president

I genuinely thought that Kamala Harris would be the next president of the USA. She was running a professional, positive campaign, and had showed that she was capable of doing the job.

So you can imagine it was a very unwelcome surprise to wake up on Wednesday to find that Trump had won the presidential election. I think much of what I wrote back in 2016 still stands, but with more weariness this time. Obviously, I live in the UK and am therefore somewhat removed from the situation. And thankfully we elected a centre-left government here back in July, although how that’ll be seen by the next world’s most powerful man remains to be seen.

Ultimately, I just feel like it’s really unfair. As I said, Harris ran a good campaign. Whereas Trump and the Republican party resorted to gerrymandering, purging voters from electoral rolls, lies, and outright vote-buying on behalf of Elon Musk in Pennsylvania. And the bad guys are supposed to lose. I was really looking forward to be able to point and laugh at Musk for ploughing millions or even billions of dollars into Trump’s re-election campaign for it not to work out.

Unlike last time, we know what the next four years will entail, and I’m not particularly looking forward to it. I suppose all I can do is live my life in a way that would annoy Trump and his cronies: be kind and welcoming, not be judgemental or prejudiced, be extremely queer, and work with and not against people from marginalised groups and different faiths.

Like most of the world, I was rather shocked when I read the news on Wednesday morning, following the US presidential election. I didn’t want to write about it straight-away and give myself time to process it, but I’m still flabbergasted that someone as awful as Donald Trump could be elected to be the most powerful person in the world.

I’m not going to try to come up with my own theories about why it happened – I’ll leave that to those with more knowledge of the facts. Especially as I don’t live in America, nor have I ever visited. But it brings back some painful memories of earlier this year, when it was announced that a relatively narrow majority of those who voted in the EU referendum voted to leave. And it reminds me of 2004, when George W Bush was re-elected US president with a greater share of the vote.

I don’t have any solutions, but America and the world have been in bad places before, and we’re still here. There’s an analogy I’ve heard where everyone is on a plane with an incompetent pilot; if he/she crashes then we all die so we need to work together to make sure we stay in the air. Whatever happens, the next four years have become very uncertain.

And I appreciate that as a white, able-bodied, straight middle-class male who doesn’t even live in America, it’s easy for me to say that. If I wasn’t at least one of those things, then I would rightly have more reason to be terrified. We need to stick together and be good allies to each other, and hope that we will all get through this alive.