Even if Donald Trump loses, his legacy will live on in US politics

The Republic Convention reminds us that Trump did not manage to conjure a gratuitous xenophobia among the US electorate – it was already there

Donald Trump is running his election campaign on the promise he will 'make America great again' (Reuters)

Donald Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention to the sound of Queen’s ‘We are the champions’, a choice song for a tycoon who seems to worship nothing other than his own skin. We know that this kitschy bombast is a subliminal appeal for us think of the presidential campaign as part-drama and part-entertainment, but beware: both have the capacity to numb the increasing unease at the sight before us, the unlikely popinjay who might actually become commander-in-chief of the United States of America.

Following the convention, the tabloids have reserved headline after headline to Melania Trump’s reported plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democrat Convention speech. This is a frivolous distraction from the main story coming out of the convention – that Trump gave us a live and ominous demonstration of exactly how he intends to “make America great again”.

In what could aptly be described (or deplored) as an auction of jingoist nationalism, bereaved parents and siblings were marched onto the stage to provide sobbing testimony of how their loved ones were killed by “Islamic terrorists” or “illegal aliens” from Mexico. The onus for all of these deaths was, by every speaker, placed entirely on Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The most potent case was that of Pat Smith, whose son Sean was killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in September 2012, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

Smith’s testimony, intermittently broken by the tremble of hysteria in her voice, blamed Hillary for the death of her son. While Clinton’s harebrained conduct in Libya is unquestionable, for Trump to politicise that grievance in deference of his campaign, to use it as an emotional battering ram against his political foe, is ignominious even by his own standards.

Alas, the festival of hyperbole does not end there. The Grand Old Party has finally released the blueprint for its platform. The long-awaited document is an unapologetic embracement of Trumpisms most vulgar excesses, enough to make even the likes of former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater turn in his grave.

Trump’s tenth-rate race-baiting knows no bounds. For a start, President Obama’s executive order which gave guarantees against deportation to millions of undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children and immigrant parents of US citizens will, under Trump, be deemed “unlawful amnesties”, opening a judicial door for their mass expulsion.

“In a time of terrorism, drug cartels, human trafficking, and criminal gangs, the presence of millions of unidentified individuals in this country poses grave risk,” the paper drudges on. One need not have a tutored eye to notice the blatant and craven attempts to pre-emptively criminalise millions of people based on the mere criteria of ethnicity.

As we have come to expect from the demagogue par excellence, the most concentrated level of vitriol is reserved for anything remotely related to Islam or the Middle East. In an unabashed practice of a policy of guilt by association, we are informed that “special scrutiny” should be applied to “those foreign nationals seeking to enter the US from countries associated with Islamic terrorism.”

It is easy to dismiss the foregoing as empty campaign rhetoric that will come to nothing; according to the polls, Hillary Clinton is well in the lead and is highly likely to secure the keys to the Oval Office.

Trump’s hairpiece might fade into obscurity, but his legacy won’t. Trump did not manage to conjure a gratuitous xenophobia among the US electorate – it was already there, in latent, and in some cases blatant, form. Trump has, in the eyes of his supporters, vindicated and legitimised feelings of supremacy and resentment of the ‘other’.

That the GOP has capitulated to Trump’s most invidious policies – despite many of the previous candidates, including Ted Cruz, rejecting them – suggests that a new consensus has ossified.The world now beholds an even more chauvinist Republican party with an emboldened electorate.

I would like to say that, if Trump loses, we may ever have to look upon his like again – but his legacy will be the great winner of the 2016 US presidential election.