What I got wrong about Donald Trump and America

Those of us who believed a Kamala Harris victory might be on the way as we expounded our punditry on various sofas on various news programmes in various nations across the world forgot one thing. The 5th Avenue factor.

In his first run for president in 2016, Trump said at a campaign rally, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” It was taken as a joke at best by people like me, people who had seen the rise of Trump at close range.

We’d seen an obscure millionaire real estate developer become a publicity-hungry headline chaser, then a shill for merch with his name on it. All the way to the ultimate: the main character in a reality show built around the fantasy of who he was.

He purported to be a New York City Democrat with a right-leaning touch thanks to his upbringing in Queens. He was someone who could get into parties in Manhattan, because they got him into the gossip columns and sometimes onto the front page too. But those close to him have said that he was always to the right of the people he partied with. He was certainly to the right of his ‘press agent’, who was called John Barron, and who was actually Trump himself.

If you were a New Yorker during Trump’s rise like I was, he was a laugh – even a joke – because of things like this. Maybe the New Yorker in me still saw him as a laugh, a joke right up until the day after the presidential election. And because I did, I missed the signs, the clues, the “tell” that would have alerted me to the fact that Trump had once again found the magic button – what really makes America tick. What it really is.

While touring the news studios, I had forgotten a key component of the American psyche that I simply do not have. It is one of the reasons I left and one of the reasons that I am still away:

I don’t like fortresses; enclosed spaces; safe zones. Americans do.

James Baldwin, whose centenary is this year, wrote in an exceptionally fiery essay published in 1965, the height of the US civil rights movement, saying that America existed behind a barricade.

He meant that barricade to be just about white people, but Trump has shown that this is no longer true. “Barricade America” is multiracial and extends across all classes.

People like me, and it looks like many of the pollsters, had assumed this barricade to be in the usual place: the states of the old Confederacy with spillage in the usually reliable so-called rust belt, like the upper midwest – maybe Michigan, certainly Iowa.

We also assumed that the fall of Roe v Wade, which had legalised abortion across the US in 1973, and the return of the issue back to the states would galvanise women; a woman being the typical voter in the US.

Plus, African American voters could certainly be relied on to vote against Trump – after all, he and his daddy Fred had been cited for housing discrimination by the Feds way back in the ‘70s, and there was the case of the so-called “Central Park Five”- five young Black men railroaded for a murder that they did not commit in the late ‘80s. Even after the Five were released from prison after new evidence proved their innocence and they were paid millions in compensation, Trump still went after them.

Relentlessly. Most African Americans know this. Most African American men know this. And yet Trump’s numbers rose. His numbers rose among Latinos, even after the “joke” about Puerto Rico being a garbage dump.

I can understand the rage that many Muslims feel towards the Dems in relation to Gaza, but Trump is the guy who instituted the “Muslim Ban” back in the day. His vote went up with them, too.

Above all, women came out for him; women who could be banned by his pick for defence secretary from serving in combat; a guy who shares the viewpoint of the Taliban.

Trump won a landslide and I and many did not see it coming not because we didn’t look: but because we failed to understand the appeal of Donald John Trump: he says and does the unthinkable and the unsayable. Because he can’t help it. Because how would you notice him if he didn’t?

So he becomes the avatar of our age, this time in which the prophet Andy Warhol stated would surely come: in which everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. Everyone.

Add this drive for fame to America The Barricaded and there you have it.

People went behind the backs of their parents, their spouses to vote for him because he guarantees a “cordon sanitaire” – not only from the rest of the world, but from the parts of America who disagree with him.

Trump is a known germaphobe. I once saw him on TV refusing to accept a baseball cap from a crowd at one of his own rallies because he said – out loud – that he didn’t know where it had been. Now he has outed his own fear of contagion.

Aided and abetted by some of his top aides, he sees America as a place which needs cleansing; needs its own iron dome, much bigger than Israel’s; needs its borders locked and secured in order to make sure that American blood stays cleansed (he has said words to this effect out loud). The US buys it. Because that’s what Americans want too.

As an American, you are sold the Thanksgiving Day BS of the Pilgrim Fathers searching for freedom, when what they were really doing was fleeing their native land in order to practice a religion and a way of life that was denied them. That religion and way of life left God and humans as individual concepts. And the gun as a right from the Divine to enforce those concepts.

When in May 2000 the movie star Charlton Heston held a “Kill the Injuns”-type flintlock rifle in the air at an anti-gun control rally intoned that anyone who wanted it would have to take it from “my cold, dead hands”, he was invoking Baldwin’s barricade.

The next four years will not only be a test for the Republic – its 250^th anniversary is in two years – but for the rest of the democratic world, especially this country.

Some officials close to Trump has been quoted as saying that if the UK entered a relationship with the “socialist EU”, there would be no US/UK trade deal. The prime minister should say, softly but firmly, that the United Kingdom is sovereign, governed by its parliament and will ne threatened by no one.

The next four years will test to destruction everything that the US is; thinks it is; and wants to be. This is the man who wants to deploy the US military on American soil to carry out the mass deportation of undocumented migrants. These are the people who voted enthusiastically for a felon to be president; the people who will allow him to have who he wants in charge of the various departments of the federal government. Even if they include a guy who says that vaccines cause death to be health secretary, and a man who has been accused of paid sex with a minor to be attorney general. Even if they include two billionaires to remake the federal government. Even if they include a vice president – who would be POTUS if Trump drops dead before his term is up – who has stated that women without children know nothing about real life.

America has always had a dream about itself and has successfully marketed that dream to the rest of the world for centuries.

Now my adopted country must step up to the plate. Show that it understands how to work in and be a part of organisations like the EU, NATO, the UN – yet retain itself.

As the US enters its dark age, the UK can enter one of light. It will not be easy. But I’m betting on it.

And we folks from Chicago pretty much always win. Apart from in 2016 and 2024, of course.