DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE ELECTION - LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE - CHRONIQUE 10

10 November 2024

THE AFTERMATH

Let’s turn back the clock to moments just after sunset on 8 November 2016. I was at a party in Manhattan’s East Village, surrounded by other writers, manifold journalists and a bevy of people from the world of technology. Arriving at 18h00 I made the mistake of articulating my concern that we had all been far too cocky about Hillary Clinton winning big:

“Trust me, Trump has all those angry white males who want revenge after eight years of the Obama Presidency, and who definitively don’t want a woman as President. Trump also has the evangelicals – to whom he’s promised so much socially regressive stuff. And he has all those suburban women who hate the fact that Hillary stood by Bill after his moronic adventure with that White House intern”.

I was met with derisive laughter from the assembled group – someone even asking me if I had voted for Trump? (I will not repeat my rather strong reply to this absurd question). An hour later, as early results from Florida came in (which back in 2016 was very much a toss-up state), I pointed to all the red on the televised map of the state, showing how many districts Trump was carrying.

“Do you see that?” I said to the guy who derided me. “That’s what an oncologist would call metastatic cancer – and one which is just beginning to spread wildly”.

Six hours later Trump was declared the winner – and progressive America was in shock. But even in the wake of the election many of my friends kept telling me: “All right, he’s a crooked businessman and a reality television star. But he once was a Democrat. We don’t know how extreme he might be. Maybe he’ll turn out to be a fiscal conservative but more liberal on the personal rights front”.

Four years of the Trump Presidency dispelled any possibility that he might govern from the center… especially when it came to reproductive rights. As such this year’s election was a contest between a centrist progressive (who also happened to be a woman – more on that in a few paragraphs), and a man who was now known for his hard right stances, his rambling autocratic declarations, his manifold criminal charges (of which he was comprehensively judged culpable), his defamation of the woman he was found guilty (in a civil case) of raping, and the fact that he spearheaded an attempted coup d’etat on 6 January 2021. 

More tellingly Trump’s victory this week was not the nail-biter that all the pundits predicted. It was decisive. It was a rout. He carried the majority of the Swing States. The Republicans have wrested back control of the Senate. The House is still not decided, but it looks like it might stay (by a thin margin) in Republican control. And, of course, the fact that The Supreme Court has a conservative super-majority (with three of the six right wing judges appointed by Trump during his first time)… the hard truth of the matter is: Trump and the Republican Party he has shaped in his image are now controlling virtually all the levers of political power in the United States. As The New Yorker noted in an introduction today to an article entitled ‘Donald Trump’s Revenge’:

“The former President will return to the White House, older, less inhibited, and far more dangerous than before”.

I am not going to prognosticate on what a second Trump term will bring at home and internationally – except to say that his threats about diminishing dissent and freedom of expression and other constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Just as it must be noted that his Vice President, JD Vance, holds hardline views against abortion, against gay marriage, against contraception, and even against the idea of women without children teaching school Given Trump’s age and his increased mental irrationality I would not be at all surprised if Vance replaced him somewhere during his second term (as per the term of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution in which a President’s deteriorating mental condition would render him incompetent for the job).

But this too is mere writerly speculation – along with the potential for further fractures within the American Republic if Trump, the Republicans and the Supreme Court begin to truly undermine certain personal rights and impose what will be a marriage between extreme Social Darwinism and Christian fundamentalism.

Naturally the Democratic Party is gripped by trauma in the wake of Trump’s emphatic victory. Especially as the reports from the final days of the campaign pointed to Harris gaining momentum, and the fact that the exit polls on the day of the election showed a high turnout of women voters and much concern about preserving the right to abortion and the threat to democratic process that Trump represents. All of this turned out to not translate into a majority for Harris. And though there will now be much finger pointing among Democrats – should Biden have absented himself months earlier?... was the cost of living index to blame? – there is another underlying fact to Trump’s unnerving triumph: for the second time running an avowed misogynist has defeated a woman for the office of President. And that speaks volumes about an underlying distrust in the American body politic about allowing a woman to hold what still remains the most powerful job in the world. Which is one of the many sad truths that need to be confronted in the wake of this result; an outcome which I predicted in my chronique last week… as much as I didn’t want it to come to pass.

To say that my fellow compatriots who hate Trump are shaken by thus result (not just those on the left, but many in the political center and certain Republicans who find him beyond distasteful and hazardous to our communal health) is to engage in understatement. I called an expatriate friend this morning in Berlin. His first words as he answered the phone were:

“Suicide hotline”.

I managed a bleak laugh in response. And later, at the moment when Trump was declared the winner, he pointed out that BBC Radio 3 (its classical music station) was playing Richard Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries”.

An American journalist friend in London simultaneously wrote me:

“Last night was a referendum on humanity – and humanity was voted out. America was nice while it lasted”.

And then there was the drily observation of a near-neighbor in Maine:

“Just remarkable. He blew away the popular vote too. Such a complete asshole”.

The great Anglo-American poet TS Eliot once wrote this telling phrase about the human condition:

‘Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow”.

The shadow that is Trump has returned to haunt us again. The fact that the country chose a man who was called by his ex-chief of staff ‘a fascist’ speaks volumes about an alternative version of reality where – knowing all the facts about Trump – half of my compatriots chose to ignore them. In fact I would argue that the country knew exactly whom they were getting into bed with if they voted Trump back intoi The White House. To quote one of the few smart pieces of advice that my late father gave me:

“Go to bed with a crazy and you wake up with a crazy”.

We’ve done just that. As America’s first great politician-philosopher Thomas Jefferson warned at the end of the eighteenth century:

“The government you elect is the government you deserve”.

We’ve ignored that warning. The Second Coming of Donald Trump has arrived. And we in the United States have no one to blame but ourselves.