How we ended up with our own version of Italy’s Berlusconi

By Clarence Page

Monday, Nov. 14, 2016 | 2 a.m.

I will no longer mock my Italian friends for electing Silvio Berlusconi. Now I know how clownish but fabulously wealthy autocrats come to power in democracies that should know better. We just elected one.

Of course, I should note that I did not vote for Donald Trump. Nor did most American voters. Trump won in the Electoral College, an out-of-date system that will endure as long as people who have the power to change it feel they can keep power more easily by leaving it alone.

The Electoral College may help to explain another oddity: Exit polls found 62 percent of voters thought Trump was unqualified. That’s more than the percentage that voted for him. About 51 percent thought Hillary Clinton was unqualified. No wonder people say they hate politics. More folks than four years ago appear to be voting for candidates they don’t like.

This was a year when, as everybody says, the voters wanted change — and to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, I now expect them to get it good and hard.

Even nonwhite voters, like me, who were expected to turn out in even larger numbers to oppose Trump than we turned out in 2012, didn’t.

Some 88 percent of black voters supported Clinton, versus 8 percent for Trump, according to a CNN exit poll. Trump who said repeatedly that black communities were in the worst shape ever obviously had not spent much time in black communities. Yet he scored with us better than Romney’s 7 percent. But then, Romney was running against President Barack Obama, whose appeal was hard for anyone to duplicate, including Clinton.

But Latino voters were a bigger surprise, since Trump had alienated so many with stereotypes of undocumented immigrants as criminal aliens and promising to deport them.

Only 65 percent of Latinos supported Clinton while 29 percent voted for Trump. Despite widespread reports of record Hispanic turnouts, Trump actually edged out Romney’s 27 percent and Clinton fell behind Obama’s 71 percent of Hispanic voters that year.

What went wrong for Clinton? Everybody wonders, including Clinton. But just as intriguing is the question of what went right for Trump. Much of the answer I believe is in the Manhattan developer’s unique skill set as a realty-TV star and tireless self-promoter — like Berlusconi and another talented self-promoting outsider businessman-politician, Ross Perot.

Berlusconi was ridiculed when he formed a largely working-class political movement and publicized himself with outlandish statements and stunts and wild “bunga-bunga” parties. But his party grew strong enough to dominate Italian politics for two decades until his conviction for tax fraud in 2013.

Yes, he was outlandish. So was Perot, in a less colorful way. But, like Trump, both had a winning characteristic that we media folks too often miss or take for granted: They conveyed to winning pluralities of voters the sense that they’re “on your side,” looking out for you.

Or as Trump said on the stump, “I am your voice.”

They identify a strong emotional need in a significantly large constituency and they say attention-getting things that service that need.

Even when they are suspected of corruption and repeatedly exposed like Trump in a parade of investigative journalism, their supporters don’t seem to care. Even when they don’t get much done on behalf of ordinary folks, they are appreciated at least for their entertainment value.

So be it. I didn’t vote for Trump, but if he’s our president, I will not be a knee-jerk opponent, unlike some jerks.

I will not say, as right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh did after President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, “I hope he fails.” Nor will I dedicate myself as GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell said of Obama, making sure Trump is a one-term president.

We who opposed Trump’s election should not fall for any more political derangement syndromes. We do not need to deny Trump’s legitimacy. We will not ask for his birth certificate. But we will criticize him when we think he deserves it and hold him accountable.

I know even modest gestures like that will be too much for many of Trump’s angriest opponents to handle. But Americans of all persuasions need to do it if we are to regain any sense of unity after our most divisive election in recent memory.

Besides, we will not have to make up reasons to suspect his honesty and integrity if he gives us plenty already.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.