Just before the US Presidential election results, Yogendra Yadav preached that a voyeuristic partisanship, either pro-Trump or pro-Harris, was undignified and demeaned us. But as an ordinary, politically concerned citizen of the world, I, like myriads of other undignified beings, am emotionally invested in what's happening in the most powerful nation in the world. My partisan heart grieves for the victims in Palestine and is outraged by America's complicity in the ongoing genocide there.

And I am devastated by the runaway triumph of a felon convicted on 34 counts, a repeated sex offender who fomented a violent insurrection at the Capitol to try and block his removal from office after his 2020 electoral defeat. And who now has the world as the playground for his venomous, self-serving, wheeling and dealing fun and games.

For bleeding-heart liberals like me, apart from the geopolitical implications, the US election was not only about left or right, democracy or fascism but also about basic humaneness versus inhuman criminality. Trump has violated all norms of civility and decency ever since he 'apprenticed' his way into the public arena two decades ago.

On the night before the results were declared, I reassured my friends, who were worried sick about a possible Trump victory, that Americans are a good lot who would not accept a bumptious, vicious white racist as President! Even as I spoke, I knew that I was treading dangerous ground. When the results were announced – Harris even lost the popular vote by almost six million votes – I was shell-shocked but not surprised!

I do not buy the favoured expert opinion that high inflation and stagnant wages were the primary reasons for Harris's defeat. The truth is that by the time of the elections, the dizzyingly high inflation post-COVID had been brought under control, wages had increased, the stock market was booming, and unemployment was at a historic low. This election was quite simply a contestation between two diametrically opposed world views – the "wokeism" of the Democratic party that emphasised issues relating to racial injustice, sexism, denial of LGBT rights, environmental desolation and white privilege pitted against Trump's dystopian nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-free trade, 'global warming is a hoax' anti-environmental philosophy. The sadistic Trump doctrine that unleashed the worst tribal impulses of the American people won hands down!

In recent years, the most powerful motivating force in politics has been identity, linked to ethnicity, race, and religion. White supremacy, nee, racism and its embedded hatreds have clung tenaciously to the American psyche but are glossed over. Political analysts tend to draw a specious distinction between racism and anti-migrant hostility. However, the antipathy towards migrants is an all-too-obvious extension of the racist instinct and is espoused almost exclusively by those invested in their White racial identity.

Lest we forget, a large swathe of White Americans has embraced the Great Replacement theory that Whites are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-White people through migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of Whites – which one commentator describes as "genocide by substitution."

Trump has masterfully played on these fears and promised what can best be described as 'genocide by deportation' involving about 11 million illegal immigrants. And his camp followers like Elon Musk, who himself worked illegally in the USA, have reinforced racist pseudo-science by harnessing his formidable social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to spread misinformation about racial minorities' inferior intelligence and physiology.

The South African expatriate, who is now Trump's closest confidante and had even joined the President-elect's conversation with Zelensky, is clearly playing from the Apartheid playbook that he was weaned on. And then you have the toxic fringe alt-right sites, which have been much more direct in purveying racism of the ugliest kind.

Don't we in India know that fascists and racists swear by God and religion to exploit the gullibility of the faithful? By packing the Supreme Court with his henchmen, Trump succeeded in his mission of overturning the 1973 Roe vs Wade verdict that had legalised abortion. In its 2022 judgement, the Supreme Court declared that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists, much to the delight particularly of Catholics and Evangelicals.

Trump acted on Noam Chomsky's perceptive observation that "if you pretend to be a religious fanatic you can pick up a third of the vote right away." Throughout his election campaign, Trump appealed to "my beautiful Christians," feeding their fears about losing power in a secularising and pluralist country, selling them Bibles and assuring them that he would rescue religion from the anti-Christian forces. He emphasised traditional Christian values, attacked the LGTBQ position by affirming that God made only two genders, male and female, and promised a federal task force to fight anti-Christian bias.

Unsurprisingly, 84 per cent of those who voted for Trump were White, mainly loyalists whose White identity trumped every other consideration in determining their choice. Trump secured 74 million votes against Kamala Harris's 68 million votes, but he was way short of Joe Biden's 81 million votes in 2020.

My explanation for this widespread acceptance of Biden in 2020 was that he is White, a god-fearing Catholic and benefited from the COVID trauma that fleetingly awakened people to issues beyond their tribal identity. Kamala Harris is neither White nor Black nor Christian, and she is a woman in a country of misogynists. A section of her ancestral constituency – the 'kick away the ladder', solipsistic Indian diaspora - was firmly with Trump. With such a crushing handicap, what chance did she have?

With the Senate and the House of Representatives in the bag and a servile, nay slavish, judiciary intent on doing his bidding, Trump has secured four years of unbridled power to do as he pleases! And he has an insane agenda, the blueprint for which has already been prepared by the Republican think tank – the Heritage Foundation. The "Project 2025" document lays out Trump's vision for governance in his second term and reflects every diabolical thing he promised to do on his campaign trail. Here's the terrifying laundry list of what his administration will be focussed on.

A total war on illegal immigrants is at the top of the agenda. The heartless man who endorsed the kidnapping and separation of migrant children from their parents in his first term is bound to enforce his threat to "carry out the largest deportation operation in American history." He even hinted that he would let loose the military to deal "with the enemy within." He will expand the Muslim ban to more countries, further tighten immigration laws and make more stringent the issue of visas from third-world countries, including India.

In the Kafkaesque world designed for execution by Trump's hatchet men, one should expect unsettling disruption on many other fronts. Expect a federal abortion ban. The American allies are wondering how to respond to a loose cannon who seems to have pledged his troth to Netanyahu, Putin and Kim Jong Un. The environment has had it; Trump will fulfil his promise to boost the planet-heating fossil fuel sector, to pull back on renewable energy, which Trump calls "scam business," and undo Biden's "insane electric vehicle mandate" requiring 67 per cent of new light-duty vehicles and 46 per cent of medium-duty vehicles to be electric by 2032. Thousands of career civil servants will be summarily terminated, their positions bestowed on Trump loyalist toadies.