When I heard the result of the US Presidential election last Wednesday morning, I experienced a vague sense of free-floating anxiety. I was surprised that the result had come through so quickly. My initial thought was that it was fake news. The polls said it was going to be close. We might not get a result for days. Surely there would be accusations of voting irregularity. Remember the “hanging chads” in 2000. Maybe the losing side would contest the result. There is, after all, a precedent.
But no. It was all done and dusted even by 9 am our time. The magical 270 college votes had been achieved. 270 indicates due west in compass degrees. 270+ is, as it were, west of sunset. In fact, as has subsequently become evident, Mr Trump got 312 college votes, and his (sic) Republican Party has gained control of the Senate, and at time of writing perhaps the House of Representatives. He has won all seven “battleground” states. The result is not a landslide, yet it is unequivocal. The Democrats were silent for a while, perhaps absorbing the shock. But they eventually conceded defeat. They did not incite anybody to storm the Capitol. Mr Trump will be “47”.
The reaction of most people I’ve been in contact with here in the UK has been one of dismay and disbelief, accompanied by a sardonic burst of hysterical laughter at life’s absurdity. How could the Americans possibly vote into the highest office in the land a convicted felon who in 2020, it is said, tried to find a whole lot of votes that weren’t actually there, and then, allegedly, mounted an insurrection in the very centre of US power?
I just shrugged and texted my friends, “Keep calm, and carry on.” The crucial thing is, from this side of the Pond, the USA is a foreign country. None of us has a vote. Winston said that we are two different nations divided by a common language. He had a right to say that, because he was half American. From May 10th 1940, when he became Prime Minister, right up to the Japanese attack on PearI Harbour on December 7th, 1941, he tried to get the USA to enter the war. Roosevelt was sympathetic, an isolationist Congress less so. Financial and military aid was forthcoming, but it was at a price, a quid pro quo. Lend-Lease was a hard-nosed bargain, the loan of some obsolete war ships, largely a symbolic gesture, in return for the lease of some outposts of the British Empire. The debt incurred by the UK was only finally paid off in 2006. In the end, the USA only entered the war in Europe when Hitler declared war on them. We seem to have been heavily reliant on the support, nay patronage, of the US ever since. Every time a new Commander-in-Chief is installed, we get on the phone, like an anxious lover, to make sure the “special relationship” is still intact.
I was always aware that the US is a foreign country, ever since I first visited in 1982. I went to New York. I remember I saw Evita on Broadway. On a street corner outside the theatre, somebody offered to take my blood pressure, while a passer-by took his llama for an evening walk. I hired a car and drove north through New York state, the Adirondacks, to Thousand Island Country, and hence Canada. In Canada I knew I was much nearer home. Before I re-entered the US through Buffalo, the Canadians looked at me quizzically and asked, “Why do you want to go back down there?” About 30 years later I had an almost identical exchange at the Portugal/Spain border when, having landed at Faro, I hired a car with the intention of crossing into Spain. It was the same question, posed by a smaller country contiguous with a larger: “Why do you want to go there?”
Mr Trump has said he will end the war in Ukraine in a single day, with a single phone call. Today, apparently, it transpires that he has already made that call, to Mr Putin. Russia denies it. But if Mr Trump made the call, that seems extraordinary. He is not yet the President, so presumably he was making the call as a private citizen. No officials were keeping a record. Mr Trump sounds very confident. I seem to recall that Mr Chamberlain was similarly confident, when he met the Führer at Berchtesgaden. I hope Mr Trump has better luck. But blessed are the Peacemakers.
Today is Remembrance Day. My free-floating anxiety continues. Mr Trump is completely unpredictable. What will 2025 bring? I am afraid we live in interesting times.
jamescalumcampbell 