Vanity Fair has studied the election carefully, and concluded that Donald Trump won because angry American white men fell in love with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In fact, Vanity Fair‘s Peter Savodnik concludes in “Why Angry White America Fell for Putin,” voting for Trump was a way for American men to express racial pride, and a preference for “submissive” women from the former Communist countries.
He writes:
While Europe has embraced socialists and Muslims, among other groups, Russia appears a final redoubt of white pride. At least, this is how Russia has portrayed itself to, and is viewed by, many on the new American right—the angry horde, the white-nationalist base who wants their country back. There were glimmers of this in the ‘90s and the aughts, when angry, white men flew to Moscow, and then St. Petersburg and Kiev, and then Tomsk and Omsk and Vladivostok, in search of beautiful, Russian women to replace their feminist wives in America. (I wrote a story about these men, “From Russia with Pre-Nup,” for GQ.) What they loved about Russian women, I learned, was not just that they were gorgeous, but rather that they were submissive. They had their values straight. When these men talked about American women, they always sounded bitter. American women didn’t know how to please a man; they didn’t wear makeup; they didn’t cook; they let themselves go. These men came from Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and the Central Valley of California, and they had fallen in love with Russia because it was full of pretty white girls who acted the way they thought girls should act.
Donald Trump’s choice of female partners reflects the yearnings and inclinations of these angry, white men—many of whom, one imagines, now comprise his base. Two of his three wives come from Slavic, ex-Communist countries. His shortest marriage was to an American.
Savodnik likewise attributes the success of populist movements around the world to white pride: “These people are not bound by a shared politics or program so much as a shared racial identity—a white nationalism born of a loathing for the multiculturalism and complex interdependency embraced by the Davos class. It is a global anti-globalism, and it is reflected in Trump, Brexit, and Marine Le Pen.”
Left unexplained: why Trump performed better among African-Americans and Hispanics than his predecessor, Mitt Romney; or why Colombians also went populist in voting against a peace agreement with guerrillas earlier this year; or why black voters in South Africa turned out in droves to vote for the political opposition in municipal elections.
Maybe they wanted submissive white Russian women, too?
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.