Do Trump supporters even realise what they have done?

As D-Day approaches and speculations over who will be the next president of the United States floods every communication medium, one thing is certain: Whichever way the results go, the tone of this election has seen America lose its respect around the world.

The US used to portray the image of a nation that welcomed everyone and anyone who was willing to love it. The ‘land where dreams came true’ has revealed a much darker side of its self now — thanks to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters.

Let us go ahead and use Democrat nominee Hilary Clinton’s words and call these millions of Trump supporters, who believe and repeat every word he says without seemingly a single frame of thought of their own, the “deplorables”.

Trump’s non-sense of a wish list for America and the world and his ridiculous claims could have been brushed aside as thoughts of a nutcase had he not been cheered by millions of these deplorables. That is perhaps what has made people around the world astonished and frankly — scared.

The fact that this unqualified, in every sense of the term, lunatic’s views are being echoed by so many is truly frightening for the majority of the seven billion people that live on this planet. What is even more daunting is that these deplorables do not seem to realise how their actions are undermining America’s stature abroad.

John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, perhaps put it best when he said that this election had made his job as more difficult as he senses foreign leaders’ polite disregard for what he has to say due to the problems back home in America. Kerry captured the mood precisely when he said, “there are moments when it’s downright embarrassing”.

Does respect for the US abroad actually matter? Well ...

The deplorables have, in no uncertain terms, let the world know that they view sexual assault on women as meaningless “locker-room talk”. Can you imagine the US trying to have a conversation about the issues surrounding women’s rights anywhere in the world again? How will that conversation even go?

The deplorables want to lock up Clinton if they win and shut down any media that does not support their empty rhetoric. When Iran’s Green Movement lost the presidential election to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration, the US had heavily criticised the regime for putting the opposition’s leaders under house-arrest and for kicking down the doors of any local media that supported them. Can the US ever comment on the fairness of another country’s election again, as it often has done in the past?

There is also the case for the desire to register every Muslim in America and banning him or her from entering the country in the first place. Can the US ever hold peace talks in the Middle East or with any Muslim country again without the other side feeling vulnerable — knowing how more than 40 per cent of the voting population in America would get rid of them in a blink of an eye, if they could?

We will brush past the astounding love that has been shown towards using violence as a solution — not to mention nuclear weapons — and hope that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean ruler and other dictators have by some miracle missed those episodes.

And let us not forget those factories in China that they want to move back to the US. Trump’s deplorables forgot that the US owes around $1.185 trillion (Dh6.80 trillion) in debt to China. One cannot even imagine how the US politicians would even start to explain themselves to the Chinese or what they would have to give the Chinese businesses for the insults they have suffered.

Yes, troubled times lie ahead for Washington as racism, misogyny, disregard for the law and hatred for anything and anyone that is different has risen in America — all in full view of the rest of the world.

And while Kerry and others project an image of confidence when it comes to America’s “amazing resilience” and its “ability to absorb something like this” and come out “stronger”, one cannot help but wonder, how can it be? How long until America wins back the world’s trust again? Will America still be the land where dreams come true?

And win or lose, where will the deplorables go from here?

It is worth noting, that unlike Trump and his supporters who do not believe in apology — except perhaps for the one occasion when caught on tape, bragging about sexually assaulting women, and even that was in no way a sincere apology — Clinton has at least apologised for calling Trump’s supporters deplorables.