Donald Trump: A Political Meteorite – OpEd
By Luis Durani*
Donald Trump has come to epitomize an array of adjectives in the political jargon. While his no non-sense approach elevated him to the top of the Republican Party as well as allowed him to take the lead against Hilary Clinton for a while, his continuous non-filtered approach has had a major setback recently.
Now that he is trailing in the polls, many believe this will be the first election in a while where one candidate wins by a decent margin rather than few percentage point. Yet, with two months to go anything is bound to happen.
That being said, despite what one may think of Trump, the political system is forever altered by the reality-star business man. During his ascension to the top of the ticket during the primaries, he managed to remove the veil from many voters’ eyes on the level of corruption embedded within the system. The 2016 elections, as cliché as it may sound, is a watershed moment in American political history. Voters and politicians are forever changed by this election. Whether people see him as the political savior or the 21st century Hitler, Donald Trump is the meteor needed to send the archaic American political system into extinction.
The main theme of this year’s election isn’t Make American Great Again or Stronger Together, it is apathy. The American voters are tired of the establishment and its total control of the system cloaked behind the fading belief that power is distributed amongst the people rather than the aristocratic few. Donald Trump helped expose all that on both sides of the political aisle. Trump in his unorthodox political approach has helped dismantle the gears of the political leviathan that many thought were impossible. All he had to do was tell the public out loud what many already knew.
While Trump made more headlines, in reality without both Trump and Sanders in this year’s election the impact could not be more so pronounced. Trump made conservative America see that its party was anything but conservative whether in its spending habits, foreign policy, or domestic policy rather the party served the needs of the donors. Sanders performed a similar task with liberal America demonstrating that the Democratic Party was far removed from its progressive roots. It had become a party of war mongers, Wall Street executives, and false bravados such as Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton.
Together both men have forever changed the system. They are akin to the meteorite that supposedly brought a cataclysmic climate change leading to the extinction of the Dinosaurs and other earth-based life at the time. The languishing political system that has disappointed so many appears to have been hit by a similar comet that will jolt both parties, if not entire system, into extinction in the next decade.
About the author:
*Luis Durani is currently employed in the oil and gas industry. He previously worked in the nuclear energy industry. He has a M.A. in international affairs with a focus on Chinese foreign policy and the South China Sea, MBA, M.S. in nuclear engineering, B.S. in mechanical engineering and B.A. in political science. He is also author of “Afghanistan: It’s No Nebraska – How to do Deal with a Tribal State” and “China and the South China Sea: The Emergence of the Huaqing Doctrine.” Follow him for other articles on Instagram: @Luis_Durani
Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy
