Monday
Looking back to Monday, the world seemed a quaint place – but by the end of the week it had become a lot darker. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States, having served as the 45th (Grover Cleveland set the precedent for serving two non-consecutive terms in the White House), and in the first 48 hours there were new norms and proprieties to straighten out. For example: was it productive in the aftermath of the election to call the 72 million Americans who voted for Trump a bunch of idiots?
Plenty of people thought this approach was strategically and morally faulty. On X, timelines divided between Democrats losing their minds and Democrats bowing their heads in concern, like saints in a church window. These were the whispery ministrations of people who like to use the word “liminal” and who, before the ink had dried on the ballot papers, got to work enumerating all the ways in which it was possible to be “part of the problem”. (Surprisingly, this list does not include the use of the phrase: “You are part of the problem”.)
What had happened? The simplest answer was that wealth inequality had driven widespread resentment that had been brilliantly exploited by Trump, but around that basic fact there were details to haggle over. It was about the price of groceries. It was about girls’ sports. It was about coastal elites who made people in the heartland feel bad for wearing flannel and getting spooked by words like liminal.
It was about racism and sexism, internalised or otherwise. This last explanation drew intense pushback from right and left, unleashing howls of indignation from people who said: “Seventy-two million Americans can’t be racist and sexist.” To which one could only smile and say: “Have you met America?”
Tuesday
Exit polls suggest 53% of white women voted for Trump, and I would guess a proportion of them did so while nursing some lingering trad wife candle for the ideal of the strong man. The exit data didn’t gauge for sexuality and while, of course, there will be gays who voted for Trump, and while the tech billionaire Peter Thiel perennially brings the side down – and while you can always find a lesbian who loves cosying up to powerful men, in fact, owing to poor judgment, I have dated some of them – if we’re doing recriminations, I would hazard this result was largely on straight people.
What could be done about it? A newspaper in Scotland noted a sharp rise in US-based Google searches around the phrase “how to get Scottish citizenship”, but it was another search that amused me: a spike in those looking for information about the term “4B”, a South Korean movement encouraging straight women to swear off sex with men until their political interests are served. Hat-tip to Ruby Rose, the lesbian model and actor, for zeroing in on the second-biggest Trump voting block to post: “All my friends swearing off men until their rights are protected and I’m swearing off white women.”
Wednesday
This is how serious things were: Bret Stephens wrote a column in the New York Times and it mostly made sense (there was a shaky bit in the middle about the folly of trying to prosecute Trump on “hard-to-follow charges”.) A friend attending Kamala Harris’s concession speech at Howard University cried and was offered Kleenex and a pep talk by a Secret Service agent. Bernie Sanders issued an excoriating retort to the failure of the Democrats and a small, Munchausen syndrome by proxy crowd sought advice online for how to deal with their children’s distress after they had informed them the world was literally coming to an end.
Meanwhile, Republicans partied. From an account in the New Yorker, the West Palm Beach victory party sounded like the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussauds. Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin, Roger Stone and Kristi Noem showed up, as did Tucker Carlson, who, the New Yorker noted, was greeted as if he was Beyoncé. And then this eye-catching sentence: “Someone shouted ‘Make a hole!’ so that Nigel Farage could be whisked through.” Imagining what sort of hole, and whisked through to what exactly, provided the only bright spot in a terrible day.
Thursday
For those needing a break I recommend the new Netflix documentary on Martha Stewart, a fascinating study in ambition, success and repression that illustrates a point about how someone can be wronged and still basically seem monstrous.
In the programme, Stewart, for all her shortcomings, is sort of fabulous, not least for saying out loud things most people only think. Of appearing in a disastrous Mark Burnett-produced chatshow in 2005, Stewart remarked it was “more like being in prison than Alderson” – the federal prison in which she served five months for insider trading in 2004. On the New York Post reporter who had written “horrible things” about her during the trial, Stewart said: “She’s dead now, thank goodness.” We are reminded in passing of what a horrible person Barbara Walters was, telling Stewart with relish she would probably be strip-searched in prison.
And this arresting detail: the prosecution of Stewart was pushed by an ambitious prosecutor, later to become head of the FBI and throw his weight against another prominent woman, an action that arguably enabled Trump’s first presidency – one James Comey.
Friday
One final unedifying spectacle of the week: that of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg reacting to the election result by changing their mailing address to Donald Trump’s Rectum. Musk even showed up in Trump’s family portrait holding a child – whether a Trump heir or one of the children from Musk’s ongoing experiment in eugenics, it was impossible to tell. In the New York Times, meanwhile, a 27-year-old student from Arizona said she voted for Trump because he was a “business guy” who showed that “anyone could technically run for the presidency” – probably the truest word said. We got to the end of the week. Now we just have to get through the next four years.
