The Trump Election

NOV 08 2016 · 12:00

Donald Trump addresses supporters on his post-election Victory Tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania, 15 December 2016. Place: United States (general election) Figures: Donald Trump, Republican nominee · Hillary Clinton, Democratic nominee · Mike Pence, running mate · Stephen Bannon, campaign chair · the 304 Republican electors who cast the official vote America First Donald Trump wins 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 227, despite losing the popular vote by 2.87 million. The margin runs through Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (states no Republican had carried since 1988) by a combined 77,744 votes. Every major political analyst, every major polling firm, and most of his own campaign staff had predicted Clinton would win. The inaugural address on 20 January 2017 frames the platform: From this day forward, it's going to be only America First. America First. The phrase carries deliberate historical weight. The America First Committee of 1940–41 had opposed US entry into the Second World War and the internationalist consensus that produced the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]) and the post-1945 alliance system. Trump's reuse is not accidental. The doctrine is articulated as explicit Westphalian retrenchment: the United States is a sovereign state with interests, and those interests are not served by treaties and institutions that constrain it more than they constrain its rivals. The Withdrawals The first term withdraws from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (23 January 2017), the Paris Agreement (notified 1 June 2017), UNESCO (12 October 2017), the UN Human Rights Council (19 June 2018), the Iran nuclear deal (8 May 2018), the INF Treaty (announced October 2018), the Open Skies Treaty (May 2020), the WHO (notification July 2020). NAFTA is renegotiated as USMCA. NATO contributions are publicly questioned. The Republic of China is granted formal cabinet-level contacts that previous administrations had carefully avoided. The post-1991 liberal-internationalist consensus is now openly contested from within its leading power. Biden reverses many of these in 2021. Trump reverses many of the reversals in 2025. The on-off pattern itself becomes the new normal. The era's central recognition (that even the leading power of the postwar order can be turned, through ordinary electoral mechanisms, against the order it built) propagates through every other capital: every multilateral commitment is now conditional on the next election. This is, in a sense, the Westphalian system functioning exactly as designed. It is also, in a sense, the end of the system's capacity to address problems that Video: ABC News broadcast of Donald Trump's full victory speech at the Hilton Midtown in New York, in the early hours of 9 November 2016.