I've been in the United States for three months now and I've had a chance to witness political fever first hand. Media propaganda is on a mass scale compared to back home in England where you might get a mail in the post about the election, but engagement here with politics is widespread. I was reading about the symptoms of psychopath personality disorder and the current billionaire GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump unsurprisingly fits them all. Most of Californians I've spoken to feel that they are in the twilight zone watching a person who Bill Maher hilariously once described as a real life "Orangutan", gaining momentum. The famous founding father Thomas Jefferson once said "When people fear their government; there is tyranny" and what is happening in the landscape of the current U.S. election is scary.
After the election of the first African-American president the success of Trump shocks many since the country appears to be in regression. Trump is an outright sexist, homophobic, racist psychopath who is more suited for a reality TV show than U.S office. How? Why? Confused Americans are asking all over the country? What did all of us good Americans do to deserve a candidate like Trump?
We all thought we had reached our comedic orgasms with the famously inarticulate George W. Bush, however Trump astonishingly makes him look like a genius, nobody thought they'd see the day that they missed Bush. Don't get me wrong, I am aware that the U.S. is more of a Corporatocracy defined by (arguably one of the greatest thinkers of our time) Noam Chomsky as a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. It's funny that the U.S. has intervened in Latin American governments complaining about a lack of democracy while undermining the will of its own people through an elitist economic system and a surveillance state.
Is there really a democracy when Trump's success is largely due to his power in the media and not his abilities as a democratic leader? He's spent $100 million just on publicity and has bragged about not having to buy advertising time because he gets so much free coverage.
"He remains a one-man news cycle who spends far more on promotion than his opponents"
In his usual fear mongering ways, Trump has declared that he will create a trade war against Mexico which would not only kill millions of U.S jobs, but it would would prompt Mexico to seek trading partners with China or Russia probably causing another Cold War. Trump has shown us on several occasions that he is a bigot to racial groups, long before he called Mexicans criminals and rapists, he accused Obama of not being born in the United States.
I don't blame Americans for feeling that their elections are rigged. Pundits say that Trump is fuelled by anger, but it worries me even more that no one like Trump has ever got this far. Consider that Trump beats Hilary Clinton. If it questioned whether he would pass a sanity test, let alone all the ways he fits the profile of a psychopath, how has this man been able to run as President of one of the greatest nations on earth and furthermore, what does this say about democracy?