All I could think as I woke every hour, on the hour, on Tuesday night into Wednesday, was that I grew up under Thatcher. It was the slightest consolation; Thatcher, while divisive and at times cruel, at least lay within the normal range for western democratic leaders and, one assumed, could name every country on a map. But that’s all there was: the idea that you can grow up in a household that loathes your country’s government and have things still turn out OK.
This line, obviously, crumbled very quickly, exposed as the luxury it was, the kind of sophistry available only to those for whom the Trump presidency is, at this stage, merely an intellectual threat. I am a foreigner in the US, but I will not be sent home or shouted at in the street, because I don’t accord with the next president’s idea of what a foreigner looks like. I won’t be denied services or human rights. I can be afraid, but my fear has an almighty white safety net beneath it.
What was so strange, on the night, was the ebullience of the pundits, who documented the unfolding drama with what now looks like sociopathic detachment – at times even glee. And that has played such a large part in getting us here in the first place. As Trump victories rolled in, Chuck Todd on NBC said: “It’s going to be a fun night!” This was not an expression of pro-Trump sentiment. It was worse than that – it was relish in the spectacle of an entertaining outcome.
And that outcome was so hideously, hair-raisingly shocking, it exposed how empty was the positioning of what came before. After Brexit everybody said a Trump presidency would be the lesser of the two evils because it would last only four years, a statement clearly based on the conviction it wasn’t going to happen. It is hard to be so sanguine now. “Only” four years, with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and a seat on the supreme court up for grabs, looks worse than the mess of Brexit.
But the analytics will wait. This was – is – an emotional blow. When I went to bed, at midnight, I kissed the heads of my sleeping daughters in what felt like a moment from a second world war propaganda poster, and was grateful they were too young to have to be told.
Leave or remain?
Cuba or Israel, said a friend by text: those were her options. Elsewhere, prominent liberal voices were already saying that to leave the country was to give up, that you had to stay and fight for a decent America.
But what does that actually mean? For some Democrats in office, it meant expressing a desire to block Trump at every path, which others said was as bad as what the Republican Senate did to Obama. Drawing an equivalence felt wrong, but who knows?.
I don’t imagine anyone will actually go. America is so big, it looks more frightening from a distance. Better to stay close to the centre, or simply not look at all. At 7am, lying in bed with my eyes shut, I experienced feeling familiar from exam time or the morning before a long flight, but infinitely worse: don’t let this day begin.
Half a world away
Next morning, the hardest thing to process was the disjunction between the normally functioning half of the world and the new one. On NPR, callers to a phone-in were tearfully anticipating the third world war; in the other, more frightening half of the show, sober analysts argued that Trump might be better than expected. This didn’t feel like pragmatism, but collusion, slippage into normalisation that can end in very dark places.
Meanwhile, in my elevator at 8am, a young man in a suit, hair slicked back in the Eric Trump style, turned and said: “I’m afraid to go out there.”
“It’s business as usual on NPR,” I said. “Yes, but it isn’t,” he replied. “The markets …” He trailed off. As we parted in the lobby he said: “Good luck.”
