Is there any point in feeling anxious about matters over which you have no control? I ask on behalf of a man fretting on a ledge.
The cause of my present unease is the US election. Yet I don’t live in America. It’s nothing to do with me. Not my concern. So is this just an indulgence?
It doesn’t feel that way. Trump represents a clear danger to his own country and other countries. He’s a wannabe fascist. Strike that. He’s a fascist without power. Grant him that power and God knows what he’ll do.
Actually, forget about God.
The vain ungodly man has already said he’ll lock up opponents and shut down TV stations he dislikes (pretty much any broadcaster deemed not to have been sufficiently flattering).
And he’ll flog you a Trump-branded bible while he’s at it. How has this deeply unholy, unchristian man won over the pious people of America? A locked-room puzzle too difficult for me to solve.
Mostly, of course, Trump is desperate to win so he can overturn the many legal cases lined up against him.
In the last days of his campaign, Trump limps like a ragged old cockerel with a temper and a bad leg. He rages he is going to “win big” or whatever stupid words he uses. Yet he is also lining up the legal cases to challenge the result if he loses. If he’s that ‘brilliant’, why’s he so worried about losing?
Trump is also deeply, deeply weird. Unhinged and unsavoury. The idiot’s idiot. His speeches cough up violent language and misogyny.
Solipsistic to an insane degree, as if no-one else in the world exists. It’s. All. About. Him.
And then he makes strange swerves like this: “That beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I have the whitest skin because I never have time to go out in the sun. I have that beautiful white. It could’ve been beautiful tan…”
I thought he spent half his life playing golf in Florida. Where the sun is known to dazzle. Or maybe it doesn’t shine on crybaby Trump. Perhaps he’ll take the sun to court.
Whatever he does seems not to matter. Even, bizarrely and horribly, when he mimed an oral sex act at a recent rally. Yup, he simulated a blowjob with a microphone. You know, I hardly believe I just typed those words. Will nothing sink him?
More reasons than can be numbered here are there to hope the Democrat candidate Kamala Harris can win on Tuesday. It’s all so worryingly close, especially as Harris is lumbered by being from the incumbent side. But at least she’s a proper ordinary human being.
ELON Musk, the world’s richest man, has thrown his weight behind Trump with an oddball enthusiasm that makes both men look even stranger.
What does Musk want? Well, if you believe the conspiracy theorists – they may have a point here – Musk and other big tech oligarchs want to take over US politics and see Trump as just a means to that end.
The likes of Musk see themselves as bigger and more important than ‘mere’ countries. Trump has said he’ll appoint Musk to review (read slash) public spending. Musk would make even more money by denying funds to others. And he would rise to an official level where he could not be touched or regulated.
If that doesn’t worry you, you should probably get out more.
ONE malign oddity is that Musk now weighs in on British politics. About which he knows and understands nothing.
Saturday’s print copy of the Daily Telegraph – not so much a newspaper as a petulant howl from a crumbling mansion in the Conservative wasteland – splashed on what Elon Musk thinks about this week’s budget (“Musk: PM is wrong on farm tax raid”).
The Telegraph was once a respectable newspaper. Now it kowtows to the incomprehensible ranting of an American Tech Bro.
Much of the reporting on the change to inheritance tax affecting farms has had a political twist. Budgets are generally too complicated for my brain. But I think what Labour is trying to do here is prevent the wealthy from hoovering up huge estates to avoid paying tax. Sounds reasonable, especially as small farms are unaffected by this reform.
Whatever the matter, the Telegraph always rants and raves about foreign courts interfering in British life. Yet it seems happy here for a foreign billionaire to stick his oar into our political pond.
Incidentally, the Telegraph also has a column from Liz Truss under the headline: “The economic blob that brought me down is shielding a failing Chancellor.”
Dear me, Truss doesn’t know when to shut up, does she? I think I’d like to buy that economic blob a drink. Although, like the woke mob, it doesn’t even exist.