I am fairly certain that Donald J. Trump, the president-elect of the United States has never heard of Mountain View County, Alberta, and may never.
The connection between the newly-elected chief executive of America and Central Alberta is that from Florida to Ohio, from Texas to Wisconsin – states that Trump was not expected to win but did – the voters who took Trump past Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to the presidency in the Nov. 8 election were the country folk of America.
They live in small towns like Olds, Innisfail and Didsbury, not New York City or Los Angeles.
They farm, ranch, mine coal, cut timber and fish the Atlantic and Pacific coastal waters.
They drive trucks, pour coffee in diners, own village stores, teach in rural schools and preach in country churches, and ship out on freighters from Gulf of Mexico and Great Lakes ports.
They are absolutely fed up with being talked about like political trash by a vain, snobbish, entitled, overfed power elite.
They wanted no longer to be governed by people who are far removed from the realities of life lived paycheque to paycheque and crop year to crop year.
They looked at Hilary Clinton and saw an aristocratic blueblood, and remembered that the Bush and Clinton family dynasties have owned the White House or sat in the president's cabinet since 1988 – three decades.
A vote for Donald Trump last Tuesday was the most emphatic way of saying “enough is enough.”
And the biggest bloc in the Trump “enough is enough” electoral coalition was rural.
In Alberta the great divide created in the 2015 election separated rural and urban voters. The election night map of America, county by county, was the same.
The first Albertans who foresaw the Trump presidency, who are at the hearts of the two right-of-centre parties, saw the outcome weeks ago.
Will Trump be a conservative like the ones on the right of the Alberta political spectrum?
Absolutely not.
Alberta conservatives are free traders. Trump is not.
Alberta conservatives are fiscal conservatives. Trump is a taxation conservative.
Canadians should expect nothing on oilsands production because it is directly competitive to American shale oil and there can be no doubt where Trump will land on that once the shale oil producers tug his sleeve.
It is said that in the United States' federal system, the president proposes and Congress passes legislation. Trump will soon need to learn how to collaborate with the Republicans who control the Congress.
He will also learn that he will not be able to control the extremists who voted for him – the radical racists and anti-Semites and gun-toting militiamen.
America is entering a time of the danger that comes with extreme change.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
