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Events in the US and Britain are straining the Establishment and cutting cola consumption.
When I wrote in January that I was giving up Diet Coke for as long as Donald Trump was President – I did not expect him to last this long. Exactly how I thought he might disappear, I am not sure, but given how shocked everyone was by his arrival at the White House, it didn’t seem inconceivable that he might vanish in a similarly inexplicable way.
I imagined that afterwards, everyone would deny they had anything to do with his disappearance, just as they denied having had anything to do with his arrival. But, damn it, he has not disappeared, so I have not had the fizzy drink for more than two months. I miss it more than I thought I would.
But if I am having a bad day, Trump’s is usually worse. Every day some fresh debacle unfolds and, having worked in the Beehive, I try to imagine how we would have handled some of these White House scenarios. But the truth is that, without a Trump as leader, we would never have been in these situations. Almost daily, I imagine a couple of people outside the Oval Office, with one saying, “Okay, while he’s watching himself on Fox News, you take his phone,” and the other one saying, “No, you take the phone.”
His team plainly never expected to win the election so were ill-prepared, hence the long slog to get a Cabinet together and the new hierarchy in each department.
I think the US public would have forgiven that, just as they would forgive Trump saying, “I will take some time to understand this immigration/trade/ North Korea/Nato/EU/visa/Obamacare situation more fully before acting.” But that is not his way.
He blunders ahead with 140-character solutions that do not withstand even the first blush of scrutiny, let alone a court’s, and get nowhere near implementation.
It is exhausting from the outside and must be embarrassing on the inside.
Yet still he tweets. And sometimes I think I understand that compulsion because, when a long Coke-less day stretches ahead of me, I am just thankful I never took up smoking or Twitter.
On the heels of the criminal rampage on Westminster Bridge came the familiar sound bites from politicians. After any disaster, citizens look for support and reassurance and it is appropriate that leaders make unifying, calming and authoritative comments.
But the gilding of the metaphorical lily by saying that these types of events strike at the heart of democracy, or similar glib phrases, is uncalled for. “Yesterday, an act of terrorism tried to silence our democracy,” said UK Prime Minister Theresa May, the day after the bridge carnage.
These offences should be called criminality, not terrorism, but even putting that aside, where was the attempt “to silence our democracy”? No one attacked democracy. Some person who may or may not have been criminally insane ran people over and stabbed a policeman. That was horrific enough.
If May had come out afterwards and said, “Because of this madman, we are cancelling the next election”, that would certainly have silenced Britain’s democracy. But that decision is in the hands of citizens and their leaders alone.
Whatever atrocities thugs commit, we do not and we never should yield to them an exalted status or power, and politicians should not use words that imply it. Lives were imperilled, and lost, on the bridge. Democracy was never in danger.
When a long, Coke-less day stretches ahead, I am thankful I never took up Twitter.