Maverick Trump? Aye, right

Ireally do not know what to make of the home straights of the Trump/Clinton race for the White House. Chiefly because, I think, although I understand and accept that Hillary Clinton is far from the most perfect presidential candidate either American party has ever fielded, I just cannot understand how and why so many are being taken in by Donald Trump.

Of course, mirroring our own current situation this side of the wobbling “special relationship”, many of the many in question feel an entrenched urban elite with its own agenda and a condescending attitude to those beyond its own confines deserves a good kicking in the polls.

However, given that as a proposition, it does still amaze me that some people seem to think that in supporting Trump, they are voting (or seriously considering voting) for some maverick outsider, anti-establishment, rebellious, game-changing and innovative self-made man and a poster boy for the concept of the American dream, who does it his way.

To me, Donald Trump is actually the epitome of same old, same old. He IS the establishment. In fact, no, that’s not quite right. He is what, not so very long ago, before the tectonic plates of class, gender, influence and power began to shift away from the certainties that had been in place for millennia, USED to be the establishment.

He is a man with a giant sense of entitlement who gets where he wants to be by shouting and bullying, trampling over others, flaunting an ego the size of Alaska (half-baked or not), without the constraints of consideration for others, respect for anyone but himself and a sense that there are, even at the extremes of political thinking, places you do not go and things you do not say.

That is not the same, of course, as casting a fierce light on things that those with an axe to grind, or a war to wage, or power to cling to, want to keep hidden, which in many respects can only be a good thing.

But just because someone says something loudly, confidently, aggressively and often enough, it doesn’t make it true.

It is surely an exercise in delusion to tell yourself that he is beholden to no one, that he is someone who isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. Except, of course, when he doesn’t, which is most of the time, even according to independent observers.

All this is also predicated on a background of inherited wealth. It was very lucky for The Donald, let’s face it, that his father was born before him.

It could, of course, be argued that Hillary Clinton has risen to prominence because of her marriage and the husband who gained high office before her, that she is a member of that very establishment Trump so affects to despise.

But if so, it doesn’t actually seem to be doing her all that much good. At the moment, the USA looks like nothing so much as a geographical version of the “British” Labour Party. You just can’t get a woman leader elected.

Old bag

You know you are a sad old bag (and don’t I know it!) when you look at your crammed diary and realise that what it is crammed with are not Proseccoinfused lunches, girls’ nights out, beach holidays and city breaks, romantic dinners, stimulating evening classes or evenings of culture – not to mention time added on for a regular brisk leh doon or even a relaxing cup of tea and a racy Jammie Dodger.

Nope. It comes home to you with a bang, of the much less exciting sort, that you are missing out big time when your Dataday or your phone diary app is full of notifications for health appointments, pill-taking and bin collections.

The former two seem to be written, as it were, in tablets of stone. Bins, by contrast, are ever ebbing and (over) flowing with the pulse of the universe, the changing of the seasons and the complicated decision-making processes of those in local government, who can’t decide which environmental fad to follow next.

I’m all for recycling and I hate waste. But I can’t be doing with a recycling system, the instructions for which are only marginally less complicated than the collected works of Stephen Hawking. Our front garden (such as it is) and those of our neighbours are festooned with bins.

Ironically, the only thing we don’t have is one for bottles, somewhat of an oversight for a household of our nature.

Not since the halcyon days of 3-2-1 and the legendary Dusty Bin has waste disposal dominated our lives so thoroughly or to such deeply irritating effect.

I seem to spend half my life washing out tins and the other half sweatily consulting brightly coloured wee bits of paper Blu-tacked to the back of the utility cupboard door, in fear and trembling lest the wrong receptacle appear on the pavement on the wrong day and a finger-wagging scaffy dobs me in because I put rejected cat food in with plastics.

There has to be a better way. The dustbin of history? I can’t wait.

He is a man with a giant sense of entitlement who gets where he wants to be by shouting and bullying

Picture: AP. Donald Trump’s claims to be rebellious just don’t wash with Helen, who sees him as the epitome of the establishment.