Let me put it bluntly. It feels as if the asshole of America just unclenched and took a giant dump on the world.

What else can it possibly mean when a country that voted twice in a row for a black man for President just chose a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate? If Barack Obama was meant to symbolise his country inching to a “post-racial” America, now it has basically elected a “birther”, once dismissed as the paranoia of kooky ultra-rightwingers. Alt-right can hardly be called “alternative” when it is moving into the White House. It cannot get more mainstream than that.

The post-mortems are inevitable. And they will come. The blame game will begin. The numbers will be crunched to see which voting segment put Donald Trump over the edge finally, and which segment did Hillary Clinton in.


It’s about lopsided global trade deals. It’s about a Democratic party that forgot its roots a long time ago. It’s about FBI director James Comey’s last-minute surprise. It’s the revenge of the “deplorables”. It’s about pollsters who miss the mark. It’s about the liberals who live in their Facebook bubbles. If only it had been Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton. It’s about all that and yet it’s about something far uglier. The Ugly American won, plain and simple. Racism and misogyny won.


Today it’s just shock and disbelief. Not just shock that pollsters got it wrong yet again, but the shock that your deeply held belief in simple human decency was so grossly misplaced.


This is not Brexit, though it will be compared to it. In that case, the excuse was the implications of Brexit had not been properly explained, that people were complacent that it would not pass. There is really no excuse for this vote. People knew exactly what they were voting for.

Donald Trump did not dog whistle race and misogyny. He mainstreamed it. And it worked. Whether they voted for him despite that or because of it, it worked. “I know he can come across as racist and misogynist but the system needed a kick in the ass”, is not an excuse. It just tells us that there can be a “but” after racist and misogynist, that that is not disqualification enough in 2016. And that is horrifying.



That’s where the election truly hurts. Not just because of Trump per se, but because it shows that you can tap into the basest of human desires and win.
Even as the polls went up and down, somewhere deep down, something would say, “But no ultimately, it’s a fundamentally decent country. They cannot vote for a man who has said as egregious things as Trump, who seems to be so thin-skinned, so trigger-happy on Twitter. That is just not possible.” But they did.