The Big Apple grapples with another Trump win

As she spoke, in the glorious afternoon sunshine, a man dressed in prison fatigues and a grotesque rubber mask of the 45^th president of the United States, mugged for the cameras. A vendor selling knockoff MAGA hats from a trestle table looked on with a smile. “The worst that’ll happen,” she said, “is that he’ll refuse to concede a close election.”

Across the street, the civilian army shuffling its way into Madison Square Garden begged to differ. In order to stage his pre-election rally at the self-styled ‘World’s Most Famous Arena’ – in reality, a 10-storey trash can plonked atop a train station – Trump paid $1.2million upfront to owners who suspected he’d stiff them on the bill. 

Knowing I was writing this story, in the days leading up to the event, a friend who works at the Garden gave me a call with a warning not to attend. “Once you’re in, you can’t get out,” he told me. Honestly, these metaphors write themselves. 

Back then, in the Before Times of last month, I still had the luxury of thinking this was all a bit of a joke. Sure, the line trudging past stalls selling conspiratorial literature and badges describing the Democrats as Marxists was long enough to fill Madison Square Garden, but the New York Knicks do that seven times a month and they haven’t won anything since 1973. 

On average, basketball fans pay several hundred dollars per game for their seats, whereas Trump was giving away tix for nix. Like the Knicks themselves, he had no chance of winning in New York. It’s showbiz, is all; the chance for the freaks to see the freak show for free. 

As someone who’s lived in Brooklyn, in Queens, and in Hell’s Kitchen and East Harlem, in Manhattan, I like to think I know a little bit about New York City. About America itself, too, actually. 

As a jobbing journalist, I’ve deplaned in cities in those flyover states everyone’s always talking about. Louisville, Detroit, Richmond, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Fresno, Ann Arbour, Salt Lake City – twice! – I’ve been everywhere, man. 

I’ve been to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Philly and DC. Trust me, if you’re in the market for someone with the kind of experience needed to wildly miscalculate the outcome of a presidential election, I’m your guy. 

I certainly know enough to tell that America doesn’t work very well. In the wake of the pandemic, rents have risen by 30%, beef by 45%, and milk by 25%. 

When living in New York last year, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t rustle up a home-cooked lunch for one for less than 20 bucks. Drinking and dining out offered the opportunity to subsidise someone’s low wages with a gratuity of up to 30%. Even as a non-religious person who sometimes believes that Trump and his cohort of Project 2025 wonkers are acolytes of Satan, I don’t know if I have it in me to unload on pinched workers who voted for a grifter who promised not to tax their tips. 

And then there are those who are here for the whole caboodle. Donald J Trump speaks to something dark in the human character, particularly its modern American variant. With his non sequiturs and his linguistic anarchy, for once, the truism that you couldn’t make him up is actually true. 

No fiction editor on earth would accept a binary creation who somehow manages to embody every single one of his country’s worst characteristics without allowing a look-in to any of the good ones. A manuscript in which such a monster became the world’s most powerful man, twice, would be returned with a rejection letter. But yet here we are. 

Still, on November 5, I could only marvel at the show of democracy on display in Brooklyn. “Look at all them voters,” I exclaimed at a line the length of a city block. 

As I marvelled at it, snaking its way along India Street, in Greenpoint, I was duly informed by my friend Bette that the hundred or so people were in fact queueing for pastries and cakes from the evidently popular Radio Bakery. “They are delicious, though,” she told me. 

Bette is an immigrant from London who, after two decades in New York, was voting in her first presidential election. As a citizen of the Land of the Free, she was required to remove her ‘Piss Off Trump’ badge before casting her ballot.

At the polling station, I caught my first real glimpse of polarised America. After speaking with Sarah, a young “queer” woman from Iran who had just voted for Kamala Harris – “I’m taking the prospect of Trump being elected very personally,” she told me – I met Gene, a 66-year-old who agreed to speak with me only because I was wearing a Ramones t-shirt. 

In 1958, Gene was baptised at the very spot at which he was casting his ballot. Dressed in double denim and a t-shirt bearing an American eagle, he told me that “America is finished as a country if Trump” – wins, I thought, he’s going to say wins – “doesn’t win. Kamala is a communist.”

With this, I was stumped. Unable to summon a follow-up question worthy of the name, instead, I babbled something about January 6 while Gene quacked back about the disorder being the fault of the National Guard. Standing there, frowning gormlessly, I was suddenly reminded of The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers, a wonderful comic essay by Woody Allen about two men who are each playing their own individual game of postal chess. 

Gene and I weren’t seeing the board in quite the same way. The country as a whole couldn’t even agree on the rules. Checkmate, America. 

That evening, I attended an election night watch party at a penthouse apartment in the Noho district of Manhattan. “Don’t you dare call it a party,” the hostess told me. “We called it that in 2016 and I’ve still got PTSD.” 

The room was full of Democrat supporters, one of whom was a lawyer for Disney who had just returned from staffing a polling station in Pennsylvania. Perhaps mistaking my surname for Woodward rather than Winwood, the first thing he said to me was that he wouldn’t speak on the record – or, as it turned out, off the record either. Bristling with quiet annoyance, for the briefest moment, I felt like a Trumper patronised by the coastal elite. 

It perhaps won’t surprise you to learn that it wasn’t the greatest party ever thrown. As the results began trickling in, on the stereo, someone cued up It’s The End Of The World As We Know It… by REM.

Two hours later, with brittle excuses and haunted eyes, people began heading for the elevator. While the optimistic among us chirped that nothing was yet certain, the realists knew better, while the pessimists knew too much. 

“This is how it starts,” said Gilles, a French-born architect and bar owner. “In Europe, a hundred years ago, this is how it all began.”  

Still, onwards and downwards. With the city once again resplendent in t-shirt-weather sunshine, the day after the election, I headed down to the Staten Island Ferry Port for a free ride across to New York’s most conservative borough. If anyone was to be found dancing in the streets, or at least lying comatose on the sidewalks, I reckoned it’d be the Staten Islanders. 

Disembarking from the boat, though, all was quiet. In the bars, what talk I could hear was muted and unrelated to the night before. The only visible display of affiliation was a t-shirt worn by a man clambering into a pickup truck in the shadow of a minor league ballpark. ‘If You Don’t Like Trump,’ it read, ‘Then You Probably Won’t Like Me (And I’m Fine With That).’

Down at the Haagen-Dazs store in the outlet mall near the harbour, a server with a heavy Middle-Eastern accent made a loveable fuss of my wife’s allergy to dairy. Rather than enquiring why someone afflicted by milk was hunting for sweet treats in an ice cream shop, instead, he came front of house with samples of sorbet on small plastic paddles. 

This beguiling encounter with an abundantly friendly man was marred only by me asking a question that brought silence to the shop. Clearly, his thoughts on the election of Donald J. Trump were his business, not mine. 

Ian Winwood is author of the best-seller Bodies: Life & Death in Music, published by Faber