SO BAD SO BAD
... It’s a catastrophe
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Paul Ash spent a week in Los Angeles, waiting for the dark mood to dissipate. But it was hard to find a ray of sunshine
IS there any silver lining to the cloud of Donald Trump — the contender almost every poll and pundit had written off as an also-ran — being elected president of the most powerful country in the world?
Not much, if the shell-shocked residents of Los Angeles are anything to go by.
In a week of asking everybody I met, from Airbnb hosts to Uber drivers and urban farmers, the reaction was pretty much the same: a grimace of displeasure.
“Well, you’ve seen the map, right?” said my host, Stephanie, by way of explanation. She was talking about the infographic in that morning’s paper — a post-election map of the US, the west and east coasts fringed in “Democrat blue” and a great red Republican tide spreading like an oil spill over the centre of the country.
This is in keeping with a traditional, if highly generalised, view of America — that the progressive liberals huddle on either coast, fuelling themselves on organic produce and Kombucha health drinks, commuting on bicycles — or at least in Toyota Prius hybrids in car-mad LA — and talking down to the great ignorant masses who live in what many derisively call the “flyover states”.
Less than a month after the election, many Angelenos show the classic signs of grief — shock, anger and denial. Acceptance — if there is to be any — is still a long way off.
“It feels like postwar Germany,” said David Hertz, an environmental architect. “It feels like a coup, a dictatorship, like anything can happen.”
Hertz, who has installed a massive water-from-air plant and uses that water to grow organic vegetables in a hydroponic tower in his studio in Venice, one of Los Angeles’ gentrified locales, fretted that Trump is serious about backing out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
“We are at such a critical point and so many people are interested in clean technology and advancing the future, and now we’re gonna go backwards, like in this last hurrah of oil and gas? It’s a nightmare. For the planet, not just Americans.”
His wife, Laura, exuding Californian vitality, joined us. “Have you apologised yet for being American?” she asked. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.” Many see the result as a gender issue. “It was a vote against a woman,” said Nicole Landers, co-founder of a communal vegetable gardening project in Venice. “This election was all about that.”
Taxi driver Ivan said his pro-Clinton friends were still in shock.
“It was a disgusting election, on both sides,” he said.
“And yeah, Hillary would have had the experience to run government. But her whole campaign was ‘Don’t vote for Trump!’ What kind of campaign is that?”
Despite the mistrust and fear of a Trump presidency, the feeling that Clinton would not have been much better is widespread.
“This election has brought out the people who lie in the collective shadow of this country, where it’s money before people,” said designer and lifestyle store owner Matt Schildkret.
“But Hillary would have been more of the same thing. People have got to realise that the one corporate they need to look after is Earth.”
On a taxi ride from Venice Beach — a place where tourists collide with the reality of the vast and growing homeless population of Los Angeles — the driver, who sells clothes on eBay with his mother, said he would not have voted for Clinton because “she’s corrupt”.
He paused. “Actually, I probably wouldn’t have voted for her because my mom hates her.”
Urban farmer Ben Hirschfeld, who helps people build and farm vegetable boxes on their suburban streets, reckons the “desperate people” — those who voted for Trump — heard what they wanted to hear in his racist, misogynist rhetoric.
“Americans are idiots so they elected an idiot for president,” he ranted. “But it’s bringing Democrats and Republicans together in new ways. So maybe there’s a good thing here.”
A good way to take a city’s temperature is to talk to Uber drivers such as Artim, who would have voted for Bernie Sanders.
“He doesn’t have any of the baggage that Hillary Clinton has,” he said.
“She had Benghazi, e-mails, FBI . . . I mean, who runs for president and the FBI is investigating her? How is that possible? Like I can’t even apply for a
It feels like a coup, a dictatorship, like anything can happen
f***ing McDonald’s job if I got something on my record. And these people want to become the president of the US?”
The wall that Trump promised to build to keep Mexican immigrants out of the Land of the Free is a regular conversation topic.
Uber driver Adam, a native of the sprawling San Fernando Valley, reckoned Trump’s rhetoric would fade. “He wants to build a wall? We can’t even build our roads in the time he wants to do it.”
George, a Hispanic driver, noted how Mexicans despised the president-elect. “Nobody likes Trump south of the border. They hate him. The Mexicans don’t like to be here. If they had the means and jobs and the government was less corrupt, they’d be in Mexico.”
On my last day in LA, an Iranian named Jorge (“I do this to get me out of the house; my kids would die if they knew I was driving a cab”) took me to Los Angeles International Airport.
Jorge was no stranger to coups — he had to flee Iran when the last Shah was toppled in 1975.
“So what do you think about Trump winning?” he asked.
I said I wasn’t sure, that after talking to a lot of people, it seemed no one wanted to predict anything.
“Ah, well,” he said, grinning into the rear-view mirror. “They elected him. Now they have to deal with him.”