NEW YORK \u2014 Donald Trump awakened a movement of angry working-class voters fed up with political insiders and desperate for change. On Tuesday, that movement propelled him to the White House.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s stunning, come-from-behind victory over Hillary Clinton served as a symbolic raised middle finger to the political establishment from his fervent backers.<\/p>\n
But to millions of others, the billionaire businessman\u2019s elevation to the presidency is a shocking, catastrophic blow that threatens the security and identity of a bitterly divided nation.<\/p>\n
Many see the president-elect as a racist, a bigot and a misogynist unfit for the office.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe scares the daylights out of me,\u201d said Wendy Bennett, a Democrat and government worker from Reno, Nevada, who cast her ballot for Clinton. \u201cI think his personality is going to start World War III. He reminds me of Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lisa Moore, a registered Republican from Glen Rock, New Jersey, crossed party lines to vote for Clinton, who would have been the nation\u2019s first female president.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a woman, in good conscience, and as the mother of a daughter, I can\u2019t vote for somebody who\u2019s so morally reprehensible,\u201d said Moore, an exercise instructor.<\/p>\n
The 2016 election will go down as one of the most vicious in modern history, as Clinton tried to paint Trump as a reckless bully and Trump belittled his rival as a corrupt insider who belonged behind bars.<\/p>\n
But the election also served as vindication for Trump, a former reality TV star whose appeal was underestimated from the start.<\/p>\n
While pundits assumed his poll numbers would sink as soon as voters started taking the race seriously, Trump was drawing thousands each night to rallies packed full of angry, largely white supporters who felt ignored and lied to by Washington.<\/p>\n
While statistics showed the U.S. economy improving overall, it didn\u2019t feel that way in places like upstate New York, Pennsylvania\u2019s coal country and former manufacturing towns across the Midwest devastated by outsourcing and globalization. Chaos abroad only added to the feeling that the country was sliding backward.<\/p>\n
Together, those factors drove a yearning to return to a simpler time when America was the world\u2019s undisputed superpower and middle-class wages were on the rise.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have our fingers in too many baskets,\u201d said Joe Hudson, 49, an engineer and registered Republican from Virginia Beach, Virginia, who said he would be voting for Trump because \u201cwe\u2019re not taking care of our own people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to be too involved in world politics. And our country is imploding from within,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need a new direction, a new attitude, and people to stop arguing and letting the media affect how we feel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s vow was simple: He\u2019d \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d His outsider status, coupled with his personal business success, lent credibility to a populist message that emphasized recapturing manufacturing jobs, restoring American strength abroad and curtailing legal and illegal immigration.<\/p>\n
Trump, early on, painted his supporters as a \u201cmovement\u201d larger than himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis isn\u2019t about me; it\u2019s about all of you and our magnificent movement to make America great again all over this country. And they\u2019re talking about it all over the world,\u201d he said at a rally in Miami last week during the race\u2019s furious final stretch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has never been a movement like this in the history of our country \u2014 it\u2019s never happened. Even the pundits, even the ones that truly dislike Donald Trump, have said it\u2019s the single greatest phenomena they have ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as he worked his base into a frenzy and locked down one primary win after the next, Trump was also repelling large swaths of the populace \u2014 including women, college-educated whites and minorities \u2014 with his deeply divisive rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Trump launched his campaign with a speech that accused Mexico of sending rapists and other criminals across the border. He later questioned 2008 Republican nominee and former POW John McCain\u2019s status as a war hero, saying he preferred people who hadn\u2019t been captured. He mocked a disabled reporter. And he called for a \u201ctotal and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country\u2019s representatives can figure out what is going on\u201d \u2014 a blanket religion test denounced by many as un-American.<\/p>\n
After securing his party\u2019s nomination, Trump questioned a federal judge\u2019s ability to treat him fairly because of the judge\u2019s Hispanic origin, repeatedly insulted a Muslim-American family whose son had been killed in Iraq, and got into an extended spat with a former beauty queen, at one point instructing his millions of Twitter followers to \u201ccheck out\u201d her non-existent sex tape.<\/p>\n
Again and again, Trump appeared poised to close the gap with Clinton, only to go off on a tangent that would send his poll numbers tumbling.<\/p>\n
Then came the release of jarring old video footage from an \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d bus in which Trump bragged about being able to grope women because he was famous. The video\u2019s release was followed by a string of allegations from women who said Trump sexually harassed or assaulted them.<\/p>\n
Trump denied the accusations, at one point threatening to sue the women.<\/p>\n
But one October surprise was followed by another: a letter from the FBI director informing Congress that the bureau had found a new trove of emails potentially relevant to its investigation into Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server a secretary of state. While the FBI eventually announced that there was nothing in the emails to merit criminal prosecution, the damage appeared to have been done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK \u2014 Donald Trump awakened a movement of angry working-class voters fed up with political insiders and desperate for change. On Tuesday, that movement propelled him to the White House. Trump\u2019s stunning, come-from-behind victory over Hillary Clinton served as a symbolic raised middle finger to the political establishment from his fervent backers. But to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-10631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10631"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=10631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}