Trump’s Victory Proves the U.S. Is Unexceptional

Trump probably won because, by the end of his campaign, he wasn’t just a nationalist populist, like the kind that has recently achieved increasing success in Europe, without, however, winning commanding heights. He was also an anti-corruption crusader. He was smart to pick up on the opportunity given to him by WikiLeaks, which tweeted on Tuesday night, “The American people don’t like corruption.”

Anti-corruption parties saw major electoral success in Central and Eastern Europe, joining or leading governing coalitions in a number of countries — Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Bulgaria — in the 2000s. Far from all of them, however, survived their second, not to mention their third election. The most successful of them — Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) — runs the country today because it has artfully combined an anti-corruption agenda with nationalist populism.

This combination has tempted many post-Soviet politicians, too. Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili honed it after his country’s 2003 “Rose Revolution,” and then, when he was swept out of power after significantly changing his country, he brought it with him to Ukraine. This week, he resigned as governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region to build a strong party and fight for an early parliamentary election. He announced his resignation in a Trump-like self-pitying, vindictive speech. He blamed corruption in President Petro Poroshenko’s administration and cabinet for his failure to reform customs and public services in the region. He said the president personally supported corrupt “criminal clans” in Odessa, and he vowed to “begin a new stage of the struggle.”

“I am the soldier who forges ahead while he can and then as long as he must,” Saakashvili said. “As long as he must until a total victory, until Ukraine is purged of this filth, of this corrupt dirt.”

As I watched the speech, I half expected the audience to start chanting “Drain the swamp,” as crowds have done at recent Trump rallies. Ukrainians may yet learn the chant as Saakashvili’s campaign progresses.

It’s highly ironic if it was Russia that provided Trump with his WikiLeaks ammunition. There, an anti-corruption, nationalist populist, Alexei Navalny, is probably the strongest figure in the beleaguered opposition to Vladimir Putin regime. Putin, who is not a nativist and whose close circle is notoriously corrupt, is the sworn enemy of nationalist anti-corruption movements in Russia’s immediate vicinity, and he is their number one target. PiS in Poland is strongly anti-Putin, too.

By winning a presidential election with a distinctly Eastern European recipe, Trump has shown that there’s not that much difference between, say, Americans and Poles or Americans and Georgians. It’s as easy to appeal to their national pride, tying it in with their economic discomfort, and their understanding of official corruption is quite similar. 

In August, Navalny published a post comparing Clinton’s increasingly expensive residences with the far grander palaces of Russian officials. He made an important point, but to the anti-corruption voter in Eastern Europe, schooled by more than a decade of politics as investigation followed by invective, Clinton still looks corrupt. Her exorbitant speaking fees would have been decried in Ukraine or Georgia as a form of graft. The Clinton’s failure to draw clear lines between their charitable foundation and their private business — which looks suspiciously like influence peddling — would have tarnished their reputations in these countries, probably to a greater extent than they did in the U.S.

It didn’t matter if Clinton was really corrupt, or if she was as corrupt as post-Soviet politicians: It’s all about the optics. “If they were public servants all their lives, why are they so rich?” — that question would have been a powerful weapon against them in the young democracies. In Ukraine, where a nationalist, anti-corruption revolution ousted the previous president in 2014, it is being asked right now in the wake of a property declaration campaign that revealed local officials have stashed away hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.

The U.S. is never compared to the young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe because the same arrogant U.S. elite that failed so miserably this year has been so proud of the U.S. political tradition. As the tradition collapsed, some members of the pundit class have had to admit they didn’t really understand the country. “America, we hardly knew ye,” economist Paul Krugman tweeted. “Certainly I misjudged the country.”

It’s time to give up the hubris. The U.S. is a country like many others in most important respects. Everything that can happen elsewhere can happen here. Trump has just happened.