Of Donald Trump, US presidency and mainstream media

For the first time in my adult life and for an unabashed Ameriphile like me, I am truly amazed at what is coming out of the mainstream media in the US. I have always been a faithful admirer of mainstreamers like CNN, Time, Newsweek, MSNBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., but I do not like the panicky hue that these media outlets have assumed in trying to downplay the real reason Donald Trump won the US presidency. These mainstreamers would want to have us believe that Russia tweaked with America’s voting public’s perception of Hilary Clinton. But, in reality, this was far from it. Is not the US perceived as the most culturally sensitive country on earth? How, then, could “kleptocratic” Russia be so refined as to influence Americans voting patterns? Moreover, the US is the epicenter of digital information processing and access and it is inconceivable that Russia would beam so much disinformation that would send Americans into gullible-mode.

I have wondered myself why WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) America came out in full support of Mr. Trump and the reason is not far to see: I would mention just two names, “Portland, Oregon” and “Salt Lake City, Utah.” Mr. Trump’s pitch to the voting populations of these towns, in addition to St. Cloud in Minnesota and Memphis in Tennessee and other suchlike cities and town where President Barack Obama did his utmost to consciously alter the population demographics, swayed the ballot for Mr. Trump.  All these years before Obama came to power, everyone always associated Portland in Oregon to a region of predominantly white Church of Christ adherents and Salt Lake City in Utah to predominantly white Mormon devotees but all these changed with Obama sanctioning massive in-flow of Muslim populations from Somalia, the Middle East and elsewhere into these regions without first consulting with the city mayors as to the appropriateness of those refugee-resettlement policies. Thus, Trump heavily bombed Obama on the campaign trail by promising he would consult mayors of towns and cities before foreign refugees are settled in their domains; this promise reverberated especially well across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other “swing” states already fearful of a foreign Islamic invasion.

Rightly, on the cusp of his much-touted “Muslim ban” the “swing” states pendulum swung in favour of Donald Trump but the US mainstream media is suppressing this fact so as not to create panic in the Muslim world and lose  a chunk of their subscription base, advertisement, and investment; they do this by over-rating Vladimir Putin. Citizens of Portland and Salt Lake City have even gone into backlash mode against Obama’s refugee-resettlement policies: at Portland two men have been stabbed to death for defending hijab-wearing Muslim girls who were being verbally-assaulted by a resident of that town and law-enforcement operatives have been documented to fatally shoot Muslim Somali residents of Salt Lake City. The question on the lips of alt-right activists in the US today is why Saudi Arabia is not practicing the kind of multiculturalism that the Muslim world expects the Western World to practice. What history has taught us is no one should try to outsmart the Americans and Saudi Arabia has just learnt the hard way by agreeing to invest scarce billions of dollars in the US infrastructure industry so as to temper Mr. Trump’s “Muslim ban.” But WASP America is not sold on this  trick one bit.

• Jonah is a lecturer at the Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State.