Many well-informed people had a scare, one morning in November 2016, when a truculent Republican named Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
Not that he despised the 304 votes he received in the electoral college, even though his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with 227 of the so-called big voters, gathered 2.8 million votes more than the winning competitor.
The 2016 American presidential campaign deserved a balanced — and therefore terrifying — documentary, under the direction of James Fletcher. “A President’s Accident”, from 2020, has been available since this Thursday (28) on the Belas Artes à la Carte service.
Electoral predictability is always relative, especially in a system like the American one, where the difference between winner and loser is usually small. Even so, “Hillary’s victory” was taken for granted. The Democratic Party came from two quiet presidential terms with the competent Barack Obama. Nothing indicated a change of direction, except a sum of small details that stitched together the unexpected defeat.
As much as six years separate us today from Trump’s victory, Fletcher’s documentary serves as a lesson, applicable to any country, about the crazy irrationality generated at the polls by populism.
Let’s take a closer look at the campaign. Hillary and Trump faced off in three debates. Specialists pointed out her clear superiority in convincing oratory techniques. He hardly cared—and deep down he was right. Debates no longer define the vote that is still undecided or reinforce the one already defined. This is because social networks have built parallel circuits for exchanging information that supply voters and provide directions for their choice.
The Republican was more present on social media, both with what he and his supporters did and because of Russia’s contribution – in an operation that the candidate did not command -, which derided the Democrat as much as he could.
Another detail. After the party convention that chose her, Hillary, with a ten-point lead in the polls, went under to go after big funders. Meanwhile, Trump gathered 20,000 voters daily at rallies that did not discriminate against major or small state. From grain to grain and with the anti-globalization rhetoric and the defense of the return of industrial jobs, he filled his enormous chat.
The curious thing is that the documentary leaves blank about the way in which the two parties saw the electorate. Democrats spoke to a fragmented audience — unemployed, gay, black — while Republicans built sociological wholes that were compact and countered what came from abroad — competition, Muslims, terrorism.
But let’s go back to early 2015, when the campaign was still in its infancy. Hillary aides didn’t think Trump truly wanted to run; they believed that he was just trying to add the dispute for the White House to his personal image, and then take advantage of it as a businessman.
The advisors’ mistake was demobilizing. It encouraged the belief that it would be easier to run over a make-believe opponent. But Trump, by contrast, displayed the fury of an enraged bulldog. In the primaries, he took on Jeb Bush, the son and brother of former presidents, calling him a low-energy candidate; the adjective destroyed him in electoral terms.
The Republican also shot in all directions and tried to hurt those who came close to the core of the Democratic Party. He resurrected Bill Clinton’s marital betrayals, knowing that his wife Hillary would uncomfortably come to his defense. And he resurrected the lie that Obama was born in Kenya, a foreign country, rather than Hawaii, an American state.
Her offensives grew until, 11 days before the election, the FBI decided to investigate 31,000 emails that the Democrat sent as secretary of state, many of them outside the US government ombudsman. “She deserves to go to jail,” his opponent roared. The word “jail” reverberated deep among the undecided, and perhaps on that day the presidential race was decided for the conservative side.
Even so, Clinton even wrote a speech as president-elect — and her supporters organized festivities to celebrate her victory. However, she gave Donald Trump.
The documentary is restricted to the electoral period. It does not run through the Republican’s presidential term nor does it stop at January 6, 2021, when he ordered his supporters to invade Congress to prevent Joe Biden from being certified as the new president. Trump was bad at everything. Even as a loser.
