THE dramatic return of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States has still not sunk in a month after the elections. His Republican party has received a historic mandate, winning over 310 seats in the House of Representatives. The Republicans also won the Senate, effectively gaining control of both Houses of the US Congress.
A convicted felon guilty of election fraud and sued for sexual assault and defamation is now the President-elect of the world’s most powerful democracy. Trump has managed to transform fear and nationalism into potent tools of election.
Despite strong evidence of Trump’s anti-minority and anti-racial rhetoric, what explains the vote shift in his favour of the very same racial minorities he claims as a threat to the economy and wants to deport?
Do people in some perverse way see the populist as the only possible way out of their everyday miseries? Is this a result of a weak opposition or a symptom of the weakening of liberal democracies marked by identity politics in the post-socialist era since the 1980s?
