By Mohammad Ali Saki

Trumpism remains in American society as a deadly virus: historian 

November 15, 2020 - 17:26

TEHRAN – An American historian likens Trumpism to a “deadly virus” in the American society and politics that its efforts “have grown stronger in 2020”.

Professor Ronald Grigor Suny says the presidential elections showed that a great number of American citizens don't approve of Trump's performance, however, he is refusing to concede defeat.

"The administration of Donald J. Trump is coming to an end, even though the president himself cannot bring himself to admit it," Suny tells the Tehran Times.

Although Trump lost the election, he won 71 million votes, leaving a deep divide behind him. "Even though voters knew who he is and the damage he has done," they voted for him, according to Suny.

President-elect Joe Biden narrowly defeated President Trump in Georgia, and Trump won North Carolina, as the two final states were called on Friday, a week and a half after Election Day. 

Biden now has 306 electoral votes and Trump has 232. Biden became president-elect when he won Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes on November 7, passing the required 270-vote threshold.

On the reasons why a great segment of the Americans voted for Trump, the professor says these voters did not vote “out of ignorance but out of resentment at the liberal and urban and educated class that dominates” the United States’ political world.

The history professor says, "The kind of America First (and to Hell with the rest of the world) nationalism represented by Trump has weakened the most powerful state in the world and made it an unreliable ally." 

The professor also predicts "the threat from the United States for Iran will be reduced once Trump leaves the White House as Joseph Biden is a centrist liberal, a man of the political establishment." 

He says, "Biden will restore (or attempt to restore) the nuclear agreement with Tehran."

He concludes that politics will become duller in the United States, and the United States will be less erratic in the world, however, Biden and the liberals have no real and realizable solutions to the major problems of American society -- racism, the polarization of wealth, overweening corporate power, and climate change.