It was like a horror film. Don’t enter that dark alley. Don’t for heaven’s sake touch that door above those dark falling stairs. But they bowled into that alley and pushed open the door above those steeply dropping steps.
Many are the takes on why Donald Trump won the US election.
He was lucky in his opponents: Joe Biden was doddery and unpopular, while as his replacement Kamala Harris had only three months to prove herself. And sadly, after a flourish of hope, she was not up to the task.
Voters wanted a hard man, a tough guy to take on the world. Trump may be soft pretending to be hard, but enough voters liked the set of his sagging jaw, the self-regarding jut of his crumbling chin.
Liberal American was too complacent, too hoity-toity, disdainful of the worries of ordinary Americans.
Maybe there are just more secret fascist sympathisers in the US than we had previously thought.
Take your pick from the above.
And pause to remember to that Trump was relentlessly thuggish in his use of lawyers. The legal cases against him were pushed until after the election and now, as predicted, they will disappear. The law, like taxes, applies only to the little people. For all that, he should remain a convicted felon in our eyes.
Something must explain how US voters behaved. Why did they do that thing?
They were wrong to elect Trump for many reasons. His character, his moral failings, his appalling past behaviour, his total self-absorption, his sheer nastiness during the election, the thumping aggression of his speech, the mad ramblings, the trailing off into nothing, the whole hellish mess of everything, the endless lies, and trying to overturn the result of the last election.
They were wrong because his economic plans are mad, based on a handful of magic bean tariffs, and more tax cuts for his rich pals. They were wrong because Trump, a wannabe tyrant who admires bigger tyrants, seems unhealthy close to Putin.
Does throwing such words make any difference? Trying to be clever with your ABCs is futile when simple words are so easily turned into cudgel slogans.
This time as last, Trump partly won because of four simple words: Make America Great Again. Bizarre, but there you go. That slogan offers false hope to those who despair about the world as it is, wanting something different.
Trump didn’t make America great again last time round, but his cynical catchphrase worked again in the social media vortex that has replaced the old legacy press. This election was shaped by social media, to which Trump, with his showman shallows, his craving for attention, his aggressive showiness, is perfectly suited.
As for Horror on Trump Street (Part II), we can’t move on without talking about Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion – an absurd fact. When did little bits of nothing become more valuable than proper hard industries?
Musk snapped up Twitter because he thought it was too left wing, and he promptly removed everything good about it – and Twitter was good at first – and turned it mostly into a right-wing hangout, lifting previous bans on the far-right, twisting the algorithms so that his own tweets were massively boosted.
And he used Twitter to help Trump win the election, while also donating a reported $118 million. And now he may be given a government role.
The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr is a long-time watcher of the ways in which the American tech bros threaten democracy in this post-truth world.
In an essay last weekend, she writes:
“Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.”
What’s to be done? It’s always unsettling when the world spins in a direction you dislike. Do you hide away, and ignore the news? It took me three days to pay attention again. Do you sink into despondency? Or perhaps instead you think this is a phase, a moment, this is now but it isn’t forever.
Trump isn’t right in what he says, and he is fallible and flaky. He will make mistakes, and like his Brit mini-me Boris Johnson his decline may lie in his character.
Wait and see time. But it won’t be pretty.