by WALDEN BELLO
Nearly a month before the November 5 election, I predicted that Donald Trump would win and wrote about it in a couple of articles. My “prediction” created some controversy, especially since the polls showed Harris and Trump in a dead heat. Not surprisingly people have been asking me the last few days how I came out with a call that, to some, had at the time no empirical basis and, to others, was an assault on their political sensibilities.
It’s not really rocket science.
Inflation was just running rampant, with over 20% cumulative inflation in four years. I went almost every spring to teach in New York for six weeks, and I was shocked to see how high prices had risen since the year before. One could gauge the popular mood in forays to the supermarket, where the joy had gone out of the great American pastime of shopping and people trudged along the aisles with a grimace on their faces as they stared at food prices that seemed to be escalating weekly.
When one turned on the television, one was assailed with images of migrants coming over the border with Mexico in droves, with border patrol agents shaking their heads, and middle class people in the Northeast waking up in shock to find migrants suddenly in their midst, deposited there courtesy of border-state governors who went on televised harangues justifying their acts by saying they wanted to give “blue state people” a taste of “uncontrolled migration” brought about by Democratic Party policies.
Then, especially since October 2023, there were very real fears about the United States being sucked into the expanding war in the Middle East, that the Biden administration had lost control of its Middle East policy to Israel, and that this was triggering domestic unrest that was brought to living rooms nightly by images of campus confrontations and massive and arrests.
Then in the last few weeks before the vote, with Israel bombing Lebanon and carrying out strategic assassinations in Iran and elsewhere, then bombing Iran itself, there was widespread alarm that Tel Aviv was intent on dragging the US into active combat and the Biden administration was helplessly looking on.
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