It's very easy to hold the view that America has lost its collective mind.
I’ve been thinking that quite a bit since waking up on Wednesday to a sight we’ll now have to live with for the next four years: A twice-impeached, convicted felon and alleged rapist hailing himself the greatest leader since Julius Caesar, not least because, unlike that “sad Roman loser”, he survived assassination.
But the world rolls on. Lessons must be learned and good points sought from the nightmare of Donald Trump’s gruesome return. So let’s get to work.
There will be no civil war in America, no lengthy legal battles about election fraud and cries from mobs of horn-headed weirdos attacking Capitol Hill with screams of Stop the Steal. Because the Democrats accepted defeat gracefully. All the smug, profiteering pollsters who decreed the election too close to call received a welcome kick in the ballots.
Labour might see the stupidity of letting their senior staff campaign against the world’s most powerful grudge-bearer. And when that grudge rebounds on Britain maybe we will finally realise that the so-called special relationship is a deceitful myth, then stop all the pro-Washington fawning and stand up for ourselves.
Through their shocking cowardice, the Democrats might make political parties realise you can’t lie about an 81-year-old’s brain being pin-sharp when everyone can see dementia.
And when you eventually replace him you should not simply elevate his uninspiring, unproven deputy who offers nothing but giggles and hugs from showbiz superstars who lend their support, not out of admiration for her, but visceral loathing of her opponent.
Image:
AFP via Getty Images)If there is one genuine takeaway bonus from Trump’s landslide, it is the death of the celebrity endorsement.
Even the most devout Democrat must have felt a surge of nausea during the love-ins between fangirl Kamala Harris and Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Harrison Ford, Katy Perry, Oprah, Beyonce, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen and George Clooney. They must have winced at the woefulness of the optics as some of the country’s richest people, who share none of the blue-collar anxieties about inflation, immigration, tax and factories lost to China, played right into MAGA hands.
These are American royalty who mostly dwell in palatial Californian piles. When the main charge against the Democrats is that it’s the political wing of a sneering liberal elite, you don’t offer up, as reasons to vote for you, some of the country’s wealthiest liberals who hold Trump and his core supporters in contempt.
Sure, Americans swoon over celebrities, but the Republicans already had the hugest celebrity in America, called Donald Trump. So who needs the apprentices?
Sure, Americans are spoon-fed what to believe by famous faces with the biggest social media accounts, but the Republicans already had the guy who controls the world’s biggest social media platform, Elon Musk. And he has more of what Americans truly desire, dollars, than any of them.
My favourite quote about how the Luvvie-ocracy turns normal people off, came from hell-raising actor Richard Harris who once refused to attend the Oscars on the grounds that “it takes 14 hours to get there, followed by 10 hours talking to self-obsessed a***holes. I’d rather spend that time in the pub talking to my mates”.
America has just chosen the pub bore who falsely professed to feel their pain, ahead of a perceived elite whom they felt could never begin to.
English (US) ·