Taiwan and the Trump Win

How an increasingly isolationist United States is bad for Taiwan. Plus, book club on Ae-ran Kim's My Brilliant Life

Welp. So that happened.  

It’s been nearly a week since Trump won another four years in office; you’ve probably read all of the takes and analyses about why the election broke the way it did, and there isn’t much more we feel like we can add. We didn’t think the Democrats deserved to win, but we don’t want to pile on. Everything we think about the postmortem for the Democrats is basically summed up by the brilliant Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on The Dig podcast. 

In the lead-up to the elections, we kept mum because we felt disconnected from the situation on the ground and didn’t feel that we had any authority to speak. Watching from afar, we were pretty convinced that Trump was on his way to victory. You could feel the shift in some of the Taiwanese American travelers who visited Taiwan. They were largely apolitical (the mythical swing voters that the media often touts), who mostly leaned Democrat but spoke of the cost of living in the United States and their feeling of precarity—even thoug…