Good news, everyone! America didn’t elect a woman.
After all, women are emotionally unstable, slathered in makeup, and they hold petty grudges for years, whereas Donald Trump...
...Alright, fine, I didn’t say there was a lot of joined-up thinking going on in the land of the free.
We should probably start calling it the land of the free-for-now, as Trump has pledged to enact a series of purges against anyone who disagrees with him, and deport anyone who is even slightly brown. He’s also a convicted felon and a rapist and all the other stuff that you’d think would have made a difference to voters, except that somehow it didn’t.
In large part, this is because Donald Trump, a fictional character from TV’s “The Apprentice”, beat both Kamala Harris and the actual Donald Trump, a senile con artist and business failure with white supremacist politics.
It’s not difficult to spot that Trump is an idiot and a liar, if you’ve paid the slightest attention to him over the years. But that’s the thing - most voters haven’t. The average American voter seems so disengaged from the political process that they turn up to vote out of an unexamined sense of duty every four years and then resume completely apolitical lives.
It’s worth pausing here to remember something Stephen King said about writing evil demagogues. King had a theory that Hitler and Jim Jones and Charles Manson were all “kind of the same guy,” in that they lacked some fundamental inner humanity, and as a result had a sort of blank slate quality that allowed their followers to project whatever they wanted.
One voter in Arizona, for example, said that she voted for Trump because he was a “business guy” and showed that “anyone could technically run for the presidency.” On BBC Radio 4, one voter said that he thought it was important to have good relations with other countries, and that Trump would be good at that. Then there’s this image, posted recently on Reddit:
Apologies if you were eating.
One commenter said that when the same picture cropped up on Facebook, his uncle commented approvingly on Trump’s “sun weathered skin”, which proved that he “had done hard work.”
It’s very easy to split Trump’s supporters into outright racists and neo-Nazis, the terminally gullible, and religious lunatics whose sole desire is to punish women for existing as anything other than incubators. These cohorts are all absolutely present in Trump’s Republican party, but it also ignores the fact that a decent chunk of people who voted for Trump did so because they have an image of Trump in their mind that is not remotely connected to reality. They are aware that he’s a rich “business guy” and that he says he wants to improve conditions for the working man.
It’s not necessarily racism or misogyny that got Trump elected again. A large portion of it seems to be absolute ignorance. Take whatever comfort you can from that - a lot of people aren’t overtly racist, they’re just dangerously stupid. Maybe that’s... progress...?
What comes next is going to be horrific for a lot of people. Internationally, Trump’s toxic mixture of isolationism when presented with responsibility, liberally sprinkled with a willingness to do whatever authoritarians prefer, is going to mean that Ukraine are likely to have to cede territory and take whatever deal they’re offered. Israel, meanwhile, will turn its genocide dial up to eleven and if we’re all very, very lucky, they won’t start a full-scale conflict with Iran and drag everyone into World War Three.
At home in the States, Trump is promisng mass deportations of immigrants. There isn’t really the infrastructure or the manpower for this, so there will be concentration camps built, and what’s worse is that this seems like a good recipe for an army of Brownshirts. You know the kind of racist dickhead who wants to pretend he (or she, but let’s be honest: he) is police or military despire being too fat and stupid to qualify for either? Those people will happily round up immigrants (or anyone who looks like they could be an immigrant) for free, especially if they’re allowed to carry a gun and act like they have official authority. It’s a solid bet that Trump will deputise these people.
Abortions might well become illegal, meaning a lot of women (and babies) are going to die, and queer people are going to be persecuted mercilessly as a backup scapegoat for anything that isn’t blamed on Mexicans.
It’s going to be a horrible time for America, and the wider world.
So how does it all fall apart? Because make no mistake, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. In spite of his strange talent for failing upwards, the man is a loser to his bones. He’s never touched anything that he didn’t wreck. He went bankrupt running a casino. He staged an elaborate plan to run for President and lose, and then he was such a pathological fuck-up that he actually won the election. Go back and watch his “victory” speech from 2016; he looks like a man going to the gallows.
Trump has peddled steaks, vodka, jewellery, his own university... they all tanked. His presidency is going to go the same way. Here are a few of the ways that might happen.
1. He Might Die.
Scratch that - there’s a 100% chance he’s going to die. He’s not immortal. But at seventy-eight years old, chronically obese, and showing clear indicators of cognitive decline, it’s fair to say that Trump isn’t in encouraging shape. Seventy-eight is actually the average life expectancy for an American man, and that’s before we look at his cancelled meetings, truncated rallies and utterly exhausted appearance in the last days of the campaign.
Anyone who has ever worked themselves to exhaustion will know that it’s only when you stop and finally take a break that the full toll of your effort catches up with you. Trump will now presumably be taking his foot off the gas, and that means he might honestly keel over before January.
Unfortunately, this might make the situation worse. Waiting in the wings is JD Vance, the Vice President and serial liar who thinks Haitian people are coming to eat your dog.
Vance has white supremacist sympathies, so his policy decisions if he inherits the presidency are going to be very unpleasant, but he’s also a spineless, doughy crybaby who is unpopular with basically everyone. Even his own side don’t like him.
Vance only got the VP nomination because silicon valley billionaires pressured for it. In interviews, he is petulant and sniffy. He wrote a book about hillbillies that was pilloried by actual hillbillies, and went to an Ivy League law school. The working poor don’t like him because he’s a condescending Ivy League law school graduate and the rich don’t like him because he attempted to build a brand by reminding everyone that he was born poor.
Vance has the support of exactly nobody, and I’m including his wife. Seeing him in the White House would turn public opinion against him so hard that all the propaganda in the world won’t make a dent.
If this election was decided by ignorant people who were just voting based on vague impressions, everyone’s immediate impression of JD Vance is that he’s an asshole. Because he is.
2. The Plague(s).
Vance is so unpopular that even the Trump campaign worked hard to pretend they didn’t know him. Instead, for the last few weeks of the campaign, Trump & co. decided they needed someone with star power. They needed a Kennedy, and for their sins they got one.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr is a steroidal roadkill enthusiast and conspiracy theorist who once argued during a divorce that he wasn’t fully responsible for his actions because he had a brain worm.
It’s only the fact that he’s a Kennedy that prevents “worm” from being the worst thing to happent to a brain in his recent family history.
For whatever reason - possibly, again, brain worm - RFK Jr. is into a lot of medically nonsensical conspiracy theories. He’s anti-vaccine, anti-fluoride-in-water, thinks that COVID was engineered, thinks that it was specifically engineered to not target Jewish people, believes school shootings are caused by anti-depressants... you get the picture.
Happily for those of us with a bleak sense of humour, Trump has said he’ll appoint Kennedy in a public health role.
One thing to bear in mind about RFK is that he’s lived the sort of responsibility-free life that you’d expect from his name. This means that consequences have never yet caught up with him.
In the mid-2010s, RFK peddled vaccine skepticism in Samoa. Then, in 2019, Samoa suffered a measles outbreak and eighty three people died, due in large part to a precipitous drop in vaccination rates.
When asked about this, RFK shrugged it off and said that he never told anyone not to get vaccinated, even though he absolutely fucking did. Also - and this isn’t germaine to the point, but it’s worth noting somewhere - RFK Jr. has a lot of credible allegations of sexual assault dogging him, and the rest of the Kennedys have largely disowned him.
Anyway, if he gets into a position where he’ll be able to dirct American health policy, Kennedy has said that he wants to end fluoridisation of water.
If you want an idea of how that will pan out, Calgary tried this in 2011. The use of IV antibiotics for dental infections in children rose by seven hundred percent.
Couple Kennedy’s plans with the Trump administration’s desire to dismantle Obamacare, the wafer-thin social safety net that allows some semblance of healthcare availability for poor Americans, and there could well be catastrophic disease outbreaks on multiple fronts. And when that happens, RFK is going to do his best to avoid any blame, as always. Whether that will work or not is hard to say, but someone is going to have to answer for whatever sicknesses begin ravaging the population. Kennedy? Trump? Vance? It’s all to play for.
3. An Unpleasant Musk In The White House.
You’d have to walk a long way to find a dumber businessman than Donald Trump. At least, you would in any sane world.
Sadly, in the world we live in, you don’t have to walk far at all because Trump is frequently stood near Elon Musk.
Trump was very publicly kicked off of Twitter, and started his own rival network. Elon Musk bought Twitter, costing himself a lot of money, and then basically handed control of Twitter to Trump for the election (despite the fact that Trump still won’t use it) and then gave even more of his money to the Trump campaign off the back of it.
Between the Twitter debacle, the existence of the Cybertruck, and his every public appearance, you’d think Musk was involved in some kind of Brewster’s Millions scenario where he’s trying to lose every penny, if he weren’t already the richest man in the world.
Despite his boundless wealth, Musk is, like Trump, a loser on a genetic level. He’s a sad, lumpen sack of resentment and intellectual pretense, desperate to be loved but repelled by the people who follow him.
It’s nothing more than what he deserves and is generally quite funny. The palpable misery of this creepy, racist asshole is sometimes the closest thing to justice that the modern world provides.
In the ten days since the election, the government-in-waiting has already started making noises about how other nations should remove any barriers to Musk doing whatever-the-fuck-he-likes, which is sinister and ridiculous, but also notable because it means that Elon is wielding a lot of power in the Trump circle.
Elon is a huge, eggshell-thin ego in a room with Donald Trump, who is a huge, eggshell-thin ego, and in a room with Robert Kennedy Jr., who is a huge, eggshell-thin ego. Musk is already leaning on people to do what he wants. Musk is used to giving orders with impunity. Trump is used to giving orders with impunity. Robert Kennedy Jr. is used to acting with impunity. JD Vance is used to kissing whichever ass is the most powerful at any given moment. There’s no way this all works out well.
4. None Of The Policies Will Work.
Trump - a noted idiot - thinks that he can solve all of the problems of the working classes by adding tariffs to imported goods. He’s talked about a 60% tax on Chinese goods and a 20% tax on anything else that comes from abroad.
What this would means is that it would cost 60% more to import Chinese goods and 20% more to import everything else, and the people who import things will then have to raise their prices. This means that things will cost more for the average person.
“That’s alright,” scoff Trump’s supporters, “We’ll just make things in America again!”
Not without a labour force you won’t.
Immigrant labour is the backbone of American food production. Once all of the immigrants have been rounded up and sent to concentration camps, food prices are going through the roof and “regular” Americans (you know - the white ones) are going to starve, or go broke, or else have to get jobs picking crops in the fields for agricultural conglomerates in the sort of neo-feudalistic system that many of the billionaire class have been hoping to instate for a while.
Part of the reason the Democrats lost the election is that they’ve long failed to understand that “economy” is actually two words.
When working people say they’re concerned about “the economy,” what they mean is that they can’t afford groceries. Democrats then point to a chart of how “the economy”, showing that the line is going up because Wall Street is doing well.
Then the Dems turn around and say they can’t understand it - the economy was doing great and they still lost an election because voters were concerned about the economy.
Voters - stupid voters, admittedly, but voters all the same - who are normally unengaged in politics still noticed that their money wasn’t going as far as it used to, and so they elected a “business guy” in spite of his unpleasant qualities. (Democrats voted in favour of Harris despite the fact that she’s complicit in a genocide in Gaza, so let’s not pretend we’re all blind to the concept of moral compromise.) When these uninformed voters realise that the Business Guy has made them not just poorer but actually broke, they’re going to be pissed off. They might even get so angry that they do something drastic, like learning.
When that happens - and I have to have faith that it will happen - Trump and his party, and all of the rich assholes tied to it, are in deep trouble.
We can only hope it happens sooner rather than later. Because a second Trump term means ugly, awful things. People are going to die. Innocent people. Good people. If I had my honest wish, the bloodshed would be entirely confined to the right wing side of the spectrum, but few people are willing to join me in this thinking. At least not yet.
So another Trump presidency will be awful. We can only hope that it’s the least amount of awful possible, with the lowest levels of disease and poverty and societal collapse, before these hateful fucks inevitably turn on each other. Because they absolutely will. Even if this election has destroyed your faith in humanity, let that lack of faith reassure you that these bastards will relentlessly stab each other in the back.
We just have to hope enough of us are still standing at the end of it all to piss on their graves.