IT’S LIKE DEJA TRUMP ALL OVER AGAIN

I wrote this piece eight years ago, for the Times Literary Supplement, who called early on the morning of 9 November 2016, the day after Trump’s first election day triumph, requesting a response. I came across it yesterday, almost a week after the 2024 election results became known. I’d hadn’t drunk aquavit nor stayed up most of the night this time. Neither decision made it any easier to take the result. But I realised that what I wrote eight long years ago, still applied today. Though I expect the next four years to seem even longer, and leave more lasting damage on America. I’ve restored a few cuts TLS made for space. And in answer to my final question, yes he sure enough can. Read ’em and weep…

US Election 2016: Reactions

The aquavit came out around 2:30 in the morning, when I realised Trump would win. By 5 I’d surrendered, and went to bed considering how we journalists had failed. I’d written a piece on election day for Newstalk Ireland about the ‘imperfect storm’: ten ways in which Trump ‘swift-boated’ America, projecting his weaknesses as a candidate onto the voters themselves. It reads a day later like a template for his victory, yet I did not take it seriously enough, not even as I watched America’s sensationalist media chase Trump’s theatrical grand guignol, rather than discuss actual issues, right to the bitter end.

There is no one explanation for Trump’s triumph. Not media, not gender, not race, not the anger of white men in the rust belt’s industrial wastelands. Not crookedness, not…