How Donald Trump’s campaign has ‘taken the road less travelled’

With the US election campaign in its final week and a Trump victory seeming more and more likely, it is crucial to remember that in the words of the great American poet, Robert Frost, Trump ‘took the road less travelled by’.

Here’s why:

When Donald Trump declared his candidacy for President of the United States as a Republican, many were sceptical. Trump has always been known to be outspoken, at times outlandish and entertaining and also independent minded. Many thought he was going to be something of a ‘soft-touch’ candidate.

The reality has turned out rather differently, with Trump combining the foreign policy Conservatism of Robert Taft who died in 1953, with the contemporary geopolitical perspectives of the ‘old-right’ conservative Patrick Buchanan and the economic protectionism/patriotism of 1990s populist Ross Perot.

Through it all, Trump has taken shots against the bias, insincerity and downright dishonesty of western mainstream media.  But he did not have to do this.

Had Trump run as a kind of lovable, somewhat apolitical uncle who decided to dabble in politics, a man who palled around with celebrities, patronised his opposition, said all things to all people and generally used his candidacy as a PR stunt (as many have wrongly accused him of doing), chances are he could have had an easy ride from the mainstream media. He could have remained ‘The Donald’ who everyone and their brother wanted to be ‘fired’ by.

Instead, he fired up the imagination of an American public who have been left behind by globalism, who have been utterly devastated by the blood soaked, war hungry policies of the last decades.  Trump speaks to an America that wanted to feel comfortable with itself again, an America that wanted to be free on its own terms, not on the terms that the mainstream media sets with its post-cultural agenda. If Trump wanted to do all he could to make things hard for himself, he couldn’t have done better job of it.

If Trump was a golf club Republican as opposed to the Republican who happens to own many a golf club, he could have been a media darling. If Trump said, ‘to hell with genuine popular support, I want to be the media’s poster boy’, he could have done so. But choose not to do so.

He choose to represent something, that I believe, he truly believes in. I believe that Trump sees American business the way Teddy Roosevelt did, as something that ought to provide services for the many, opportunity for the willing and a monopoly over none.  In this sense he is a true American patriot, one who does not see America’s greatness dependant on warring with other great powers, primarily Russia. He sees America’s greatness in a self-contained confidence, in an entrepreneurial spirit and a ‘fuck you’ attitude directed at local naysayers, rather than sovereign states.

Donald Trump’s personal fame and his acceptance amongst the mainstream media gatekeepers of fame could have been deeply enhanced, had he followed the ‘company line’. He conspicuously choose not to do so and by his own estimation, the movement which he created has astounded even him.

Trump could have well decided to use his presidential bid to make his own, somewhat tired brand ‘great again’. Instead he decided to ‘Make America Great again’ and in doing so, he had to fight off the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, much of the Republican party, big business, globalist interests, international neo-liberalism, international neo-conservatism and anti-Russian maniacs both in America and in Europe.

If Trump wins, his victory will be unprecedented on many levels. Not least  because it will represent a man who took a difficult road to victory when the easy road was laid down in front of him and paved in gold. If Donald Trump wins, it will be a victory for many things, not least, his own stamina and indefatigability.