Yes, this is a kind of death

America, this is on you

Where do we start? I mean, really, where do we start?

Perhaps the first thing to say is that it feels like a death. You know, when you’re lying in bed and you can’t sleep because your heart is racing and your stomach is churning and your brain feels as if it’s darting down a million different rabbit holes. And you finally drift off and monsters are chasing you through the night and something jolts you awake and for a moment you’re relieved because the monsters of the night have gone, but then it hits you. The monsters haven’t gone. The terrible thing that made the monsters look benign has happened. It’s real. It’s true.

This is where we are. Or perhaps I should say: this is where I am.

I know about death. I know what it’s like to get a call to say that your sister has collapsed while she was doing the washing up and that the paramedics couldn’t save her. I know what it’s like to get a call to say that your father, whose brain has been chewed up by cancer, has given up the fight against whatever it was he was fighting against. I know what it’s like to get a call to say that your mother “is very unwell” and later understand that what the person who called you actually meant was that she was dead. And I know what it’s like to get a call to say that your brother, who was due to come for lunch on Sunday, and was on the phone to your aunt when the line suddenly went quiet, is someone you must now refer to in the past tense.

I know what it’s like to have to re-stretch your world to a reality that feels so mad it can’t be true. But I also know that when I got those calls, my world changed, but my moral universe didn’t.

I wish I could say that now.

Every single member of my now late family tried very hard to live a good life. We were brought up to believe that this is what you did. Your job on this earth was to be a decent human. Your job was to be a good neighbour, a good friend, a good citizen. It was to consider the needs of other people and treat them with respect. It was to do your best to make the world a better, kinder place.

I am wondering now if we were mugs.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have silenced, literally silenced, half a population. In Iran, the government is murdering and torturing women who take off a head scarf in a street. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un is sending young men to be slaughtered in a country they couldn’t find on a map. In China, more than a million Muslims have been imprisoned, tortured and sometimes sterilised for their faith.

All around the world, autocrats are doing terrible things to the people they lead.

But no one voted for them.

Last week, more than half of American adults voted for a convicted felon who has assaulted multiple women, raped at least one, overthrown federal abortion rights, threatened to deport millions of people and tried to overthrow democracy. They voted for a man who has been called a fascist by three of his serving generals, including his longest serving former chief of staff.

General John Kelly, that former chief of staff, offered a helpful definition. Fascism, he told the New York Times last month, is “a far-right, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement characterised by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy." Trump, he said, is “certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators” and “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist”.

I think we knew that before, to be honest, but it’s always useful to have feedback from a colleague.

We all know that Trump lies all the time. He boasts about doing “the weave” in his speeches and yes, that’s what he does. He “weaves” a web of violence, anger, threats - to women, immigrants, critics, dissenters – and the thicker that web gets, the more people love it. He pumps himself up with his lies, his anger and his promises of revenge. He pumps other people up with them, too. He gives them permission to feel what he feels. It isn’t clear exactly what has fuelled his own anger, but he gives people a range of excuses.

Pissed off by the price of eggs? Hey, let’s throw out millions of Latinos! Feeling disrespected by the women in your life? Get the bitches on their knees. Grab them by the pussy, knock them up and then watch them bleed. Your body, my choice, as the political pundit Nick Fuentes said on X/Twitter last week.

(Fuentes, by the way, is a 26-year-old white supremacist who has been invited to have dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Logo.)

I keep being told, in columns, articles and even by people I know, that “decent” people voted for Trump.

Really?

What do you call someone who votes for a fascist?

If you are enabling a fascist, installing a fascist, complicit in their fascism, I’d have thought the answer is probably a word beginning with f.

A few weeks ago, a political commentator told me that he was quite looking forward to a Trump presidency. It would, he thought, be terrible for the world, but also quite funny.

I told him that I was expecting a Trump presidency. I’m afraid I always expected a Trump presidency and had to force myself not to say that in my last newsletter because I didn’t want to crush any flickers of hope that might turn into a miracle. I also told him I thought a Trump presidency would be about as serious as you could get.

It’s funny, I suppose, or at least peculiar, that you can brace yourself for a terrible thing and still find the reality catapults you into a state of almost catatonic shock.

I knew the markets were predicting a Trump win even when the polls were tight. I have learnt that “follow the money” is a pretty reliable principle in geopolitics and power. I thought the electoral college system would probably skew things for Trump. I didn’t think most Americans would vote for him.

They did. Or at least just over half of them did. More than half the American population voted for a man who has said how much he admires Hitler.

The last few days have been beyond parody, beyond satire, beyond sanity.

Trump has nominated a Fox News presenter as defence secretary, the man who will be responsible for the most powerful army in the world. He has picked a national director of intelligence who has been described as a Russian agent on Russian TV.  He has picked as attorney general a man with only two years of legal experience who has been accused of paying under-age teenagers for sex. Oh, and he has picked an anti-vaxxer as health secretary. Yup, an anti-vaxxer.

Nearly a million Americans died of Covid during the pandemic. Just imagine how many would have died if the person in charge of the nation’s health had banned vaccines.

The Republicans now have control of the Senate as well as the House of Representatives and the White House. The lunatics really have taken over the asylum. The land of the free is now the land of the freak.

Putin must be ecstatic. So must Xi Jinping. They have been telling their people for years that Western democracy is in its last, sputtering, decadent days. At the moment, it looks very much as if they’re right.

Should voters get what they voted for? Sure, they should have Googled a tariff before voting for the price of practically everything to go up. But Trump? They didn’t need to Google Trump. They knew who he was and what he stood for and they voted for him anyway.

Last week, America woke up to the biggest reality TV show the world has ever seen. In this show, humans are lab rats. They will be stretched, punched and pinched according to the conspiracy theories of their masters, men (and the odd, very odd, woman) who put loyalty to a sociopath above any flicker of conscience that may once have rippled through their brain. And we will all suffer. America first, of course, but we are all affected by the global economy and by what happens in the Middle East and Ukraine.

We have four years of this. In our brains, in our lives, on our screens. Four fucking years.

Yes, of course we must try to keep our own values alive. Of course we must try to cling on to our belief in beauty, truth and a collective human effort we might call society.

But we must also look at the world with clear eyes. What we are about to see is what a lot of people want.

To realise this, to face this fact, really does feel like a kind of death. And after a death, what sane humans do is take some time to mourn.