Interview with Tamar Jacoby, American reporter and the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. Interviewer: Iwona Reichardt.
IWONA REICHARDT: You have just returned from the United States, where you were observing the final stages of the presidential campaign. Then you came back to Europe, specifically to Ukraine where you spent election night when the results came in. Were you surprised by the news that Donald Trump won?
TAMAR JACOBY: I was – it was a punch in the gut. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Now that I look at the results, I think we all should have seen it coming. We told ourselves it was 50-50, but it wasn’t 50-50. Trump won by a significant margin. I don’t blame the polling – I don’t think that’s the main problem. I think that people just didn’t want to see a Trump victory coming. I certainly didn’t want to see it. Now we need to accept that Americans have embraced Donald Trump.
It’s hard to understand why exactly. Is it that voters don’t believe he’ll do all the crazy things he says he will do? Or is it that they really just don’t like the direction that Democrats were taking the country? Why this wholehearted embrace? I’m still struggling to understand it. But clearly Americans have embraced Trump, and we are going to have to accept the choice and live with it for four years.
