Trump elected: US writer reacts to his worst fear made real - ‘A new normal is on its way’

It’s extremely disconcerting that, on those rare days when you’re positive something XXXL will happen, everything starts out so utterly regular-sized. I began the morning of the most important, impactful, insane election in US history by going to the orthopaedist. Few things make you feel more normal and oddly comforted than climbing into your EV and hitting surprisingly light traffic – it’s not a holiday, for Christ’s sake, though it certainly should be – on the way to Metro Orthopedics and Sports Therapy (MOST) of Rockville, Maryland, an office that is always hopping with physical therapists and their benign torture chambers of exercise machines, elastic bands and oversized inflatables.

My incredibly upbeat orthopaedic surgeon said all looked good five days after he arthroscopically repaired a tear in my left meniscus, and added a bonus: apparently I’ve got gobs of cartilage remaining in both knees, which hopefully means I won’t be following my handful of friends currently recovering from knee replacement surgery. The news the previous few days had me feeling better about things. The gold-standard pollster in Iowa—a state neither side spent any money in as it’s gone big for Trump twice already—issued a stunner, with Harris ahead 47-44. Then Trump just kept getting weirder and sadder and more offensive with each succeeding rally, at one point pretending to fellate his microphone, while Harris went way upbeat, didn’t speak his name and, instead, had single-name superstars by her side such as Oprah and Gaga.

So I was feeling pretty good upon my triumphant return from my ortho, but since rollercoasters always do come down I turned on the news to catch video of downtown DC businesses boarding up in case of violence, a vivid reminder that Maga has given that old cliché “elections have consequences” a new and threatening meaning. I live just over 11km from the US Capitol, the site of the last attempted coup, but it seems unthinkable anyone would want to riot or challenge the peaceful transfer of power in Woodside Park. They’d get stuck in so much traffic trying to get here they’d turn around and drive back to Ohio.

Then came the news that Joe Rogan, among the most inexplicable opinion-shapers imaginable, given his history as a mediocre stand-up comic and host of a show that challenged contestants to eat, among other fun stuff, raw horse rectums, endorsed Trump to his 14.5 million Spotify listeners. And then I was chatting with a friend, and somebody – I think it was me – said something about Trump hopefully being just odious enough to overcome America’s historically deep well of racism and sexism, which reminded me that America has a historically deep well of racism and sexism. Then this made me worry that there were closet racists and sexists out there who say all the right things but in the privacy of the voting booth commit the unpardonable sin that cancels out what the other side considers the unpardonable sin of a woman allowing her husband to assume she’s voting, as he will, for Trump, but instead betray her faith, family and country—not necessarily in that order—by voting for the coloured lady.

Civic service fallout

To clear my head and break up some scar tissue, I decide to go for a “walk” which today means limping to the end of the block and back. I run into a neighbour and her dog on their way back from our local polling place – I’m almost positive the dog didn’t vote – and we stop and trade anxieties. She’s got one kid away at college and two in school all day and her husband had the audacity to go to work, so it’s a good thing she ran into me as she had some serious venting to do. Her husband runs a non-profit founded to fight the influence of money in US politics – a Sisyphean task if ever there was one.

In 2021, it shifted its focus to safeguarding democracy, which seemed an adjacent and more pressing concern. That’s one thing about living in DC: elections hit a lot of people professionally as well as personally, and this one has a potential knockout punch. I know people, for example, who have retirement letters drafted and ready to send should Agent Orange somehow prevail. And this isn’t the first time a poor decision by the electorate stabbed some civic-minded careers in the heart. I knew an attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission who had been working for five years on a class action lawsuit the government promptly and unceremoniously dropped after George W Bush was elected. Unsurprisingly, he left public service. I also had friends who were among the 55-60% of lawyers in the civil rights division of the Justice Department who left in the months after Bush was elected, as his minions set about gutting the division and politicising the department. One of the painful ironies of Trump is how fully he has managed to normalise W who, until Covid arrived, was certainly responsible for more dead bodies than the Donald, and who still fits in snugly into our list of worst presidents.

Fake threats

My neighbour and I decided the most fitting end to this day would be for it to be arithmetically demonstrable and announced on every cable news network and social media site that black Puerto Rican women in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia had voted as an impenetrable and insurmountable bloc and bedrocked Kamala’s victory, action that further served as a de facto fitting session for the Orange Outlaw’s orange jumpsuit.