PRESIDENT ELECT DONALD TRUMP! WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY?

When America woke up on November 9, many people were shocked! Many were depressed and upset, others frustrated and even angry. Why? The person they thought and expected to be elected was not. She lost. The person that they never ever seriously thought had a chance at the Oval Office was elected. Shocking! Astonishing. So what happened? And why?

I’m writing this post in an attempt to try to explain what happened and why, and to do so especially to people outside of the United States. What follows is my view and does not represent anyone else. It is not a policy statement for anyone. It is solely my personal view. Since November 9 many have written asking how did that happen, what it means, why there are protests, etc.? I think that there are several explanatory facts. If you don’t like my opinion, that’s perfectly fine. You have that right.

Explanatory factor number one: The way the media mis-handled the news. Almost all of the media was for Hillary and against Trump. Now true enough, they presented most of the facts (maybe 80 to 85% of them) about the events of the campaigns, but facts alone are never enough. Facts always have to be interpreted. And interpreted they did. And the spin that 90 to 95 percent of the media put on the facts created an impression against Trump and for Hillary. The negative stories on the news and in print against Trump was overwhelming. I have heard that it was 70to 80% negative for Trump and only 20% for Hillary. That spin biased the news.

CNN was especially biased against Donald Trump and I experienced that way in every single country that I have traveled during the campaign, some 30 or so countries. The news I heard when away from the US was completely different from what I heard at home. When I talked with people about American politics, what they heard and what I had learned at home were completely different. I eventually started saying early this year (2016) that “just about everything you have heard in the news about Trump is wrong.” And it was. It was taken out of context, it was exaggerated, it was given negative spin. Half of the American population discovered that on November 9. They were absolutely shocked because the media bias had set them up for a disappointment.

Second explanatory fact: The “message” that the Democratic candidate put out. During the campaign Hillary painted Donald Trump as being so bad, so evil that people were absolutely convinced that he was a bigot, hateful, that he would be a dictator like Hitler, etc. No wonder her people are now protesting! If Hitler had been elected, I would have protested! But what are they protesting? They can’t be protesting the democratic process? A free election process? The peaceful transfer of power? Actually, the protesting is an unthinking reaction to the framing rhetoric of Hillary Clinton. But it was just rhetoric—the extreme language that both candidates used as they painted the other one as the

embodiment of evil. But it was just words. Not reality. Yet some people don’t seem to know that.

For months I have been objecting to the way both candidates talked about the other. Both used what we call “cognitive distortions”—exaggerations, over-generalizations, personalizing, awfulizing, emotionalizing, etc. That’s not good. Many people do not know how to process that kind of language. They think it is real! They don’t know that these childish kinds of words create cognitive biases and distortions and prevents clear thinking! It sells papers. It gets notice on the evening news. But it is childish, immature, and psychologically debilitating. In therapy, in counseling, in trainings, and in coaching— we warn people against that kind of language. In NLP, the Meta-Model of Language is a model designed to challenge and question that kind of language and enable people to clean up their language patterns.

Both of them should have known better! But “political speech” in 2016 seems to be full of it and the US elections is a riot of mis-languaging. So no wonder people without training, believing the words and getting into cognitive distorted states of mind-and-emotion are out on the streets protesting. It is an inevitable result of the kind of language that was put out.

Third, the division and polarization of the country. A divide of values, understandings, lifestyles, etc. has been dividing Americans for a couple decades. It got much, much worse in 2008 when Obama was elected and in spite of him wanting to unify the country, the country has become much more divided. In terms of unifying the country, he failed. And now at the end of his presidency, there is a deeper divide than has been in decades. The deepening of that division then showed up in the election in terms of the vision of the future that each candidate presented. Today, that division is deeper than ever.

Two visions of the future of America emerged during the election and these different visions defined the campaigns. One is an increasingly socialistic state wherein the government would take more and more responsibility and control of people’s everyday life— regulating things, managing things, etc. A vision of centralization. The other vision is a vision of a smaller government and control being more local— with States and cities. One vision struck me as that of entitlement and the other of personal responsibility.

My own politics is for smaller government, more local government, and more personal responsibility. I vote for more choice, not less. I prefer to let people choose the way they want to live and be responsible for their choices rather than trying to control them. For social issues I prefer the liberal and libertarian point of view. About financial issues, I opt for running government as we do our personal finances and businesses— pay for what you buy and fiscal responsibility.

Today (November 10) Obama and Trump met at the White House and talked for an hour-and-a-half and described the peaceful transfer of power. That’s the way it should be. So let us be stronger together and make American great again!