2016 U.S. Election: How Donald Trump Edged Hillary Clinton

they don’t understand that just because someone thinks the opposite of what they think, that doesn’t mean that other person is stupid. Many people I’ve talked to would call Donald Trump a stupid man and in kind, many people I’ve spoken to would call Hillary Clinton a stupid woman. Neither of those statements are true, however, there is always a chance that a person is astronomically wrong.

This was the case with Donald Trump. A great number of people, experts included, who thought that Donald Trump was way in over his head in this election. When he first announced intention to run, I thought he did have a chance because he was the outsider with a great business track record (He made billions, that’s a great record!), and because he wasn’t a politician.

People have been complaining about do-nothing politicians whom we can’t trust, but we need them. Compounding that problem was the fact that no one can run against them because they keep the “honest guy,” out or make him/her have to accept money/favors in order to achieve something thus playing the proverbial game and becoming corrupt. However, a citizen like Trump, who doesn’t need their money to keep himself afloat, doesn’t have to sell his soul in order to get a seat at the proverbial table.

But even I felt that after the “Grab her by the…” remark, and after the liberal media seemed to twist and spin every word he said into a dagger to stab him with, I started to think he wouldn’t win because the media wouldn’t let it happen. After all, Harry Reid outright lied about Mitt Romney not paying taxes when he had paid several million. Reid didn’t care and still doesn’t care that he lied in order to help Obama secure a second term.

The whole liberal press army was out to get Trump more than perhaps any candidate since Andrew Jackson. They blatantly made up things like calling him a Russian spy, made comparisons to Adolf Hitler, said he was a terrible businessman with multiple bankruptcies (exploiting the fact that most people don’t understand how corporate bankruptcy is different from actual bankruptcy). When they ran out of bullets for him, they shot at his wife, calling her sexist degrading names while acting as if they are women’s rights activists.

My friend Cameron predicted a landslide win for Clinton. I’m not sure if anyone I knew actually felt that Donald Trump had a chance. Conservative Fox News was not optimistic. The others were optimistic for the next democrat. I personally thought the yellow journalism’s urine stained words had ended his chances.I only turned on the television to see how the country voted. Then I saw…I was wrong

I was wrong. So was anyone who thought he didn’t have a chance. That includes Utah congressional senator Mike Lee whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Weber State University this past spring. He was positive Trump wouldn’t win the election and this was when Cruz was on his last legs trying to defeat Trump primary. Lee was convinced, I don’t know how, that the Republican Party would be able to overcome Trump.

He quoted Winston Churchill: “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”I wished he had been next to me so I could’ve cracked, “Is Trump the right thing or did we forget something?”

Because there Donald Trump was winning state after state after state. I then realized that my theory had still remained true. Enough of America was so sick of politicians and especially Hillary Clinton that they were voting Trump because they’d rather roll the dice with him than take the guaranteed pointless four years of Hillary Clinton. Being interviewed was a woman who voted Trump. Really? A woman not his wife voted for him?

She said she liked how he tells it like it is. It’s not pretty, but he tells it. She was right too. People are tired of politicians especially with how they speak. If they are given an uncomfortable question, they respond with a modern day version of a Shakespearean soliloquy as they beat around the bush so they can successfully dodge a question.

Like with Lee, there was another conversation exchange that always stayed with me from that talk with him at Weber.

Me: If Donald Trump wins… Lee: I don’t think he’s going to win. Me: Just hypothetically, if he wins, do you think he’ll be a lame duck president or do you think he’ll be able to get things done. Lee: Oh…Well to tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s scarier. A presidency where Trump does nothing or a presidency where Trump gets a lot of things done.

To tell you the truth senator, that wasn’t an answer to my question. See what I mean? There’s a good chance you were rolling your eyes just then because you can’t stand the political speak. It’s like an art of not offending anyone to the point where they aren’t human, but breathing English thesauruses’ walking around the streets of our capital cities.

Lee has gotten his wakeup call by now or he’s still in disbelief because he underestimated Trump like pool player underestimates a hustler. Only Trump didn’t have to pretend that he didn’t know what he was doing. He seemed to look like he genuinely did not. However, and this is where one can argue Trump has more credentials for the job than originally thought, because he understood his audience.

Trump knew more about the people that he was supposedly constantlyoffending than everyone else because he not only performed better than expected, he won. He knew that his refreshing straight forward speech was something a lot of people appreciated even if it was offensive. A lot of people just want the truth. They don’t care if you wrap it in a bow or whack it across with a wooden board. People want the truth.

Trump calculated that while he said some offensive things like the audio recording of him saying disturbing things about women’s genitalia, it still didn’t change the fact that Hillary Clinton was a corrupt politician who had not achieved her goals in all her years of power. This was an advantage.

Trump gambled that voters would weigh her actions heavier than his words. While he has a big mouth, he does not have a criminal record of any kind nor has he ever been criminally charged. A lot of women would think they’ve heard worse or just accept the sexist language as part of life as many women do. And before any liberals cry out about the sexual assault claims and the civil suit alleging he raped a 13-year-old girl, please just stop and look in the mirror for a second.

The only reason anyone believed those charges or allegations against Trump is because they already hated Trump. When you hate someone, it’s quite easy to think the absolute worst of them. If we replace Trump with Obama, then the radical racist section of republicans who hate Obama would want him in prison without a trial and the liberals who hate Trump would be calling the situation something along the lines of a giant stack of manure.

This section of voters who didn’t just think with their hearts, but also their heads. They saw the civil suit for what it was. A liberal attempt of sabotage. Of course it can’t be proven in court because of attorney client privilege and the two witnesses are confidential, but the timing is too coincidental that he’d be accused of something that happened close to thirty years ago just as he’s running for president? Let’s be real, Donald Trump is a sexist pig who has cheated on his wife, but a pedophilic rapist?

Interesting thing, the suit against Trump was dropped two days before Election Day. That was quite another “coincidence” to say the least…

To further counter the idea that he was sexist, Donald Trump got the women who accused Bill Clinton, Hillary’s husband, to appear at the debates. It was such a powerful counter image for him to show because the implication that Hillary is no different than Bill in the sense that she helped silence them. How can you call yourself a champion of women’s rights when you’ll cover up your husband’s sexual harassment?

So much of Hillary’s support was the unspoken idea that because she’s a strong woman, she’d protect the women of America. Well she can’t portray that now when she’s been painted as a woman who’d choose her marriage over victims.

Many liberals said “So what?” the same way that Trump’s hardcore said about the genitalia remarks, but there was enough disgust and ugliness to go around between the two. In my opinion, that was a huge negating factor for Hillary as exit polls have indicated that more white women voted for Trump than Hillary Clinton.

In addition, Trump countered all the additional spins that people were saying about him by highlighting Clinton’s failure in a way Bernie Sanders did not. Trump played up that the Clinton Foundation is corrupt. He played up the emails that Clinton was being investigated for. He played up that Obamacare was an absolute failure. Trump convinced voters in key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa that he was the right man for them because he was going to improve the job economy; something that Clinton did not do.

This was also something that the liberal press did not twist and Clinton couldn’t get the majority of the American people who were on the fence to vote for her. There was also Florida, which might’ve been Clinton’s if not for third party voting. The gap between her and Trump was 128,863 votes.

204,854 people voted Johnson and 63,664 voted Stein in the third largest electoral state (29 votes). That one state, if she takes it, it’s a dead lock for both while we wait on the rest of the results. There’s no way to know unless those quarter million plus number of people are asked point blank if they had to choose between Trump and Clinton, but if she gets the bulk of them, then Hillary Clinton takes Florida.

One more thing that helped Trump was that no matter how much the liberal media attacked him, they couldn’t pull a 1984 and alter history. Hillary Clinton had more scandals surrounding her than Switzerland has mountains. They couldn’t erase Whitewater, Primary Colors, Benghazi, etc. and the American people didn’t need to rely on biased newspapers when the Internet and social media spread the facts as easy as it is to click the share button.

Donald Trump never hid from his scandals. In fact, it might have made him somewhat relatable to some voters. When a person tries to act like they’re something they’re not, they become a façade and easier to dislike. Then after the DNC hacked emails showed that the Democratic Party had been colluding to sabotage Bernie Sanders from the get-go, confirming what many feared and assumed, it was another nail in her coffin because many of the millennials who wanted Sanders felt betrayed and refused to vote for her.

It took all this and the Electoral College surviving the popular vote to make Donald Trump the next president. Hillary Clinton is projected to win the popular vote by around 250,000 people but she lost the electoral vote which was designed to give smaller states more power with the senate two-man rule.

Oh and some smart campaigning by a man the press would love for people to think is stupid.