It has become fashionable, especially among the elite class of mainstream media pundits, to dismiss President Donald J Trump and the new era of ‘Trumpism’ as something barely deserving of an eye roll.
Those who privately supported him were reduced to uneducated, red-neck hicks – the toothless type who drink beer on their porch and marry their first cousins.
For those who dared to venture their support for Trump in public, far worse characterisations were reserved. They were racist bigots, xenophobes unfit to see the light of day in a civilised society.
Candace Owens, pictured here in the White House with the 45th President of the United States Donald Trump on June 4, 2018
So where do such insulting illustrations leave Americans like me?
I am a black woman who began life without any semblance of privilege.
My mother, who never completed high school, spent brief stints of her life in children’s homes and became pregnant with my brother as a teenager. She gave birth to all four of her children out of wedlock and raised us in a roach-infested, low-income housing unit.
My parents were too poor to put me through university and I began my adult life more than $100,000 in debt, having taken out considerable loans to put myself through school.
If you buy into media stereotypes, that makes Donald Trump my enemy, because there is no place in ‘Trump’s America’ for minorities and the impoverished. But such a view could hardly be more wrong.
There is no President (and I dare say no leader in the history of the world) who has faced more accusations of inherent hatred and racism than Donald J Trump. Joe Biden himself, who looks set to occupy the White House, declared in the summer that America has ‘had racists, and they’ve existed and they’ve tried to get elected President. [Trump’s] the first one that has’.
This statement flies in the face of history, let alone common sense.
According to Ms Owens: There is no President (and I dare say no leader in the history of the world) who has faced more accusations of inherent hatred and racism than Donald J Trump’
America, in her short existence, has had presidents who openly used racial slurs in the Oval Office, presidents who presided over slavery, and presidents who signed laws of racial segregation during the 1890s.
None of those who make such sweeping statements about Trump can pinpoint a single policy that substantiates their claims of racism nor can they offer a single explanation as to why this supposed bigot was able to increase his support so substantially among minority voters.
Early estimates reveal that Trump secured approximately 35 per cent of the Hispanic vote – most remarkably, along the nation’s border in Texas, he received nearly 47 per cent support from the Latino electorate.
If building the wall along the southern border was truly an exercise in xenophobia, as the media portrayed it, why are so many Latinos standing in support of the man who erected it? In the same way, he increased his support considerably among black Americans, doubling it among black women from four per cent in 2016 to eight per cent this year. Among black men the numbers are even more staggering – increasing from 13 to 18 per cent and counting.
And he’s had my support, too. I’ve worked with his campaign for re-election in recent months.
But in the media echo chamber, where reality is forbidden and critical thinking is suspended in service of a higher narrative, people like me are explained away with petty name-calling. Minorities who support the President are traitors, minstrels and fools.
The comfortable elites who control the national media would much rather believe in unicorns than risk stumbling upon the reality of Trump and the millions of forgotten people who voted for him. Who are the disregarded men and women who rallied behind the President? They are the people who have seen in Donald Trump the re-emergence of the American Dream.
People like me who had that dream stifled before they ever truly learned of its existence. Government-run schools coupled with media propaganda conditioned me to believe that my role in life was limited to victimhood.
As an impoverished black woman, I was trained to see only my own oppression. I was taught that my default settings would be upset, anger and outrage.
Others, too, have found themselves written out of the American Dream. The coal miners, rig workers and truck drivers – the men and women increasingly told they are members of a world that needs doing away with.
They have learned they are to be replaced by the armies of latte- sipping tech entrepreneurs now filling the coastal cities.
The future, they are told, belongs to keyboard warriors and bloggers who paint a picture of an America where anything so old-fashioned as hard physical labour is backward and unnecessary.
The man who cracked open a Bible was mocked as much as the woman who forgoes her career to raise her family.
That was until Donald J Trump got on stage and gave a voice to the voiceless.
He told Americans they no longer needed to remain silent about their values – or the past of which they were proud.
Suddenly, America became a home again to the only -ism that ever truly mattered: Individualism.
For farmers, coal miners and the like this meant they could go out and do an honest day’s work without coming home feeling ashamed about a society that sought to eradicate their jobs.
For stay-at-home mothers, this meant they could honour their husbands and raise their children, without being viewed as a stain on the altar of female empowerment.
For me, this meant that I could be seen as something more than another black victim. I could aspire to something beyond the media stereotype of anger and outrage. It meant that perhaps, despite the media’s relentless propaganda based on skin colour, that I could aspire to be whoever I wanted to be in this world.
Don’t forget that Trump was hugely popular as a personality before he even thought of entering politics. And he will remain popular because he understands the humanity of ordinary Americans.
Yes, Trump’s behaviour in recent days has been criticised.
But the denial of democracy actually started from the moment he took office with open disdain from major news media and television channels.
To this has been added the relentless meddling and censorship from the tech overlords determined to take ever greater control of our brave new world. Twitter, Facebook and Google defend their profits in the name of free speech, but they are all guilty of the same thing: Disdain for the average American.
The media has portrayed Trump’s Make America Great Again rallies as something in the vein of the Ku Klux Klan. We are told these are meetings where ill-informed straight white males dominate the crowd in the hopes that their leader will return them to the glory of yesteryear.
Yet no one who has been to these events could possibly believe such distortions. Far from promoting white supremacy, the rallies bring together the most unlikely of allies. Rich, poor, Hispanic, black, white, women, men, homosexual and heterosexual Americans, all stand in allegiance to something bigger – far bigger than even Trump himself.
Trumpism is the roaring return of the American Dream, the only vision that can unite people across every walk of life. It is a philosophy, an idea that connects people irrespective of gender, race, and religion. It is a concept threaded by our individual choices.
In Trump’s world, everyone has potential, no matter what our starting point in life. America is a country which rewards people, all people, based on their drive.
Trump offered a return to my grandaddy’s America: the land of the free and the home of the brave – the birthplace of individualism which allowed for my grandfather to go from a sharecropper on a farm in the segregated South to the owner of that farm some half a century later.
And whether Joseph R Biden or Donald J Trump makes it across the inaugural finish line in January – and even now, I still believe in Trump – a growing movement of men and women who would dare to hope they actually matter is here to stay.