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‘Most Americans voted for Clinton or Trump for all the wrong reasons’

Kerry Hinton, 43, of Lakewood, Colorado fills out her ballot at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds on November 8, 2016 in Golden, Colorado.

The real tragedy of the November 8 US presidential election is that a great many people voted for Hillary Clinton  or Donald Trump for all the wrong reasons, according to Barry Grossman, an international lawyer and political analyst who is based in Indonesia.  

Grossman told Press TV on Friday that the Republican winner and other Americans owe a debt of gratitude to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who made personal sacrifices in exposing the reality of Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Trump won the election because Democrats rigged the system to have Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, according to WikiLeaks.

Independent Senator Sanders, who sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, could have won the election but the Democratic National Committee (DNC) stopped him from doing so by pushing him out from the primary race, the whistleblowing agency suggested in a statement published on its website on Wednesday.

 WikiLeaks claimed that the Democratic Party establishment conspired to ensure Clinton win the party’s presidential nomination. In doing so it chose a weaker candidate who lost the election against Trump on Tuesday, the agency suggested.

What many pundits are missing

“While I agree that the Clinton cabal's conduct during the primaries was one of several key factors in the outcome, I believe there were a number of phenomena playing out - often at cross purposes – which led inevitably to the same result that saw Trump take the White House,” Grossman said.

“To be sure, there is no shortage of people now pointing out that the mood of the electorate during this election cycle was hostile to the establishment and Washington insiders but, in pointing out the obvious, many pundits seem so wedded to their own agenda that they are missing the obvious about what this really means,” he added.

“At one level, it seems to me that people already frightened of the future and tired of losing ground in their own lives, took this opportunity to express their deep offence at the presumption self-professed progressives who reacted with condescending contempt towards all those people who are tired of the Democratic Party’s unqualified and even blind support for social engineering projects which strike at the heart of what many Americans embrace as core beliefs,” he stated.

Hubris and dishonesty of so-called progressives

Grossman said that “the hubris and dishonesty of so-called progressives plumbed new depths in a largely pro-Clinton media which made no effort either to hold Clinton accountable for her record or to genuinely understand what Trump was saying, preferring instead to recycle innuendo and partisan caricatures of him while giving Hilary Clinton a free ride.”

“In my opinion, this election was far more a collective reaction to the absurdly partisan way the media discharged its role in the electoral process than an endorsement or rejection of either candidate. While the electorate is obviously made up of people with wildly different levels of political sophistication and knowledge, even the least sophisticated voters know when they are being sold porkies by the media and when they are being insulted by any candidate’s political machine,” he said.

“While apart from the Democrats’ failure to gain control of either house of Congress, I am very satisfied with the outcome, but my own view is that the real tragedy of this election is that a great many and perhaps even a majority of the people voting one way or another did so for all the wrong reasons.  That, it should be obvious, is a problem which will not simply go away,” the analyst noted.

“I also take the few there is clearly a growing cross section of the American electorate – both Democrats and Republicans – who are tired seeing progressive causes and, more importantly, the foreign policy agenda embraced the Washington establishment hijacked by neoconservatives and the special interests they tend to represent, with more sophisticated progressives realizing that for the time being it seems that neoliberal economic policies are a burden Americans may have to bear in order to resist the neoconservative geopolitical agenda,” he said.

Not many understand how the government works

“While many people still have little or no understanding of the way government works and what a president can and cannot do, they are slowly waking up to the fact that presidents and, indeed, political parties have defaulted into becoming ‘policy takers’ rather than ‘policy makers’, and Americans are at last waking up to the way the policy making process is entirely owned by think tanks running on private money,” Grossman said.

“The simple fact is policy making has become an industry and that industry, like the related ‘security’ industry, has become so powerful and arrogant that instead of think tank pundits actually asking themselves  what is ‘right’ or what Americans want, they proceed by identifying  what would be most profitable to the corporate and other special interests they are  beholding  to, before  then expressing their ‘expert’ vision entirely in prescriptive and normative  terms framed to advance the agenda of special interests aligned with the US establishment, while abandoning  even the pretence of being concerned about compliance with the conventions and law of nations which have come to be known as international law,” he stated.

Vote against the US political establishment

“Trump’s promise to put American interests first, to embrace a far less interventionist foreign policy, to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s conduct as secretary of state, and to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington made him stand out as the obvious candidate of choice to an electorate that wanted to send a clear message to the political establishment that the electorate rejects the way the political process and government itself has been co-opted by corporate and special interests who have no loyalty whatsoever to ordinary Americans,” Grossman said.

'We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Julian Assange'

“In any case, it seems to me that we all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Julian Assange who, though he remains holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy while the Atlantic World's security apparatus remains obsessed with exterminating him, nevertheless abandoned all caution and personal concerns in feeding people the facts about Hillary Clinton and her cabal that controls the Democratic Party,” he observed.

“Of course, his personal sacrifice in exposing the reality of who Hillary Clinton is will not go unpunished and the fact that his unstinting public service alienated his natural support base among progressives only serves to reinforce the concerns which saw so many Americans vote for Donald Trump,” the commentator said.

“Indeed, I rather doubt that he would have won the election without WikiLeaks but it would be naive to imagine that the axiomatic rule which dictates that ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ will somehow be suspended for Julian by a grateful Trump,” he concluded. 


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