Defeat of Trump, the tyrant king, brings world new hope
Activists for more liberal causes in the USA can now look forward with greater optimism, writes Laura Waddell
An unfamiliar tingling came over me as I watched the results of the US election last week. Could this be hope?
It was always likely the Trump camp would contest the process in the event Biden was winning. There were warnings not to expect a result straight away. The former President’s shambling press conference and subsequent fevered tweeting attempted to draw an arbitrary line between ‘legal’ ballots and ‘illegal’ ones, and he raged about mail-in ballots all along, presumably to energise his angry base. But he was undermined by his own favourite channel, Fox News, as they started calling states for Biden.
Mail-in ballots had surged in number, encouraged by the pandemic, but also partly as a response to disenfranchisement tactics: the closure of polling stations and the fear that violence might break out as news coverage showed armed men making threats at vote counts. Between this and litigation attempts to halt counts, it was going to take some time to untangle the knotty business of who was winning.
Still, naively I stayed up late on the day the polls closed, expecting to get at least a sense of which way the wind was blowing and who would be the next President of the United States. The world was watching this momentous occasion: the graspable prospect of Trump being sent packing was too tantalising to miss.
But around 3am that first night of counting, as bookies responded to Trump’s lead in several states by projecting better odds for him, my desire to watch the carnage in real time diminished, and I sloped off to bed. I’m not sure disappointment would be the correct word for how I felt in that moment; enough electoral upsets in the past decade have tempered expectations. This year has taught us things can always get worse. Rather, what I felt was a familiar steeling against the worstcase scenario, drawing on muscle memory.
I woke up on the second, then the third and fourth mornings of counting to see that little had changed in the dials, but by now, it looked more reassuring. CNN’S anchors talked at a gallop while the numbers remained static. The results from each new county to declare, however tiny their impact on the state’s overall total, were being announced as breaking news.
It was disorientingly dramatic, compared to more reserved British coverage of elections, but soon I learned to distinguish between breaking news and Breaking News with capital letters. Which bursts of adrenaline, fear, and excitement to pay attention to, and which to quash. But the maths made it increasingly likely that it was going to be the end of the Trump presidency. The hope was still there and it was asking for patience.
I’d never heard news anchors speak so openly disparagingly about Trump, notably CNN’S Jake Tapper who was repeatedly scathing. The tide was turning. Trump’s team was said to be furious with Fox News, and it was a petty pleasure to imagine Trump himself watching Rupert Murdoch’s channel as they stopped pandering to him.
After years of grotesque and tangible misogyny, racism, anti-science and general cruelty, not to mention a level of gob-smacking narcissism rarely seen so nakedly in top figures in the public eye, this was hope. This feeling creeping up that finally this grotesque, cruel, spoiled, bad man might be booted out, and the ripple effect over the nation and beyond, diminished.