It can be hard to tell, sometimes, whether you truly want something or have simply realised that it is now out of reach. I had a dalliance with someone a few years ago and only started wondering if I’d perhaps wanted more once he got in a relationship with someone else. To this day, I’m still unsure about what happened there; did my feelings take that bit too long to emerge and so I missed my chance, or was I merely jealous that I no longer had the option to be with him?
It was a minor incident, all things considered, but one I’ve kept coming back to over the past few days. If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you will know that I spent two months living and working in the US last year – mostly based in New York, but occasionally travelling around as well.
At the end of my last stay, in mid-November, I reached quite a peculiar state of inner peace. I’d decided to spend some time across the Atlantic back in 2023, because I felt I had unfinished business with America, and that narrative arc was coming to an end. I was entirely fine with it. My time in NYC had been lovely – in turns thrilling, exhausting, frustrating and exhilarating – but I’d done everything I set out to do. I could go home.
I even said it to my friends there: some of our last drinks felt quite poignant, as I made it clear that I wasn’t going to return anytime soon. If they wanted to see me again, they’d have to be the ones schlepping over to Europe.
Then Donald Trump walked into the White House again. We all knew that his second presidency would be rough, but it is fair to say that few had expected the speed at which he set out to destroy the federal government, and the lives of so many vulnerable people, both in the US and in the rest of the world.
Attempting to keep up with the news has begun feeling like torture again, just as it did between 2016 and 2020. If anything, this time round seemingly feels worse, for reasons I’m still struggling to put my finger on.
Is it the sense that they know what they’re doing this time? The presence of Elon Musk? The far right populists applauding them from abroad? The sheer volume of executive orders, coming out like a tsunami? The lack of optimism that things will get better again?
Everyone will have their own theory, but the latter is the one I keep coming back to. Trump was elected nine years ago and he governed for four years then Biden won, and for a while we thought things would be OK, and it’d merely been a deeply unpleasant blip. Does anyone still feel this way now?
Even if the Democrats manage to win big at the midterms in 2026, then get the presidency back in 2028 – what big ifs! – there is no real sense that things could return to normal for the US. Too much has already happened, and too much is likely to happen over the next few years. Something fundamental has broken in the fabric of American democracy, and the country we knew may well be gone for ever.
It is a real tragedy for the millions of Americans who didn’t vote for Trump, and whose lives will now forever be shaped by the tyrant they sought to oppose. Closer to home, it will also take some adjustment for the rest of the world. America’s influence on the rest of the planet has been such that whatever they do next is likely to influence us all.
On a more self-involved note – this is a personal column, after all – I worry that I’ve been robbed of a possible life which I assumed I would get to keep.
Back in 2024, I managed to build myself a little nest in New York. I had my neighbourhood, my cornershop, my friends, my favourite bars, and all my frivolous habits. If I close my eyes now, I can still picture the view from the subway when going towards Manhattan, and seeing the skyscrapers come into view.
I felt no immediate desire to wave goodbye to London in November but, I now realise, had got used to the idea that New York would remain out there, ready to welcome me back if I changed my mind. That this is no longer a real, tangible possibility makes me feel like I’ve been robbed of a potential future which I’d not completely ruled out yet.
There was this nest I built – and I was never sure I was going to use it – but it’s now being destroyed, and I can’t help but mourn for the potential freedom it offered me.
That’s what America was always meant to stand for, right? The land of the free, and a beacon of hope to people in need of a fresh start. It never quite lived up to its promise, but it was nice to pretend that it did, for a little while.
