CNN commentators and guest analysts offer their take on the 2016 presidential election’s outcome.
Errol Louis: Now, the real pivot?
After months of riding slash-and-burn politics to victory, Donald Trump claimed the ultimate political prize — and immediately struck an unexpected note of grace and reconciliation.
Let’s hope it was genuine.
“It is time for us to come together as one united people,” Trump told a jubilant crowd at the Hilton, just days after leading followers in chants of “lock her up” — a vow to investigate and jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“We will seek common ground, not hostility,” he said, weeks after vowing to sue every one of the 10 women who have alleged that Trump grabbed, groped or kissed them against their will.
And as for Trump’s many political opponents, the president-elect struck a rare note of humility. “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help,” he said.
Could this be the long-awaited and oft-promised pivot Trump’s supporters said would happen? Or are we in for more of the tone of mockery, insults and bitter backlash that Trump aimed at so many during the campaign?
In this, as in so much else about this remarkable campaign, the only thing we know for sure is that America is now in uncharted territory.
Errol Louis is the host of “Inside City Hall,” a nightly political show on NY1, a New York all-news channel.
Brett Talley: Trump gave the forgotten a voice
This election was for the forgotten among the American people. People who have been ignored, walked upon, told that their concerns don’t matter. They believe in America, but America hasn’t believed in them. When Donald Trump came on the scene, for the first time, they had a voice.
Did it help that his opponent is one of the worst candidates in American history? Of course, but don’t discount his message. It was his message that won, his message that broke through, his message that brought thousands of Americans who have never supported a Republican into his camp.
Now the work begins. Republicans must hold him accountable. They must ensure that the promises he made are kept.
But that’s for tomorrow. For today, the voiceless have spoken, and they were heard from one side of the country to the other, and in every corner of the globe.
Brett J. Talley is a lawyer, author, one-time writer for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and former speechwriter for Sen. Rob Portman. He is deputy solicitor general at the office of Alabama’s attorney general.
Lanhee Chen: Dismantling of core parts of Obama agenda?
The historic victory for Donald Trump and congressional Republicans may lead to even more history being made in 2017 — the dismantling of many of the core parts of the Obama agenda. While the temptation will be for analysts to linger on the improbability of tonight’s outcome, the reality is that a presidential transition and new Congress await.
A top priority for President-elect Trump should be the repeal of Obamacare and its replacement with market-oriented, cost-lowering reforms. The health law was a central issue in the stretch run of the campaign and Republicans finally have an opportunity to accomplish what they’ve been unable to for the last six years.
There are, of course, other important priorities — the naming of a constitutional conservative to take the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s place on the Supreme Court and growth-boosting tax and regulatory reform for starters. But few things would do more to signal to all Americans (and to reassure some jittery Republicans) that President-elect Trump is serious about reform than taking immediate action on Obamacare.
Lanhee J. Chen is a CNN political commentator and the David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was the policy director on the Romney-Ryan 2012 campaign.
Jeff Yang: Nothing prepared us for this
Nothing prepared us for this outcome — a victory by Trump that seems to have been the antithesis of what every poll and pundit predicted, save for a handful of outliers who were dismissed as partisan fantasists. (Bill Mitchell was right after all.)
As recently as hours before early returns began to deal shuddering blows to overconfident Democrats, insiders were still predicting blowout electoral victory for Clinton.
Yet at the returns-watching event I organized tonight, we could only watch with our mouths open as states no one had credibly predicted for Trump turned red.
Talking heads instantly began yammering about white economic anxiety, about the feeling in the Midwest that the recovery had left them behind. But even states like Iowa that have had solid fiscal bouncebacks under Obama — and voted for him twice — went for Trump.
And in these states, the issues that voters said were most important in making their presidential selection were immigration and terrorism.
The fact that polls failed to pick up the breadth of Trump’s support is even more evidence of an uncomfortable truth: White people in this country fear and resent the browning of America, and a demagogue whose central platform plank was a promise to turn back time to an era before a black president, before the boom of immigration, before civil rights, maybe even before Emancipation, appealed to them in ways they refused to publicly admit.
And now America faces four years under Trump, with a Republican House and Senate, and at least one, possibly three Supreme Court vacancies to fill. Trump owns the GOP, and can take it whatever direction he chooses. Emboldened racists will target people of color; sexual abusers have been given tacit permission to predate at will. Obamacare is threatened, perhaps fatally. So are marriage equality and Roe v. Wade.
But it is no longer time to mourn, but to organize. The groups that will suffer most under Trump have always had to be stronger than the storm, and though they have been bound, they will not be broken.
Jeff Yang is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to radio shows including Public Radio International’s “The Takeaway” and WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” He is the co-author of “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” and editor of the graphic novel anthologies “Secret Identities” and “Shattered.”
Julian Zelizer: A new Republican party
This is one of the most stunning upsets in American presidential history. Very few people saw this coming — his candidacy, his campaign, and his victory.
The Republican Party had changed in pretty dramatic ways over the past decade and many of the experts missed it. Indeed, many Republicans missed it as well. The tea party had been the first indication that the Republican Party had moved in a more rightward, rambunctious, smash-mouth and reactionary direction. Donald Trump understood this, and he crafted a campaign around this new GOP. The question now is, what happens when he moves into the challenge of governance?
Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a New America fellow. He is the author of “Jimmy Carter” and “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.”
Frida Ghitis: Will we recognize America?
The most dispiriting, bizarre election in modern American history concluded with a shocking outcome. The slow-motion realization that Donald Trump is becoming the next President of the United States left much of the country dumbfounded, American allies deeply worried, and America’s enemies no doubt in a celebratory mood. At the Kremlin, they may well have had champagne with their Wednesday morning breakfast.
The big question now is what kind of a president Donald Trump will be. As a candidate, he inspired millions to support him, even if large majorities of Americans said they believe he has the wrong temperament to be president. His candidacy also inspired a surge in ugly expressions of hatred, as racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes and homophobes felt emboldened to flex their muscles.
If that’s what a Trump candidacy wrought, what will a Trump presidency bring? Will we recognize this country four years from now?
Trump won’t just be president. He will lead a party that will control all the branches of government, making it possible for him to move forward with his plans with little effective resistance.
For the sake of the country and the world, let us hope that his more outrageous statements were only an act, only political theater. If what we saw was real, which is more likely, let’s hope for a miracle, for a conversion on the road to Pennsylvania Avenue.
We can only hope that the magnitude of what has occurred will produce a change in the man, removing his most dangerous tendencies, disappointing his cheerleaders in Moscow, Damascus, and other capitals where regimes view America as the enemy and a thriving United States as a danger to be thwarted.
Let’s hope Trump finds a way to embrace the best of America, which, during the campaign he seemed to so easily disdain; values such as tolerance of different ideas, backgrounds and beliefs; respect for America’s freedom of the press and independence of the judiciary.
The odds of a miraculous transformation seem minuscule. The country, Americans, will have to be on their guard. If this election was a test of American democracy, the Trump presidency will be an even tougher one.
Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review, and a former CNN producer and correspondent. Follow her @FridaGhitis.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Every American presidential election is a referendum on the state of the nation. This one has also been a showdown between candidates so different that the nation in question seemed to be two separate entities. One looks back to a “better time” for a white majority constituency now threatened by demographic change and immigration. “I alone can fix it,” says Donald Trump, this nation’s savior. The other is oriented to the future and sees increased diversity as a source of strength rather than fear.
Today this former nation sent a message to the political establishment — and the nation’s nonwhite populations — by electing Donald Trump. Instead of 30 years of leadership, we have a political neophyte who saw a gap in the political marketplace and sold himself as a racist who would avenge eight years of an African-American in the Oval Office. Instead of a former secretary of state, we have a man who knows little about foreign relations. Instead of a commander in chief, we have a man who insults our troops past and present, and a man so impulsive his campaign had to take his phone away from him to stop his destructive tweeting, as though he were a child.
I feel great sadness and trepidation for America tonight. We are better than this. Our task as citizens will be to let Donald Trump know it, in the strongest possible terms.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Her latest book is “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema.”
