IF YOU reached for your phone after a few hours’ sleep and couldn’t believe your eyes – join the club. If you decided against a hurricane of numbers across TV every platform and the sight of Boris Johnson on Channel 4, this column is here for you.
(Nadine Dorries earlier this year for the UK election night, the execrable, embarrassing mumbling Boris Johnson this – what must Channel 4 think of their audience?)
But then so much about the past 48 hours has been barely believable, yet soberly predictable.
From the ordinary Americans who popped up on rolling news, agreeing Donald Trump represented a danger to democracy – yet voted for him anyway. To American actor Mickey Rourke posting his social media support for Kamala Harris while carrying the Confederate flag.
Ahead of the count, Trump declared any poll accurately showing him trailing Kamala Harris was corrupt – likewise any journalist correctly interpreting said numbers.
In the end he didn’t need to shift to his parallel universe. Nor were those fences needed around the White House, the Harris residence and businesses across the US amid the threat of political violence.
As reality sank its teeth into Harris supporters, they deserted the watch parties at around 6am in scenes reminiscent of football fans leaving a match with 15 minutes to go, well aware the miracle wasn’t happening.
It is untrue to suggest she lost America’s Black contingent. The largest voting bloc opting for Harris was Black women, the second largest was Black men – despite concerns that her pitch to them was not a patch on, say, Barack Obama.
Harris lost bigger than Hilary Clinton in 2016 because, despite concerns over reproductive rights, Roe v Wade and so much more, it is starting to look as though Americans would prefer to vote for a man than a woman. Trump has now seen off two of them – one Black, one white.
Don’t get me wrong, Harris lost because she failed to read the room in terms of the bigger picture. She failed utterly listen to the voters who wanted to see an end to Muslims being killed in the Middle East cycle of blood.
Harris was also handcuffed by a Biden administration that had left ordinary Americans worse off in the pocket. CNN statistics suggest she did not outperform Biden’s 2020 numbers in a single county.
But it is striking that Latino men who’d backed Joe Biden in 2020 didn’t transfer that support to her – despite a speaker at his New York rally in Madison Square Garden referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”.
In addition, that the qualified, decent woman could lose so crushingly, however, to the convicted felon accused of sexual impropriety by 26 women, a serial liar who incited an armed insurrection and should never have been allowed to run in the first place, tells its own story.
The scale of Trump’s success is such that we may not see a moderate Supreme Court for decades. Get ready too for the police force to go rogue with even more impunity. Trump, remember, was the man who took out the full page ad in the eighties for the execution of the Central Park Five – jailed for years, only to be found innocent of raping a woman.
The story was made famous by the Netflix box set When They See Us. So heartbreaking I could not watch it a second time.
And yet it is a microcosm of the truth that we’ve become a social media society unwilling to look at the detail.
Trump floundered in interviews and his one debate. He peddled well-documented hate, racism, sexism, misdirection and aggression, right up to the final day.
Yet he succeeded, with the help of Elon Musk polluting social media (why didn’t the Democrats raise that as more of an issue?) in convincing his supporter base to fear “the enemy within”.
He isn’t a politician, he’s a raconteur. There was never any point waiting for the specifics on policy. He made it up as he went along. Yet it worked for Boris Johnson here. It is responsible for the rise of Nigel Farage and is seeing similar results across Europe too.
No wonder, the French government spokeswoman declared on Wednesday morning that Europe should be willing to take charge of its own destiny, in the wake of the election result, will not be a lone voice.
“We must not ask ourselves what the United States will do but what Europe is capable of doing. In a number of key sectors – defence, industrial recovery, decarbonisation – we must take charge of our own destiny,” said Maud Bergen.
Several demographics across the US may find themselves having to do likewise with two of Trump’s favourite words in mind: America First.