The World Disagrees With You

It’s been almost a month since the U.S. elected Donald Trump as president for the next four years. After an insane campaign period and a nerve-wracking election night, Trump got the minimum 270 electoral votes that are needed to win the election and will be the 45th man to move into the white house.

This year’s election and campaign period has been a particular crazy one as the frontrunners for presidency has been quite controversial. On one hand you have a businessman without any political experience, claiming that Mexican immigrants are rapists, saying he could date his daughter if she was not family, claiming that the current president is not a U.S. citizen, and calling women he doesn’t like dogs, slobs, fat pigs and disgusting animals. On the other, you have a candidate who has been accused of breaking the law by using her family’s private email server for official communications, including thousands of emails that were marked classified by the State Department.

The U.S. presidential elections are always interesting for international media as U.S. politics not only affect the country but the whole world. However, the 2016 election has received extra attention as it resembled a freak show more than the most important election in the world. The whole world have been watching you for months now America, and you are making a fool of yourself.

I would have liked to see Bernie Sanders winning the election, but when he was out of the race, it was no question who was the better candidate out of Trump and Clinton. While Trump has no political experience and no impulse control, Clinton has lots of experience and has served many roles in U.S. politics such as first lady, senator and secretary of state.

Who America decided to elect would have major political repercussions for the entire world, so when it was official that Donald Trump was chosen, the rest of the world was in shock. Looking through my Facebook feed that night, many of my friends voiced their opinion on the matter and mostly agreed that the American people had made a huge mistake. If it was up to the rest of the world to decide, Clinton would – without a doubt – have been the president-elect right now instead of Trump. According to a poll that surveyed 19 different nations on who they would rather have as the next president of the united States, Trump would have won less than 25 percent of the vote in all the countries surveyed, according to The Economist. In Denmark, less than 4 percent said they would chose him over Clinton.

So how did Trump manage to convince so many Americans that he would be the better choice to make America great again? How did he manage to appeal to so many people when the rest of the world despises him? I have been living in the U.S. for two and a half years now, and the people here are not really that different from back home. Despite what people in Norway might believe at this point, there are a lot of intelligent and smart people here. I have even talked with hardcore Trump supporters who are really intelligent people. So what I and the rest of the world do not understand is how all these smart people voted for a homophobic, misogynist, racist candidate who does not believe in global warming and whose only concern is to “make America great again.” But obviously not great for all people, only for the white heterosexual men who love the Second Amendment and believe that homosexuality can be cured.

However, despite what people would have predicted, Trump is now the president-elect, and as much as we might dislike it, we should all wish him good luck and hope that he actually does a good job. He will hold the world’s most important position for the next four years, and the world depends on him not screwing it up.