It doesn’t look like we’re going to get a result from the states any time soon. I have been pondering what is happening there culturally: By claiming to speak for and represent an apparent ‘silent majority’, is trump doing something both sophisticated and insidious? He is a self-proclaimed millionaire who says he sides with the poor working class; a man who has been on television throughout his life yet who opposes the media and dismisses news as ‘fake’. Trump thus occupies a set of contradictory positions, perhaps most of all by claiming not to be a politician yet occupying the worlds most powerful political office. Does doing so let him appeal to the type of uneducated working class person, who may feel excluded from a Symbolic / Media sphere controlled by educated liberal ‘elites’? Newspapers and TV channels are usually controlled by people educated enough to reject the views of people like Trump and his supporters, which is why such views do not get much representation in the media. But by telling his supporters that they are an underrepresented majority whom he alone stands for, Trump lets his supporters believe that their reactionary, xenophobic views are as intellectually valid as any other, and that the only reason why they are not represented in the Symbolic is that the ‘elites’ are biassed. Trump thus legitimises the simplistic, reactionary thinking of the right by establishing himself as a figurehead for it. Due to him, people think it’s okay to be an uneducated xenophobe, and such thinking is rejected by the media not because it’s flawed, but because the media is controlled by despotic elites.

He thus effectively empowers right-wing reactionism by framing those who reject it as an oppressive, elite minority. Ignorance and the rejection of education, especially higher education, is framed as advantageous; this also allows Trump to establish himself as his supporters sole source of information. Trump therefore has a hoard of ignorant, reactionary zealots following him with cult-like fervour. I find that very concerning indeed: whatever the outcome of the election, such a state of affairs, with so many people following one despotic, egotistical man so blindly, is surely very worrying. Whether he did so intentionally or not (and I rather doubt he is intelligent enough to make such a plan) trump has set himself up as a messianic figure to his supporters, both of the people and superior to them. This means that if he looses the election, his followers are so brainwashed that they would simply see it as another form of oppression by evil liberal elites, refuse to accept the result and probably become violent.