SO HERE we go then. We know what Donald Trump’s inauguration means. What is coming, where it will take us and who will defend it.
TV anchors here excitedly trailing his return showed themselves to be detached from the ordinary people braced for his impact in this country. Some politicians, right wing commentators, media platforms, TV and radio stations will immerse themselves in his rhetoric and executive orders designed to sow division and purge the America of minorities.
Hate, as we know, has become big business in this country. We had a glimpse of it – and what it leads to – last summer as rampaging mobs attacking Black and Asian people in the streets, fuelled by lies and misinformation on social media.
As for social media, Meta supremo Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and a string of other big companies have ended fact checking and diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Apple boss Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai joined them at the church service ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
The degree to which they and X owner Elon Musk will control access to information over the next four years should send a shiver down your spine.
Social media has already become unusable. Balance and community has been replaced by filth and manic propaganda. But here’s the thing. If you are of a demographic under threat, we’ve seen it all before. We know how to put our shoulders back and face it, head on. We can step away from social media.
In the real world, since the Sixties and Seventies, we’ve grown up with – and fought against – naked racism, subtle micro-aggressions and tick boxing, all of which exist to this day. On both sides of the Atlantic. So we are used to whatever comes from Trump. He will further embolden the UK’s rabid right wingers with his vow to conduct the largest deportation in American history.
In 2017 he described sports stars taking a knee in pursuit of racial justice as “sons of b**ches”. A year later he dismissed Haiti, El Salvador and parts of Africa as “s***hole countries”.
Last year he defended his call for the death penalty in 1989 as five innocent children – aged between 14 and 16 –were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a white woman. Those examples barely scratch the surface.
And yet we in this country have lived through the recent blatant racism of Boris Johnson and henchwomen, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman – and the amplification of their disgusting rhetoric by mainstream broadcast media.
We campaign against the institutional racism embodied by the death of Stephen Lawrence and highlighted by Baroness Casey’s report into the capital’s police. We fight against the fact Black and minority ethnic people in the UK are more than twice as likely to experience extreme levels of hardship, and suffer similar disadvantages in health and education.
Trump 2.0 will simply maintain a world we’ve long become accustomed to. Where Labour Government ministers slap down all those concerns to maintain the UK’s “special relationship”. Where depending on your skin colour, police use guns in the US – or excessive force over here – instead of words.
And where women are used to the turbo-charged misogyny embodied by Trump’s boast that he could grab them by the private area.
The small mercy we can give God thanks for is that, as Italy, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, France and other parts of Europe fall under the influence of extremism, the UK’s voters rejected it last year. We pushed back against it before, we can do it again.