Mr. T Goes to Washington

By dint of simple coincidence, I’ll be the first of my colleagues with the chance to weigh in on our blog about Donald J. Trump winning the White House on Tuesday.

Not only that, but staffers here at InsuranceNewsNet report from and live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, one of the “blue wall” states the Democrats had to hold if they were going to win.

Democrats carried Pennsylvania four years ago but not this year. This year, we went almost all-in as The Donald carried nearly every county in the Keystone State. (Full disclosure: as an Independent I almost always split my ticket.)

Trump ran a nasty, bigoted campaign, no question about it. I personally have a hard time seeing how women can even vote for him. An Egyptian baker in my town already is suffering, but I’ll get to that in another post.

Yet Trump also blew apart the old political order, bypassed the party establishment and appealed to his voting base.

There could be nothing more salutary for our country’s political system, one in which the candidate who wins the popular vote still doesn’t capture the White House.

For more of our nation's existence, politics has soldiered on as a sclerotic duopoly where ideological and political choices range from far right, to right to slightly right.

In life insurance terms, it would mean buying products from only two companies, MetLife or Prudential, for example.

Or, it would mean distributing annuities through only two channels, banks and broker/dealers, like going to the supermarket to buy ice cream having to select only among bourbon vanilla, Tahiti bean vanilla or French vanilla.

Not much of a choice, is it?

So along comes Trump, the gaudy showman with questionable business bona fides.

His negatives were sky-high, but he was the only person in the entire field, other than Bernie Sanders perhaps, who represented another realistic option with fed-up voters. (Libertarians who’ve never heard of Aleppo don’t count.)

Trump ran as a Republican, but the only reason he ran as a Republican was because the Democrats had their candidate – or thought they did until Tuesday. So the only other avenue to a serious White House run was to hop on the Republican ticket, which at this time last year offered a dozen contenders.

We have in the White House as close to an independent as we’re going to get, at least for the time being.

Let him have his say on the Affordable Care Act, the fiduciary rule, the estate tax, state-based insurance regulation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Social Security reform.

InsuranceNewsNet Senior Writer Cyril Tuohy has covered the financial services industry for more than 15 years. Cyril may be reached at cyril.tuohy@innfeedback.com.
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