I am praying for a silence of the bams. All the polls say that Biden is going to win.. But we’ve been here before
There is a moment in the film Alien 3 where Ripley, finally driven to the very edge of her mind by the monster, says to the alien: “You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else.”
Which is pretty much how I feel about Trump now.
A quick potted history. I first became aware of the name “Donald Trump” in 1991 when, as a student at Glasgow University, I read Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. Trump is something of a hero to the book’s narrator Patrick Bateman. Given that Bateman is an amoral serial killer, it was pretty clear what Ellis was saying here.
And that was about it. Like most people outside of Manhattan, I was then pretty much ignorant of
Trump for what now seems like a blissful decade, before he popped on to the cultural radar again around 2004, when he began starring in TV moronathon The Apprentice. “Oh,” I thought. “That’s that tacky buffoon from American Psycho. He’s a reality star now.”
There followed another neardecade of Trump-free peace. Until I joined Twitter in 2011. One day, I noticed that Trump tweeted about politics a lot. Like all the time. And he was obsessed with insulting Obama. “How funny,” I thought. “That fool from The Apprentice is now a mad old racist who hates Obama.”
He was also given to offering teen heartthrobs unwanted advice on their love lives, like when he tweeted Robert Pattinson that he shouldn’t take back Kristen Stewart because “she cheated on you like a dog and will do it again”. He also, generally speaking, seemed to have a strange obsession with what he saw as the terrible ways of dogs. “This is great,” I thought, “he’s absolutely bonkers.” It was, as they used to say, an Insta-Follow. Then came the night of the US election in 2012. For weeks, Trump had been crowing about how badly Obama was going to lose. (He was, inevitably, going to lose “like a dog”.) Of course,
Obama won. Trump went berserk on Twitter, falsely accusing Obama of losing the popular vote, calling for a “revolution” (tweets he later deleted) and finally huffing: “Well, back to the drawing board!”
“Mate,” I tweeted. “You sound like a bad Scooby-Doo villain.”
And Trump blocked me.
“Wow,” I thought. “That’s weird. The crazy old racist reality TV guy who hates Obama just blocked me on Twitter.” (By then, Trump had joined a growing list of celebrity lunatics who had blocked me on Twitter, including, but not limited to, the late Michael Winner, Piers Morgan and the failed actor
James Woods.
And then, well we all know what happened next. “He won’t run for president, will he?” I asked my American friends. Then it was: “He can’t win the Republican nomination, can he?” And then it was: “He can’t win the election, can he?” And, as every “no” became a “yes”, your despair grew.
For a long time, I thought that despair would end this week, the moment Trump was up for re-election and inevitably lost. Now I’m not so sure. Yes, all the polls indicate a Biden victory. But we’ve been here before. And, unless it’s a Biden landslide on the night, watch Trump attempt to steal power somehow. How? I’m not exactly sure. But every single thing we know about him tells us Trump will lie
and cheat. Let’s not forget that he also has a pretty strong motivation to “win”, in that he’d probably quite like to avoid spending the rest of his life in court, then in jail.
I think the best outcome we can hope for is that Trump loses decisively enough that the result cannot be denied.
He will claim he has been cheated. He will go on about voter fraud and mail-in ballots for the rest of his life.
He will spend his last 10 weeks in office trying to do as much damage to liberal America as he can, including attempting to repeal Obamacare and possibly beginning the process of overturning abortion laws. But he will go in January. However, what he’s helped to create isn’t going anywhere…
There is a scene in Hannibal, Thomas Harris’s hilariously camp third Hannibal Lecter novel, where the good doctor, on the loose in Florence, attends an exhibition of medieval torture instruments. He does not go to look at the exhibition itself because “the essence of the worst of the human spirit is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd”. Lecter goes to watch the faces of the spectators, as they drool over the horrors.
It is no longer Trump you watch at his rallies, as he spews his bile and racism, as he deliberately mispronounces Kamala Harris’s name or says that US citizen and Congresswoman Illhan Omar has no right to have opinions on her own country because she was born in Somalia, or as he sinisterly draws out the “Hussein” in “Barack
Hussein Obama”. It is the faces of the crowd you look at, the faces behind him: cheering and sneering – and almost entirely white and mask-less – as they shout “FOUR MORE YEARS” and “LOCK HER UP” and “MAKE THEM PAY!”
Unless it’s a
Biden landslide, watch Trump try to steal power
And there are tens of millions of them. Tens of millions who have been empowered for four years. Who have been told that their bile and racism are perfectly fine.
Like anyone who isn’t a) rich and utterly selfish, b) a vicious racist, or, c) has an IQ over 90, I am praying that Trump is destroyed in the election on Tuesday.
Sadly, and however large Biden’s victory might be, those faces behind him aren’t going anywhere.
There’s the real horror of America in 2020.