2) He didn't get half the country to vote for him. It looks like around 55-60% of voters turned out this year (the whole tally isn't calculated yet). Of those, he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him). So at best he seems to have gotten around 30% of the voters to vote for him. Not everyone is a voter (age, other disqualifying factors). So even if he had somehow gotten 50% of voters (which, again, he didn't), he'd still have less than half the country voting for him.
Trump could never be elected into office here in Canada, even with a low voter count because his views are far outside of the norm of how many Canadians think. America is different with a different culture, and the only evidence we have (polling data) suggests that the views of a great many Americans in 2016 line up pretty closely with the views of Mr. Trump.
An election is basically a poll of whose views the population supports. So any person elected by that population must be a person with views that said population does not find extreme.
I think this is a problem with modern liberalism in that "extreme" has become synonymous with "people who disagree with me" or "people who don't share my right kind of opinions"
a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or
religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates
extreme action.
Nothing about this requires viewing them only through a local and not a global lens, either.
And just because people voted for Trump doesn't mean they agree with all or even any of his positions. (Anecdata) I've spent the last several days speaking with numerous people who voted for him despite disagreement on many of his policy positions, strictly because they were voting against Clinton.
However this was not considered an extreme position in the 1800s because, unforutnately, it was the majority position.
The problem you are having is you are defining extreme with reference to what you and the people around you believe to be extreme and fanatical rather than defining it based on what the majority consider extreme and fanatical, and the best evidence we have for the majority view in America is a very recent poll.
Oh the irony. Political correctness played a large part in this election especially for the youth vote.
The left says: here is a list of things you can't say. Here are the punishments for saying them (public shaming, etc.).
The right says: say anything you like.
Unless it's in reference to a certain political candidate's hair, that is:
http://www.thewrap.com/gawker-says-peter-thiels-lawyer-threa...
What do you mean by this exactly? Trump lost the popular election with 47.5% support to Clinton's 47.7%. How did you come up with the "around 30%" figure?
http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/eligible-voter-turnout-for-201...
231,556,622 eligible voters
59,791,135 for Trump (25.8%)
60,071,781 for Clinton (25.9%)
I just grabbed the first website in the search results that had numbers, which are based on projections. I'm not standing behind their accuracy (I don't even recognize the site), but I have no reason to suspect they'd be purposefully wrong. And we're talking ballpark figures anyway.
Mrs. Clinton also got less than 50% of the votes. Neither one won a clear majority of the popular vote.
EDIT: Out of curiosity I looked some numbers up, going just by the ones that did turn out to vote, she has 47.52% of the cast votes, he has 47.19%. The difference in votes is around 400k.
Well, you wrote, 'he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him),' which means that the reason Mr. Trump received less than half the votes is that Mrs. Clinton received more than half the votes, which isn't true: both of them received less than half the votes because some voters voted for neither.
It's interesting that I'm being downvoted because folks think I'm a Trump partisan (I'm not!) I'm just pointing out facts, not opinion.