It’s a challenging morning for a cockeyed optimist like me. You see, last night, in an act of shocking but unsurprising self-ruin, a majority of my fellow Americans voters thought – now for the second time! – that making one of the world’s worst people its most powerful was a good idea. I sit on my screened porch with my first cup of coffee, and things look pretty normal out there. Unfortunately, a new normal is on the way, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be an improvement. And yesterday dawned with such hope.
The morning before
It’s extremely disconcerting that, on those rare days when you’re positive something will happen, everything starts out so utterly regular-sized. I began the morning of the most important, impactful, insane election in US history by going to the orthopaedist. Few things make you feel more normal and oddly comforted than climbing into your EV and hitting surprisingly light traffic – it’s not a holiday, for Christ’s sake, though it certainly should be – on the way to Metro Orthopedics and Sports Therapy (MOST) of Rockville, Maryland, an office that is always hopping with physical therapists and their benign torture chambers of exercise machines, elastic bands and oversized inflatables.
My incredibly upbeat orthopaedic surgeon said all looked good five days after he arthroscopically repaired a tear in my left meniscus, and added a bonus: apparently I’ve got gobs of cartilage remaining in both knees, which hopefully means I won’t be following my handful of friends currently recovering from knee replacement surgery. The news the previous few days had me feeling better about things. The gold-standard pollster in Iowa—a state neither side spent any money in as it’s gone big for Trump twice already—issued a stunner, with Harris ahead 47-44. Then Trump just kept getting weirder and sadder and more offensive with each succeeding rally, at one point pretending to fellate his microphone, while Harris went way upbeat, didn’t speak his name and, instead, had single-name superstars by her side such as Oprah and Gaga.
So I was feeling pretty good upon my triumphant return from my ortho, but since rollercoasters always do come down I turned on the news to catch video of downtown DC businesses boarding up in case of violence, a vivid reminder that Maga has given that old cliché “elections have consequences” a new and threatening meaning. I live just over 11km from the US Capitol, the site of the last attempted coup, but it seems unthinkable anyone would want to riot or challenge the peaceful transfer of power in Woodside Park. They’d get stuck in so much traffic trying to get here they’d turn around and drive back to Ohio.
Then came the news that Joe Rogan, among the most inexplicable opinion-shapers imaginable, given his history as a mediocre stand-up comic and host of a show that challenged contestants to eat, among other fun stuff, raw horse rectums, endorsed Trump to his 14.5 million Spotify listeners. And then I was chatting with a friend, and somebody – I think it was me – said something about Trump hopefully being just odious enough to overcome America’s historically deep well of racism and sexism, which reminded me that America has a historically deep well of racism and sexism. Then this made me worry that there were closet racists and sexists out there who say all the right things but in the privacy of the voting booth commit the unpardonable sin that cancels out what the other side considers the unpardonable sin of a woman allowing her husband to assume she’s voting, as he will, for Trump, but instead betray her faith, family and country—not necessarily in that order—by voting for the coloured lady.
Civic service fallout
To clear my head and break up some scar tissue, I decide to go for a “walk” which today means limping to the end of the block and back. I run into a neighbour and her dog on their way back from our local polling place – I’m almost positive the dog didn’t vote – and we stop and trade anxieties. She’s got one kid away at college and two in school all day and her husband had the audacity to go to work, so it’s a good thing she ran into me as she had some serious venting to do. Her husband runs a non-profit founded to fight the influence of money in US politics – a Sisyphean task if ever there was one.
In 2021, it shifted its focus to safeguarding democracy, which seemed an adjacent and more pressing concern. That’s one thing about living in DC: elections hit a lot of people professionally as well as personally, and this one has a potential knockout punch. I know people, for example, who have retirement letters drafted and ready to send should Agent Orange somehow prevail. And this isn’t the first time a poor decision by the electorate stabbed some civic-minded careers in the heart. I knew an attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission who had been working for five years on a class action lawsuit the government promptly and unceremoniously dropped after George W Bush was elected. Unsurprisingly, he left public service. I also had friends who were among the 55-60% of lawyers in the civil rights division of the Justice Department who left in the months after Bush was elected, as his minions set about gutting the division and politicising the department. One of the painful ironies of Trump is how fully he has managed to normalise W who, until Covid arrived, was certainly responsible for more dead bodies than the Donald, and who still fits in snugly into our list of worst presidents.
Fake threats
My neighbour and I decided the most fitting end to this day would be for it to be arithmetically demonstrable and announced on every cable news network and social media site that black Puerto Rican women in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia had voted as an impenetrable and insurmountable bloc and bedrocked Kamala’s victory, action that further served as a de facto fitting session for the Orange Outlaw’s orange jumpsuit.
I return home to catch a news shard about a fake bomb threat at a Georgia polling place that Brad Raffensperger – the secretary of state Trump asked to find him 11,000 votes in 2020 (an act that in a non-parallel universe would have cost him the presidency and his freedom) – said came courtesy of the Russians. Sure, why not? Stories abound of nervous FBI and cybersecurity officials, Proud Boys and QAnon-ers plotting on Telegram all manner of election-related nastiness, and the race to see whether more disinformation comes from homegrown sources or those in Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and who knows where else. Last time, I think it was Moldovan teenagers. But they should all steer clear of Philadelphia, where I just heard the district attorney Larry Krasner offering the following advice to potential election pranksters: “Anybody who thinks it’s time to play militia, eff around and find out.”
It’s the middle of the afternoon, and you can almost hear people voting. I, and about 40% of those who could, voted early. Turnout in 2020 was the highest since 1900, and this time should be as high or higher, because no matter which side you’re on, the stakes appear apocalyptic. But we don’t make voting easy, as the multi-hour wait times in cities all over the country clearly demonstrate. Among the 36 OECD nations, only the US and UK don’t hold elections on weekends or provide guaranteed time off for workers to vote – insert your favourite snarky Brit joke here. In Israel and South Korea, it’s a national holiday.
Millions of idealistic, tireless Americans will redouble their efforts at making this a more equitable world.
But if you want to know how serious this particular election is to some people, check out this story. We have friends who live about an hour from here, and while their niece’s official voting residence is in swing state Georgia, she’s been staying with them for a while. She thought her absentee ballot needed merely to be postmarked by the time polls closed on election day, then found out, too late for the mail to be an option, that it had to be received by the closing of the polls. So, she drove 1060km to Atlanta, voted, spent a few nights in her childhood bed and drove back.
For no real reason, I think about a friend of mine in Texas, and think about dropping her a note, and then I realise we’ve never discussed politics. She’s way too smart and kind and artistic to be a Trump/Ted Cruz supporter, isn’t she? And then I realise that exact thought progression is likely to be among the things Trump supporters hate most about liberals: the assumptions we make about people because of their geopolitics, and/or vice versa. I don’t send her a note; I’ve been burned by Texas before.
We went back to standard time two days ago. It’s a weird thing we do here – turn the clocks back an hour in the fall – I think it’s so that kids don’t have to wait in the dark for their morning school bus, but it means now it gets dark really early, which is giving this whole enterprise a mildly ominous feel. We’re heading up to a neighbour’s house around 7pm, but she made us promise to leave by 10 if things go badly. Everyone I know is having at least a modicum of PTSD from this night in 2016. We had people over back then, and as rational as we all are, no one’s ever coming here for that occasion again. Why risk it?
Nauseously optimistic
Five of us gather for beef stew, macaroni and cheese and a green salad, the kind of comfort food you wanted for how we are all feeling and my new favourite pun: nauseously optimistic. It’ll be hours before any of the swing states are called, but none of us are feeling good. The consequences are way too big for a single night; humans aren’t good at lady-or-tiger scenarios. It’s a relatively liberal assemblage, so MSNBC is the channel choice, and we watch but are unable to follow TV host Steve Kornacki as he compares vote totals from 2020 and 2024 in one after another of Georgia’s 159 counties, which is by any standard way too many counties.
Georgia and North Carolina aren’t looking good, so when 10pm rolls around we decide to decamp to our respective homes. It seems this kind of misery doesn’t love company, even a little bit. My wife had spent the night in Philadelphia and was up at 5am volunteering at a polling place, so she crashed shortly after we got home. Left to my own devices and feeling a sense of impending doom, I passed out about 11. When I first awoke at 2:30am, even before I checked my phone, I somehow knew the bad guys had won. I managed two more hours of sleep, but then surrendered to the dull ache of underslept consciousness and disappointment, and went downstairs to make coffee.
It’s 6:44am now, and those who said the sun would come up in the morning as usual were right. But it seems a sadder, weaker sun, as if having to illuminate the world this morning is going to be just a little harder now. A friend drops by for coffee and commiseration. He runs a business that primarily hires immigrants – all here legally, but so are the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and my guess is most of them sleep with one eye open these days. But he says his crews were pretty sanguine this morning, as all had come here from situations considerably more challenging than anything the orange man is likely to produce. And I’m feeling fairly guilty for the intensely selfish reason I had for wanting Trump to lose: I simply didn’t want to write about him any more.
We spoke to our eldest, who lives in Philadelphia, and is planning a restorative justice circle today for the kids she works with in an after-school programme. Our youngest will continue his work for housing and economic justice in Colorado. Millions of idealistic, tireless Americans will redouble their efforts at making this a more equitable world. And one day the Donald Trumps of the world will be consigned to history’s trash heap. Just not today.
