It’s easy to hate Donald Trump – but essential to learn from him | Martin Kettle

The president-elect articulated the voters’ rejection of the liberal order. Responding to that is a priority

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The American election feels like the upending of the previously familiar political world because that’s what, in many respects, it is. But not in all respects. It is very important not to exaggerate or to over-generalise what the election of Donald Trump means. Only by not exaggerating and not over-generalising can we understand the true and specific seriousness of what is really happening. One of the things that has happened this week is, after all, very traditional indeed. Since 1950, America has had seven two-term administrations: those of Eisenhower, Kennedy-Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W Bush and Obama. Only once – when George Bush Sr was elected in 1988 – did the outgoing president’s party get its candidate returned to the White House. The other six times they failed. After eight years of the same party in power, Americans tend to vote for change, as they did on Tuesday. That looks like an established pattern to me.

Similarly, it makes good headlines to treat Trump’s win as a tsunami of the ignored that overwhelmed the established and complacent. Again, in some respects that is true. But be careful. It hardly squares with the result of the popular vote, in which Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump this week, only the second time in the past 100 years that a winner has trailed his rival. Nor does it easily explain why Trump, who was supposed to be bringing squadrons of new voters to the contest, actually polled fewer votes than Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and even Mitt Romney in 2012.

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