Basseterre, St. Kitts, January 10, 2017 (SKNIS): The first African-American chairperson of the Republican National Committee (RNC) from January 2009 until January 2011 and the first African American to be elected to statewide office in Maryland, taking office as lieutenant governor in January 2003, Michael Steele, has described President-elect of the United States of America Donald Trump as “an asymmetrical actor playing in a conventional game.”
“People scratched their heads and they tried to figure out so how do you start a race for the presidency of the United States coming down a golden escalator, walking up to a microphone and begin to say that you’re going to build a wall to keep people out of your country and that the people who are coming into your country illegally are largely rapists, crooks and criminals?” asked Mr. Steele in giving the feature address at the Prime Minister’s Annual New Year’s Gala on January 7 at the St. Kitts Marriott Resort and Royal Beach Casino.
He further asked: “How can you start a presidential campaign that way? How can you then go on from there and begin to talk about another community of people and say well we’re going to ban them all because of their religion? How can you go on from there and begin to have conversations that are clearly personal in nature, that are derogatory towards women and yet still be close—how does that happen?”
Mr. Steele, who is a MSNBC political analyst, sought to give an explanation of what happened.
“Well here is how it happened—the American people at a certain point had bait in a lot about Donald Trump, whether the folks on the left coast, the right coast, the elites in Washington, New York, LA (Los Angeles)—we’re all upset and here fired up—they saw that as real, he was speaking their truth, that’s how they felt. They felt isolated enough. They felt disconnected enough that he could come into this space and say the very things that just four years ago, he probably would have been crucified for. That is how frustrated they had become,” he said.
“Now, I didn’t like it. A lot of us didn’t like it because that’s not how leaders lead,” Mr. Steele explained.
“If you understand the why of what happened then you’ll understand how to deal with it. Understanding the how a Donald Trump beats 15 well-qualified individuals in the primary, governors, senators, candidates who had run for the office before—beat a former senator, first lady, a secretary of state and managed to do it in a way in which despite all the ugly, all the racism, all the xenophobia, all the misogyny, was able to win an election, you have to understand the why and the why rests in one place as far as I can see and that is the people,” he said.
He said that Donald Trump “after everything he said about women, particularly after the video tapes had come out near the end of the campaign in his very vulgar conversation with Billy Bush” won over 40 percent of the female vote. After saying all that he said about illegal immigrants, he won 10 percent of the black vote and 30 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Mr. Steele said you have to understand the why in Politics. “If ever there was a change election in America, this election was it and yet no one believed it, no one saw it, least of all the people running for office.”
