Post Donald Trump

 Unfortunately a lot of what I have to unpack about the time that I spent in the US will revolve around Donald Trump being elected president. That is the reality. In many tangible ways, he didn’t make my life more miserable. Trump doesn’t touch my life in many ways. I had obtained a green card in the waning days of the Obama administration, and it turned out that I might have run into problems if I had waited a few months more. 

But the reality is that at that point in time, I was struggling, in the sense that I had gone to a new country and tried to live a new life, and I was struggling to find a greater meaning in that life. I had good things – a good job, not necessarily one I really liked, but a good job. A housemate who never gave me a lot of problems, with one important exception. I was living in a nice place – near Mexico, but a nice place. 

Some problems had already started, and we already knew that the Republicans were slowly going mad. Maybe they had always been mad. Maybe it was just as well in the 60s that there were always people from both parties who opposed the civil rights movement. What happened in the 60s was explosive. There were the civil rights movement, there was the immigration act. Maybe Hawaii joining the union was the beginning of Asian America becoming some kind of a force instead of being marginalised. A quiet force, nonetheless. 

The cultural force of what happened in the 60s in America couldn’t be overstated. A lot of things became permitted: free love, long hair, flower power. Blacks and whites had a short lived rapprochement. The old taboos fell away. The conservatives were just being defeated left right and centre when it came to the tussle for the hearts and minds of the young. Then came the Vietnam war and the civil unrest. 

What happened was a blowback to the growing liberalism of American culture. America was possibly weary of all the chaos, and they turned to law and order. Richard Nixon became the president, and he became a cultural revolutionary in the Barry Goldwater mould. There was the politics of resentment, whereby they would never be as cool as people on the other side of the political divide. That some of their most cherished instincts included the notion that certain races were inferior, and that lent them to be the subject of a lot of hatred. 

There was the rise of the notion of the “moral majority” in the 70s. There were a lot of tele-evangelists who pushed back against the liberalisation of the culture. And at the same time, the hippy dream of free love and joy and wonder collapsed, when people woke up and realised that they had to work for a living within a capitalist system no matter what. 

Certain social justice movements continued unabated. There was Roe vs Wade, the right to have an abortion. That sparked an unbelievable shitstorm amongst conservatives in the USA, and up till now, they’re fighting to have that one undone. In the 1970s they were fighting for feminism, in the 80s and 90s they were fighting for gay rights, and in the 21st century, Asian Americans and Latinos were starting to make themselves visible in the USA. 

Then in the 1980s, the Republicans continued their rightwards lurch. They saw that the big government was crumbling, and they set to dismantle many state organs. They cut back on the welfare state, even if they kept defence spending at Cold War levels. They lost the White House in the 90s, but they finally gained back congress, and started using the strategy of stymieing Bill Clinton’s White House. The mutual antagonism gained force during several incidents: the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, the government shutdowns. At the same time, there were issues with violence being broadcast on TV. The film “Natural Born Killers” was an indictment of violence being fed right into the homes of Americans. They were broadcasting the Gulf war, which for whatever reason was immensely popular with a lot of Americans. There were the shootouts with David Koresh, the mass suicides of Heaven’s Gate cult, and the OJ Simpson car chase and trial. There was David Duke being elected to public office. I was a teenager when a lot of that was going on, and I watched on with a lot of fascination. But today, I recognise a lot of those things as America’s slow slide into madness. 

We could recite a lot of the lowlights of the Dubya years. 9/11, the rise of the surveillance state, the anti-terror paranoia, the tax cuts for the wealthy, the Afghan and Iraq wars, hurricane Katrina and finally, the sub prime crisis and the Great Recession. But that was just the US going farther down the road of more self-destruction. And maybe a lot of the Tea Party madness happened recently enough that I shouldn’t go around just listing it out. 

What was notable, though, was that strange cast of characters that bubbled to the top of the Republican Party slate of candidates. First, there was Sarah Palin, who was a fierce and sorda attractive for her age. But she was certainly not worldly enough to command a presence on the national stage, and I think McCain just nominated her to appease the far right elements of the party. Then there were fundamentalist characters like Mike Huckabee, father of Trump’s press secretary, Sarah. There were Michelle Bachman. Herman Cain. Ted Cruz. Carly Fiorina. Ben Carson. A whole slate of crazy, kooky people who aren’t necessarily more sane than Donald Trump. 

And that brings me to Donald Trump. He crept up on us, almost unseen. His candidacy started out, a bit as a joke. His first brush with fame in the political arena was spreading wild birther conspiracy theories. And then he got roasted in public by Obama. His candidature started off as a joke, and not too many people took him seriously, until he started surpassing the usual suspects in popularity: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush. And when he got nominated as the Republican Party candidate, things started getting a little tetchy. People started seriously considering the possibility that he might become the president. 

The second horror show was the Democratic nomination process. For the second presidential campaign in a row. Hillary Clinton was finding that process hard to navigate. She was usurped by a newcomer called Obama the first time, and the second time, the rivalry with Bernie Sanders was surprisingly tough and rancorous. In fact, there was so much bad blood between the two that it may have fatally doomed the Democrat’s campaign. There were the people who were galvanised by the Bernie Sanders campaign, and found it hard to vote for Hillary Clinton, not least because she represented the big money interests. And somehow they managed to conspire an even worse outcome: voting for Trump. And a few were even unapologetic about it.

The whole campaign was on a knife’s edge. We thought that it would have been self-evident that Trump was uniquely unqualified to be a president, and yet he had so many supporters in red country. But I somehow managed to house with a old lady who was fully capable of being decent and kind, and yet she was a staunch Republican and a Trump supporter. I think in a way this was a stroke of luck, because I’m uniquely qualified to understand the mental processes that go behind her support of Trump.

At no time did I feel that I was in a more dangerous place because of Trump. Well, there was a time when I was more afraid to go out running because of what people might do. And a few people were emboldened to come up to an Asian guy and take the mickey out of me. But the only time anything happened was when somebody came up and asked me if I listened to Paul Simon (there’s nothing wrong with Paul Simon but the implication is that I’m square). I said, no bitch. Coltrane. 

Previously I had never thought of Trump as anything more than a lecherous clown, but there now seemed to be a darker, more vindictive side to him as well. He was happy to play on peoples’ anxieties about immigrants, and gave those infamous soundbites about immigrants being rapists and thieves. He was willing to lie and bend the facts just to play up to peoples’ prejudices about how America was given a raw deal and he could get a better deal with other people. He just encouraged people to be more xenophobic. 

He made the US look like a nastier place. Whether it was the correct impression, I don’t really know. But it might have contributed to my falling off at my workplace. 

Now that I had my green card, maybe I felt more at ease travelling back to Singapore every once a year. I had always missed home to a certain extent, although I knew that it would be a changed country and I would have to earn my place back there. It felt as though my time in Singapore would feel like holidays. My enthusiasm for work started to level off. You could go down the rabbit hole of news articles. 

I always had this recurring dream. I would walk and walk and walk in search of a hawker centre. Maybe I would be in a wrong part of a city, or I would just be a few blocks away from the fabled hawker centre. It could be night time, or it could be dusk (it was almost never day time in my dreams – I’m a night person). These days, I’m back in Singapore, I could just walk to a hawker centre because I wanted to. 

There would be something shocking that Trump would do every day. He would order the Muslim ban. There would be some political violence at Charlottesville, and Trump would refuse to come out and condemn the perpetrators. He would appoint some of the most venal people to cabinet level positions. He would gut the EPA. There were the border separations of women and children. He would meet other heads of state and act like petulant children in front of them. He would cosy up to dictators, because he felt a personal connection to them. He would golf all day and watch Fox news all night. He would host big events on the government’s dime and send the bill to one of his own hotels. 

I don’t know how much he inspired right wing populist movements around the world. In retrospect, Erdogan was one of them. It was more like a coming out party for him. Same for Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. But Trump’s presidency came around the same time as many similar right wing movements all over Europe. There was the premiership of Boris Johnson, there was Brexit. 

So I wonder if those few years of Trump derangement fed into my neurosis. It was some kind of a good life I had. I could eat burritos if I was sick and tired of western food. I could eat Asian food, because there were always a few takeouts around. I didn’t live in a global city like Singapore but it was a big enough city that there was something interesting around the corner. I wasn’t always thrilled about doing my own cooking but I could fix something up every now and then. But there were chores all the time. Every weekend, I was just achieving the bare minimum I set for myself, which was to go out for a run and do my laundry by driving out to the laundromat (I didn’t have a washing machine in my house). And perhaps I wasn’t very good at coming up with stuff that I would be excited about. I had friends in the workplace, and I communicated with a few friends back in Singapore, but otherwise, very little in the way of a social life. 

I’ve come to realise that a great part of the joy that I felt upon moving to Mexico came about because I had a few achievements. I earned a degree, and I earned the right to live and work in another country. It felt good to live in another country, to look around and take in the sights. Maybe I was getting island fever and tired of the same old places all over again in Singapore. More importantly, it felt like almost everything was fresh and new, that I was living something old and tired behind, but finally breaking through. During the Trump years, it felt as though my own life had gotten old and tired itself. 

Sometimes I looked at my co-workers and wondered if any of them truly supported Trump. I daren’t think that they did. Of course, there were many of them who didn’t really care either way. But even those who did not support Trump might look at me with the same foreboding that inspired those supporters to join him. 

Another thing that occurred to me was this – I had gone to America during the hope and change of the Obama years. I knew that the US had very deep and entrenched problems, but I allowed myself to think that I would be there during some of its best years. After all, it was 2011, and Silicon Valley was the hippest, most progressive, most technologically advanced place on earth, the one place that could solve all problems that could ever be solved. 

It was very easy to have a rosy view of technology during those years. They had just come up with smart devices. Facebook was going to lead to Arab Spring! It was going to lead to the toppling of dictators! It was going to lead to real liberal democracy in Singapore! 

Well, no. It was going to lead to another level of surveillance of citizens that even the communist regimes of the 20th century couldn’t even dream of. It totally ruined the type of political discourse that took place in a country. It ruined the way that democracy work, and it turned a lot of interactions emotionally toxic. I learnt about how tech was an enabler. How they drew you into their tech ecosystems and conspired to keep you there. How outrage and anger were identified as the emotions that you wanted to provoke if you wanted more eyeballs drawn to your platform / content. So sometimes I looked at my own role in trying to help people waste more time on the internet, and suddenly I felt a bit ashamed at what I was doing, never mind that that’s one of those activities that could help you earn more money in the tech system. 

So this isn't directly related to Trump, but I also thought about how tech in the 21st century changed the way that we live and interact with each other, and it just felt as though it wasn't really for the better. 

Sometimes I look at some of the old pictures of Americans celebrating at the end of the second world war. It’s what I feel when Donald Trump is defeated in an election, and the prospect of not having him around felt like such a great relief. 

It’s been a little surprising that the election ran so smoothly. Of course, there were a lot of capable, very organised people on the grassroots level who pushed back against all attempts by Donald Trump to tip the election in his favour. There was the resistance against Donald Trump to oust him from day one. But he fought back hard, fairly and unfairly, against all the criticism.

 

He’s tried to pass off lies as truths, even when he’s being called out. He’s managed to assemble a coalition with the other Republicans who might have been put off by the madness of his administration but still plumped for him. That’s one reason why Republicans, although smaller in number, punch above their weight politically as opposed to Democrats, who usually underachieve due to infighting and whatnot. People are wondering why they did that, and one possibility is what we’ve just seen in this one last week: they want to be the ones still in control. If you’re the ones who are propping him up, you’re also going to be the ones to decided when his political career is finished.

 

One of the most remarkable things is that Fox News’ endorsement of Trump is tepid. One of his greatest constituencies is Fox. If that deserts him, then his ability to challenge the system is crippled. It’s what he relies on for information and news, not official briefings. And Fox is made of two parts. The News people, who generally have journalistic integrity, and the opinion people, who are just happy to say whatever it is to make the Republican party win election. and quite remarkably during this election campaign, the news people have asserted their independence and got away with it. I think they’re starting to think that destroying the integrity of the USA for the sake of hopefully extending Donald Trump’s stay in the White house is not worth it. Perhaps they already knew that they could stymie the Democrats for a really long time and they were happy with that.

Interestingly enough, one of the states that Joe Biden flipped was Arizona. At first I thought that Arizona was getting flipped because of demographic changes. Then I realised that it wasn't so much that Arizona was going to the Democrats, as that Arizona was flipping the finger at Trump. They were still quite Republican, but they couldn't stand the things that Trump was saying about John McCain. And John McCain delivered another fuck you to Trump. (First was when he was sick and dying of brain cancer, but turned up in the Senate just to make sure that Donald Trump didn't manage to repeal Obamacare.) His widow, Cindy McCain was campaigning against Trump. The Red Indians were turning out for Biden. So it'll be a while yet before Arizona becomes a blue state. 

 

I’ve had to deal with their warped logic from day one, but there were times when I asked one of them point blank to explain to me the difference between 1 million and 1 trillion, and I couldn’t get a straight answer. Which means they could be reading a news item that says that the US made a payment to Iran for a few million dollars, and that the federal deficit is in the trillions, and they couldn’t place those two news items in context.

 

I couldn’t really tell if they were really stupid, or they were pretending to be stupid. My housemate usually listened to a lot of conservative talk show radio, but always turned it off whenever I was around. And a lot of the supporters are always saying that he’s speaking the truth while all the other politicians are lying. They are looking at his crudeness and his bluntness, and they’re mistaking it for honesty and frankness. After talking to them for years, I have learnt that bullshit is an extremely powerful force. No matter how wild or crazy your worldview is, it is possible to assemble something together some seemingly plausible story from all that, and all the craziness is confined to one or two arcane (but very significant) details.