By Daniel Margrain

For this writer, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States didn’t come as a surprise. The same, however, could not be said of numerous “experts” and media political pundits, many of whom responded in shock and incredulity to the result in the early hours on November 9. Independent journalist, Neil Clark quoted one irate Oxford-educated columnist who tweeted:

“Just woke up. Jesus H Christ, America. What the f*** just done. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” 

For such “experts” the idea that ordinary American’s could have voted for a chauvinistic, misogynistic and demagogic racist as opposed to a what the media bubble perceived was Clinton’s modern liberal and humanist values and sense of dynastic self-entitlement, was inconceivable. The pollsters who were wrong about the 2015 UK general election, the EU Referendum and Corbyn’s election victory, predicted with near unanimity that Clinton would win as illustrated by CNBC in the graphic below.

Analysis of the polls prompted Dan Hodges, who has been wrong on virtually everything else, to make the following prediction on Twitter:

Meanwhile, hardcore anti-Corbyn ‘socialist’ and former adviser to Tony Blair, John McTernan tweeted:

The “expert” views above were largely predicated on what the polls were telling them. In view of the pollsters latest debacle, it must be increasingly obvious to the public that the purpose of the metropolitan media elite’s use of polls – which as Mark J Doran pointed out – “are expensive and have no shelf-life” – is to influence, rather than reflect, public opinion.

The notion that Trump’s flamboyant and largely inflammatory campaign was directed at a disillusioned, disenfranchised and alienated working class, while Clinton’s rather lackluster and robotic campaign was aimed towards a corporate-media elite, appeared to be beyond the understanding of the liberal-left broadsheets. Jonathan Freedland’s piece for the Guardian entitled, Who is to blame for this awful election?, for example, was written as if he had just ventured to earth from another planet.

At no point did Freedland make reference to Clinton’s complicit role in the destruction of Libya, the dismembering of Syria, her role in Honduras or the comments she made in relation to Palestinian elections. Neither, did he mention the disastrous domestic economic policies of the Obama administration and its fetishizing of neoliberalism, or the wider ratcheting-up by the establishment of anti-Russian propaganda. Instead, the politics of identity were preferred. It appeared to be beyond the comprehension of the Guardian journalist that one of the main reasons why the American people voted Trump into power was that the failed economic policies of his predecessors over the last two decades, have resulted in a fall in their incomes, while those at the top have increased. 

Neither, apparently, had Freedland considered that the de-industrialization and hollowing-out of U.S cities and the mass outsourcing of jobs, might actually equate to the American public voting for a politician who promised a major programme of investment in public infrastructure, a revitalization of industry and the creation of millions of jobs to boost a flailing economy akin to the New Deal. Nowhere were these factors mentioned in Freedland’s analysis. But perhaps most significantly of all, not a single reference was made in respect to the American public’s lack of any desire for a new cold war and military confrontation with Russia which Clinton’s rhetoric promoted, nor of the Wikileaks revelations of her e-mails proving “beyond reasonable doubt the extent of Hillary’s corruption.”

Predictably, recriminations from liberal academics and others followed the realization that Trump had won. Economist Paul Krugman, for example, exclaimed on Twitter:

Daniel Margrain‏@hairymarx1