A 70-year-old racist, misogynist billionaire who wears an orange wig and is married (for the third time) to an eastern Europe adventuress a third of his age who struggles to speak English, who lives in a 120-room mansion while claiming to be a man of the people, and who was born into an affluent Establishment family of Upper East Coast WASPs but claims not to be part of the Establishment, is now leader of the free world. As you shudder in anticipation of what comes next, remember that the world survived Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. An American president can get himself, his country and the world into a lot of trouble, but fortunately, there are far more controlling mechanisms around an American president than there are around a Maltese prime minister.
Britain’s Nigel Farage must be delighted (but not as delighted as his and Trump’s friend, Vladimir Putin, is). It’s a stark reminder of how a man with an anti-social personality and enough determination can, when the conditions are right, wreak maximum destruction on the society he hates. Less effectual sociopaths go out with a machine-gun and begin mowing people down in shopping-malls. Those who are more focussed and intelligent, and who have better social skills, take the political route and get there.
Denizens of Labour HQ and other assorted members of the TaghnaLkoll crowd are out in force on social media, expressing their horror at the election of a Republican who is also a bigoted racist misogynist. They’re doing this because they think that being anti-Trump is the fashionable and hip thing to do, and not because they’ve actually thought about it. I read their affected posts and comments and I laugh quietly to myself. The reasons why I’m against Trump and against Muscat’s party are almost identical. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
American electors aged between 18 and 25 voted in their overwhelming majority for Hillary Clinton. This was across all state bar three or four of the usual suspects. It’s a distressing echo of what happened in the UK referendum last June, the key difference being that young Americans have the consolation of knowing that Trump will be voted out in four years, or will have to step down in eight. There is no such consolation for young British people, unless MPs vote to trigger Mrs May’s plans into oblivion rather than trigger Article 50. And the likelihood of that happening is remote.
The last days of Donald Trump’s campaign were marked with strange echoes of Muscat’s 2013 campaign. He wasn’t inspired by proceedings on the toenail of the Mediterranean four years ago, that’s for sure. So we can suspect that the same advisers who ‘Americanised’ Muscat’s campaign back then had some kind of role to play in Trump’s, or that it has all been the most incredible coincidence.The man whose first wife still calls him The Donald suddenly started talking about ‘a movement’ even as he boasted about policy plans that are incredibly divisive, with his third wife – clearly after extensive elocution coaching – told her audience, in a speech that went around the world, to believe in Trump because he believes in you. It was all so sickening, but that’s life and politics. At least he won’t be carrying on with Marilyn Monroe while his brother runs another girl off a bridge in Chappaquiddick (and that was the United States’ most glamorous president of all time).
It’s hard to shake the fear that the world we know is now in the grip of a rising force of fascist sentiment, as the ignorant and the uneducated charge forward demanding ‘control’, led by the better educated who have a historic fascination with the world of the jackboot. At times like this it’s reassuring to remember that my generation lived the first half of our lives with half of Europe imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, thinking it was entirely normal and that the Cold War and European terrorism were facts of life. And our parents’ generation, who are with us still, got through the devastation of the Second World War and the aftermath, European reconstruction and years of rationing. And they thought it was normal, too. Somehow, we’ll survive Trump, Putin and Theresa May. We’ll even survive Marine Le Pen and whichever clown Italy decides to vote for next.
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