Circus season is over, but only for a while
MORE people voted for Donald Trump in 2020 than they did for Barack Obama in 2008. Let that sink in a moment. The 2008 election is regarded as a landmark moment, a turning point in US history, the end of centuries of racism, generations of hurt and untold pain.
A mere twelve years later and it’s as if it never happened. At the time of writing it’s estimated that 70 million Americans voted for Trump to serve a second term. 70 million. The Democrats had repeatedly urged people to get out and vote, and they did, in record numbers.
Problem was, many of them voted for the other guy, leading to a race which, on more than occasion, looked like teetering in the direction of the incumbent commander-in-chief.
Like a bad guy at the end of a superhero movie, Trump is currently shaking his fist, vowing we haven’t heard the end of this as the removal vans idle outside the White House.
But come January he will be gone, it will be over.
That means no more rambling speeches, corrosive tweeting, and ill-judged medical evidence, no more hate-filled invective, puzzling grammar and self-congratulatory statements - well he’ll still do all of this, but no-one will care anymore.
Instead, there’ll be a period of calm, a return to something approaching normality. For us here in Ireland this will mean days, even weeks, without hearing anything about the US president.
Biden will occasionally make the headlines; he’ll do the whole Paddy’s Day shamrock thing, visit his ancestors in Mayo, but mostly he’ll do whatever it was American presidents did before Trump turned the job into a 24-hour reality tv show.
The temptation is to think that in years to come we will look back at the Trump-era as an aberration, a time when the people of the most powerful nation in the world suffered a form of temporary insanity.
But those 70 million voters would argue otherwise. Because while Trump and his bombast is soon to leave the building, those voters, their ideologies, their disaffection, are going nowhere.
Again, as outsiders, there’s a tendency to attribute Trump’s success to gun-toting, bible-wielding, Covid-deniers who believe America can only be made great again by building walls and returning to segregation.
Yes, some of those who voted for Trump fall into that category, but not all 70 million of them. Indeed, despite his overt jingoism, he performed strongly in Latino strongholds and, remarkably, secured pockets of black votes across the States.
It should seem remarkable that a black person would vote for Donald Trump, especially given the enmity he shares with his predecessor, not to mention the presence of Kamala Harris on the Biden ticket.
But America no longer votes along racial lines. Years of being lied to, of being promised change and salvation by die-hard liberals have taken their toll on the country’s working classes, on low-paid households of all ethnicities.
Some of those 70 million votes were cast because of Trump’s business acumen, because of an economy which had been performing well pre-pandemic. But the majority were protest votes, US citizens surveying the political climate and opting to snub their nose at the status quo - just as they did in 2016.
That this act of protest almost saw the most reprehensible US politician since Richard Nixon re-elected is cause for concern, but not for the reasons you might think.
Because rather than signal the end of an odious era in American politics, this is just the beginning. Think about it: if 70 million Americans were willing to vote for a man who can barely form a coherent sentence, who mocks the disabled, boasts about molesting women, and throws a strop whenever things don’t go his way, just how many of them will vote for an actual politician?
The template has been set. The way has been cleared. All it will take is for someone to distil Trump’s rhetoric and present it in a younger, more attractive package. The circus may have moved on to another town, but it will be back, and god only knows what kind of freaks it’ll bring next time.