What we learned from US presidential race

Trump has transmitted this same ideology, that America has lost its place as a world power and that the nation needed to reclaim something lost. Look no further than his campaign slogan repeated endlessly, “Make America Great Again”.

* Partisan politics is alive and kicking: When Trump announced his candidacy, most people shrugged it off. There was no way a reality TV host and real estate mogul could actually become the President of the US. However, when Trump won the Republican primaries, then the nomination at the Republican Convention, it showed that irrespective of his nonconformist political demeanour, Republicans had no choice but to endorse him, showing that in the end, partisan politics will always reign supreme no matter how radical their candidate might be.

* America is more fragmented than it realises: It is no surprise that Trump’s popularity was co-related to the racist and exclusionary values held by contemporary America.

Trump showed that America is a truly divided nation yet to come to terms with issues of race relations and immigration policies.

* Beware of far-right populist fervour: The rise of “Trumpism” on a much broader level is a manifestation of far-right conservatism intended to protect core conservative values. This was already seen in the Brexit vote and in a general feeling of Euro-scepticism.

Such values are becoming normative as more nations seek to safeguard their own national and state interests.

* But everyone still loves an anti- hero: Trump was the epitome of an unconventional hero. He was the self-declared saviour of the contemporary American nation and therefore defined his campaign as a break with the status-quo, or, as he said, one that sought to “drain the swamp of Washington.” Trump established himself as everything Clinton was not and in so doing rode a wave of ascendancy to a point where he had a legitimate path to being the 45th US President.

The 2016 US presidential race will go down in world history as one that defied the conventional.

It has the rise of Trump to thank for that as he has forever changed the political landscape of not just the US but in fact that of the entire world, and for the reasons listed above, one should be wary of the implications of such a future for world politics.

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