Stop Calling Trump an Outsider by m.nicole.r.wildhood

Stop Calling Trump an Outsider


Major media outlets reported on the “stunning victory” of an “outsider” over his opponent, whom many have have argued was the most qualified candidate in decades, on November 9th and again when the Electoral College confirmed his victory. Trump supporters see him as a way out of their plight inflicted upon by them status quo because they see him as an outsider to the system that’s hurting them. On a basic level, it’s true. Trump is a man with no political experience who has attained the highest political position in the United States. His experience is mostly in conning workers, dodging taxes and keeping as much attention on himself as possible. Calling him an outsider deceived millions of people into thinking they were voting for someone far less dangerous than Donald Trump. People voted for Trump because business as usual was crushing them; they understandably wanted a way out of the status quo and saw their chance in ‘outsider’ Trump. 

He’s an outsider on another level: despite his multiple business failures and need for the government to bail him out, he’s a top member of the one percent. Much as he’s disavowed all affiliation with extraordinarily wealthy people like Charles and David Koch, Trump is a billionaire himself. Millions of working-class, blue-collar people came to believe that such a man as Trump cares about them, in large part through imprecise, sensationalized media coverage: ‘outsider’ is not a neutral word. It’s got a positive tone to it, like ‘underdog,’ the guy you want to root for simply because the odds are stacked against him. Calling Trump an outsider fails to accurately convey the dire peril electing him has put us all – but particularly the already vulnerable (low-income, people of color, women, people with disabilities, immigrants, non-Christians) in.
 
A word like ‘outsider’ equates Trump with politicians like Bernie Sanders, who qualifies as an outsider, too. But it’s nonsensical to put these two men in the same category. Sanders did not have balm for every wound ailing America and he certainly had some major flaws. But his vision for healing what hurts did not explicitly promise to harm millions of people living in this country. Sanders is an outsider because his ideas run counter to the political and social culture he’s in (which does not necessarily make them wrong); the Democratic Party did not believe he would have enough support to get elected president because the people, the vast majority of whom desperately want and need systemic change, have become outsiders to their own government. Trump is an ‘outsider’ because he is the first bona fide schoolyard bully to be elected president on the platform of being a bully. A word other than ‘outsider’ is clearly needed.

Ultimately, the problem is that electing someone ‘outside’ the system leads us to believe we’ve solved the system’s chronic and systemic issues. Trump may be an outsider in that he's assembling the wealthiest cabinet in history, but ​his initial appointments reveal he is no outsider when it comes to corruption - he's appointing an EPA chair who is against environmental protection, an education secretary who is anti-public education, a labor secretary that's against workers' rights, and a secretary of state that's literally spent his career deceiving and destroying our world.​
 
But even if they weren’t, choosing an outsider to the system to run the system has less of a chance of changing the system than it does of changing the outsider. There is real work in desperate need of being done, which would have been true regardless of the results on Nov. 8th. Trump’s election has underscored the need for this work to be done for some (at least now it’s harder to deny that racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and general bigotry exist, so the claim goes) but obscured this need for many others. Getting an ‘outsider’ into the highest position in the land apparently seems to some of us like a big enough accomplishment to allow us to sit back and trust that wrongs will be righted without any further effort on the part of the people.

Many laudable efforts are being made to challenge the election, Trump’s appointments and his nonchalant, better-than-this-attitude toward what should be a serious and solemn endeavour and many of them affirm that he is in fact not an outsider at all. But our mainstream media and the many who have been emboldened by his election to asssault others in his name (as just one example, the day after the election, a white man grabbed my ass and, as he was reaching around to the front, yelled, “if my president can grab pussy, so can I!” in the presence of four other white men who all turned the other way) (short piece I wrote) and bludgeon the vulnerable with demands for “unity” and “coming together” still believe that an ‘outsider’ won the election and that this fact alone legitimizes not only everything Trump says but everything said or done in his name.
 
Trump is an outsider in a literal sense. But words matter. Continuing to tout him as one makes his rise to power seem like a victorious overcoming by a weak but deserving perseverer. In reality, what happened was not a ‘stunning upset’ nor even an ‘infiltration’ but an ominous coup not by an underdog but by a man already on top. This ‘outsider’ plans to use his newfound insider status to make more and more people outsiders – to healthcare, to the job market, to social services. Trump’s story is not about the underdog who has overcome the powerful; it is about the powerful who ha​ve​ overcome the underdogs...if we let him.

In addition to blogging at http://mnicolerwildhood.com, m.nicole.r.wildhood's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Atticus Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for America Magazine’s annual Foley Poetry Contest and her nonfiction has been anthologized in several collections. She currently writes for Seattle’s street newspaper Real Change and is at work on a novel and several volumes of poetry, including one in Spanish.

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