There is a school of political commentary that insists Donald Trump is some sort of accident—an error in the matrix, a glitch in American democracy that will be corrected by a software update called “the next election.” This school is wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Trump is not an accident; he is a discovery. And like all great discoveries, he has merely revealed what was already there.
Karl Rove, and others of his generation, keep analysing Trump as though he were George W. Bush with worse manners or Richard Nixon with a Twitter account. This is a category error. Rove is from another place in time, a sepia-toned era where politics involved dog whistles, not foghorns, and where the ugly bits were hidden behind carefully worded press releases. Trump does not do subtext. Trump is the text. Bolded. In all caps.
Trump speaks Trumpian, a language that does not require interpretation if you accept its premise: say the quiet part loudly and the loud part repeatedly. When he says things that cause commentators to clutch pearls and reach for smelling salts, he is not mis-speaking. He is speaking precisely. It is the audience that is confused—particularly the audience that still believes America is what it says about itself rather than what it repeatedly does.
Trump has discovered America. Or more accurately, he has re-discovered it. He is the Christopher Columbus of our time, except instead of landing in the Caribbean and claiming he had reached India, he landed in the American psyche and announced, “This is it. This is the place.” The only difference is that Columbus pretended he had found something noble and exotic. Trump has no such illusions.
What Trump found was not a shining city on a hill, but a strip mall with a flag outside, a gun inside, and a deep resentment about someone, somewhere, getting something they don’t deserve. He discovered an America that had been there all along, patiently waiting beneath layers of civics textbooks, Hollywood films, and inaugural speeches.
For years, America has been a pig with lipstick. The lipstick was democracy, equality, freedom, and opportunity for all. The pig was… well, the pig. Trump simply wiped off the lipstick and held up a mirror. The horror was not that the pig existed; it was that millions looked at the reflection and said, “Yes. That’s the one.”
And this is the crucial point that polite society keeps missing: Trump does not create his voters; he counts them. If a candidate can talk about immigrants eating dogs, cats, hamsters, emotional-support iguanas—pick your animal—and still receive more than zero votes, then the issue is not the candidate. The issue is arithmetic. Votes were cast. Ballots were counted. Democracy spoke, and it did not whisper.
The usual defence is that Trump voters are “misinformed.” This is comforting because it implies that a better PowerPoint presentation could fix things. But misinformation does not produce enthusiasm on its own. You can lie to people all day; they will only believe you if the lie flatters something they already feel. Trump’s genius—if one must use the word in a strictly clinical sense—is that he flatters the worst instincts without pretending they are anything else.
He does not say, “We must have a difficult conversation about cultural change.” He says, “They are taking your country.” He does not say, “Globalisation has produced uneven outcomes.” He says, “You are being robbed.” There is no translation error here. The message is received exactly as sent.
This is why attempts to “decode” Trump miss the point. He does not need interpretation; he needs acceptance. Not acceptance as in approval, but acceptance as in recognition. This is America talking to itself in the mirror, unfiltered and unashamed.
Trump did not lower the bar. He simply walked over and pointed to where it already was. And when historians look back, they may conclude that his greatest contribution was not policy, appointments, or court cases, but anthropology. He mapped the terrain. He named the inhabitants. He showed that beneath the lipstick, the pig had been running the show all along.
The tragedy—or the comedy, depending on your tolerance for irony—is that many are still shocked. But discovery is only shocking the first time. After that, it is denial. And America, having been discovered by its own reflection, now has to decide what to do with the knowledge.
Trump, having done his Columbus act, has already moved on. The rest are still arguing about whether the land exists.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 