So he is finally president again with even more of the nightmare surprises than those we had long dreaded and what changes we have been through in the shadow of Donald Trump. Remember the long-ago moment when he sought the Republican nomination in the election against Hillary: Jeb Bush, who understood that left liberals had no monopoly on compassion and decency, said of him – appropriately choosing his language as well as his emphasis – in Spanish el hombre no es conservador.
Ted Cruz, an unlovely Texan, but an upper level lawyer who has often won when he appeared before the Supreme Court said of him, ‘This is a man who could bomb Denmark.’ Well, hasn’t that come back to haunt us? Who in their wildest dreams could have imagined that an American president – nevermind the level of braggadocio – could declare that he was keen to annex Greenland, nevermind that it was a Danish protectorate, and that the Greenlanders themselves were proud of their independence. This is also the man who declared – in a fit of the impulse towards American Greed again – that he wanted to get his hands on the Panama Canal and that he wanted to rename it the American Canal. Quite apart from the gratuitous insult to Canada in the last days of Justin Trudeau’s premiership, suggesting that the land with the closest of all connections to America should become one more state is absurdly offensive.
What’s happened in the wake of the landslide election victory has been doubly weird for a lot of centrist, more or less liberal people (not necessarily leftist or woke, but encompassing those things) is that ‘we’ (whoever we are) came to realize that we had badly misjudged the American electorate and that the Democrat campaign had been a sustained exercise in condescension.
Kamala Harris had her points, she seemed good when she just laughed in the Donald’s face, and there were huge numbers of Australians and British who said that however much they were conservatives, they had much more in common with Kamala Harris’s centre-leftism than they did with Trump’s vision – this group included Rory Stewart, the podcaster, William Hague, the former Tory leader and foreign secretary, and to his great credit, George Brandis.
But the campaign to beat Trump didn’t need Barack Obama lecturing young male blacks not to vote for Trump, his vowels getting more southern by the second.