujarat once said was his developmental aim. Maybe we all could have a repeat matinee show in the premises of Trump Tower a few years down the line?
Or, in most elemental terms it is as the punk musician Beth Ditto expresses: We got too comfortable, but everyone's awake now. It is tempting to add: definitely a little late.
See also Lebedyev on the Tendency Underlying the Railways.
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