CHICAGO (JGL) – When Senator John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States, it was the inventor of television, who got the credit.
When Donald Trump was elected president last week, it was not just his Twitter and the social media that carried him as The Donald claimed afterwards. I think it was actually a slogan invented by a leader of a Third World country more than half a century ago that elected him 45th U.S. president.
I was in my junior year in high school at the Divine Word in what is now Sorsogon City in the Philippines when I first got wind of the political slogan of then Senator Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1965. I first read Marcos’ campaign battle cry: “Elect me President and I will make the Philippines great again.”
Teen-aged kids my age at the time did not usually read newspapers. But because I was hawking newspapers so I can buy the stuff that my playmates had, I was forced to read the headlines of the newspapers I was selling. I would scream to the top of lungs the headlines to attract newspaper buyers.
Unfortunately, when President-elect Trump delivered his acceptance speech shortly after he won the elections, he was quick to thank his parents, sisters, brothers, his wife and children, his political advisers but not to President Marcos, who was the original promoter of the Great Again Society! He did not even thanked God!
Fortunately for Mr. Trump, government officials, like President Marcos, are not allowed register their slogans or trademarks under international copyright law, unlike ring announcer, Michael Buffer, who was able to register his trademarked catchphrase, “Let’s Get Ready To Rumble,” which already earned him $400-M.
REPUBLICANS URGING TRUMP TO WITHDRAW FROM RACE
But why did Mr. Trump win the elections when a month before the elections, his fellow Republicans were telling him to withdraw from race after Mr. Trump was quoted in an unaired footage from 2005, in which Trump bragged about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women who were not his wife.
Despite Trump’s apology for his own crude and vulgar comment against women, Mr. Trump still beat the survey-leading Secretary Hillary Clinton, who should have principally benefited from The Donald’s misogynist remarks being the first woman presidential candidate of a major political who could protect her own kind. How come?
The billionaire businessman had promised to disclose his tax returns before the elections as did other presidential candidates in the past but despite breaking his promise, which is tantamount to tax avoidance, The Donald still won.
Mr. Trump has never held any elective position and therefore it is impossible for voters to anticipate what he would do on some hot button and critical issues facing the nation. But they opted to ignore his rival candidate President Obama described as the best qualified presidential candidate of the United States of America. And yet, Mr. Trump trumped Hillary.
As unconventional as he could get like the Philippines’ firebrand presidential candidate Rody Duterte early this year, Mr. Trump’s antics had me agonized on whom to support.
In the Philippine elections, I had no reliable information about the campaign of Mr. Duterte, so I settled for the lesser evil. Boy, was I wrong! Between the two elections, Trump is tamer than Duterte, who would kiss lips to lips with women voters in the presence of the news media while Trump would only be describing them inside a locker room.
So, in the last few weeks of the campaign in the U.S. elections, all surveys and editorial endorsements of mainstream U.S. newspapers were pointing to Hillary as the run-away winner.
But Hillary’s alleged use of private email address instead of a government issued when she was messaging her official duties had kept on popping up to the bitter end of the campaign.
This made my heartbeat pound stronger that my candidate Hillary was going to lose.
Go figure, Trump seemed to be doing everything wrong while Hillary was doing everything right. This started when The Donald announced following the Dec. 7, 2015 San Bernardino, California attack that he was “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” This should certainly help minorities to support Hillary.
“SEN. JOHN NOT MY KIND OF HERO”
On July 2015, Mr. Trump described American war hero and former presidential candidate Republican Sen. John McCain as “not a war hero, because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war for five and a half years during the Vietnam War, having been shot down over Hanoi on a bombing mission. This should have kept a big chunk of Republican votes away from Trump.
Mr. Trump clashed with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly during a debate in August 2015, later suggesting the reason for the tension was that she had been menstruating. He said she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her… wherever”. This demeaning comment on women by Trump against Kelly should have piled more votes for the camp of Hillary and less to Trump.
And in one of his speeches, Mr. Trump said, “Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
To put an icing on the cake for Hillary’s camp, Mr. Trump planned to build a Great Wall along the 1,989 miles (3,201 kilometers) Mexican-US border and deport millions of illegal immigrants, a plan which certainly and surely had Hispanic American voters gravitating to the corner of Hillary all the more.
Alas, despite the very repulsive stands Mr. Trump had taken, he still won. Why?
This is my take: American voters do not want Donald Trump. But they have had enough of Barack Obama. The rising cost of premium of Obamacare must have alienated lots of votes of the middle class from Hillary. And they also do not want Hillary either for her failure to offer better alternative to some of the Obama failed programs.
Coupled with the overconfidence of Democrat voters, notably the blacks, who usually go out and vote in droves during presidential elections, and the whites, who distance themselves from voting, there seems to have truth to a general observation that there were more white women voter turnout than black women in last Tuesday’s elections, neutralizing whatever edge Hillary had on women.
Trump presidency! (Contact columnist: jglariosa@hotmail.com)