America, your country is now a fucking mess so do something – we don’t want the rest of the world to be dragged into your lunacy!

I have no idea whether you now reading this are from Asia, Europe, Africa, an Aussie or an American. And if you are American, I have not idea whether you support Trump and voted for him last November or whether you think not only does he have several screws loose but is worse than clever and dangerous – as Stalin was: Trump is stupid and dangerous (as the man with the funny moustache was whose ‘Empire of a thousand days’ – das tausendjähriges Reich – lasted just 12 years). Ironically, as far as that is concerned it doesn’t matter either way.

I have already posted several blog entries making it clear that I think Donald J Trump is a $9 bill who should not get the time of day from anyone and who is bad news all round, and not least the millions who voted for him, so there seems little point in repeating all that.

But what I haven’t written about is the odd situation that – as far as I can see – in America there is an elephant in the room which everyone is ignoring. And that – the head in the sand – is far more troubling than even the fat orange fraud occupying the White House and the damage he will do to his own country. Patriot? Really?

The elephant in the room is this: the United States now has as its president – it’s legitimately elected president, and that feature of the matter is pertinent – a man who is a convicted felon, whose sexual assault on magazine journalist E Jean Carroll has been adjudged to be tantamount to rape, a man who, most probably knowingly, inspired insurrection and so on. But none of that is new.

The question is, and I’m sure it is being debated in some parts, not least in the US, but which oddly seems to get no public showing: how on earth did such a ridiculous situation come about? How on earth did such an apology for a man get within 1,000 miles of the White House, a man who, for example when he was first president, had to be told that ‘the Balkans’ were not the same as ‘the Baltics’?

And you don’t have to be a Democrat to think that: the GOP is full of staunch conservatives who are in despair at what Trump is doing and think he is a ‘fucking moron’ (© Rex Tillerson).

If, of course, you are one of those who ‘like what Trump says, he gives it too us straight’ and that ‘he will make America great again’ and don’t believe, as I do, that he us full of 24-carat bullshit, I am the one you will insist is ‘an apology for a man’.

Well, that’s as maybe, but I certainly fancy my chances of coming out way ahead of Trump in any morality beauty parade.

. . .

The essence of the problem facing America – and I suggest it is not at all too dramatic or pretentious to describe it as an existential problem – is that Trump has tens of millions of supporters, tens of millions of folk who we can only assume are as straight-up as everyone else. So he does have a lot of folk backing him, although despite Dumpy Trump’s crowing and bragging, he did not enjoy a ‘landslide election’ of any kind last November. And that claim needs some unpacking.

In terms of ‘electoral college’ votes, a case might be made – as does Trump – that his election was ‘landslide’: because then the votes were tallied up in different states and the different state electors were divvied up, at the finish line he won 312 of the electoral college votes, 86 more than his opponent, Kamala Harris.

But hold on: the crucial detail here is ‘the electoral college’ and in terms of how many of the popular votes he won, it was a very narrow victory if not close run, though given the electoral college set-up pretty much every US election in recent times has been close run on the popular votes metric.

Nationwide Trump won 77,303,573 votes with Harris taking 75,019,257 of the popular vote on a turnout of 63.9% of those eligible to vote). That is certainly not a landslide in anyone’s book, unless you are state-registered fantasist

 

like Trump of which, apparently, in MAGA land there seem to be quite a few. The bottom line is that Trump won the White House because of America’s decidedly wacky electoral college system

That 238-year-old electoral college system is archaic, hugely flawed and as the man once said ‘not fit for purpose’. You can even hear it creaking every four years from this side of the Atlantic, in cosy Old Blighty. But although that is not news to anyone and many – though not all – Americans agree the electoral college needs root-and-branch reform, it would be easier to establish total harmony in the Middle East in perpetuity than get agreement on how – even whether – to reform: getting the 50 US states, all intensely jealous of many aspects of their autonomy is seemingly impossible.

. . .

In the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia it was at first proposed that Americans should elect their leader (i.e. the President) by a direct popular vote. This was rejected, partly because the mover and shakers in Philadelphia writing the constitution were not keen on the ordinary man in the street (or as then was the ordinary man in the field).

There was also additional concern from the southern, slave-owning states where almost 90% of the five states population was black and didn’t have a vote. Thus the number of voters they had would be far fewer than in those states in the north which was equal in population size and so the north would always dominate the union.

So the compromise was the electoral college system whereby each state was allocated a certain number of electors and the five southern states were allocated a disproportionate number of electors given the size of their population.

Whether or not it was noticed that under that arrangement the boot was very much on the other foot and the south would dominate the union does not seem to be recorded. And unsurprisingly, for the next fifty-odd years the US president came from the southern states given that part of America’s electoral clout

Since then there have been two constitutional amendments to sort out this and that, but the number of proposed reforms – more than 700 over the past 250 years – highlights how dissatisfied many Americans are with the system.

In brief, Donald Trump can stick his ‘landslide election victory’ where the sun don’t shine: it is 24-carat nonsense.

. . .

All that, though, is a side issue to the problem which dare not speak its name: that even were Trump to die tomorrow or otherwise leave the stage and perhaps deflate the MAGA movement, the political sentiments in America which sustained the rise to power of a man who is akin to a lunatic would still be be present.

And as eggs is eggs another similar cynical character – and quite possibly far cleverer man or woman than Trump – would step up to tap into those feelings.

Thus the elephant in the room is that American men and women in their tens of millions are happy to condone rule by a man who is a contradiction from every angle.

So how did that situation arise? I ask because I am certainly not suggesting that all those tens of millions are terminally stupid or plain evil: a great many will want the best for their country as the next voter.

They pledges their allegiance to Trump and gave him their vote because he said the right things: he promised ‘to beat inflation and bring down prices on day one’, but now (as I write) we are on day sixteen of his regim and the signs are his ill-advised tariffs will push up inflation and prices.

However vacuous and insincere his slogan Make America Great Again might be, it did and still does resonate with a great many Americans, though frankly, given America’s economic clout I’m at a loss to call to mind a time when America, more or less, was not great. But that is beside the point.

Similarly with the angst he is stirring up about immigrants: yes, there are a great many immigrants living in the US who did not enter the country legally, apparently as many as eleven million. Unfortunately, a vast number of them are so well-integrated that in many industries they have become crucial and those industries would be in a jam if they were no longer available. This is particularly true in the agricultural industry in the states to the west and southwest.

Just days ago I read a report – the usual caveat, of course, that we should not necessarily believe everything we read in the papers – that when in California and at Trump’s instigation Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers set about rounding up whatever illegal immigrants they could find, on orange farms where the picking was done my illegal immigrants on the first day 25% of pickers did not show up for work, and on the following day the figure rose to 75%.

They are scared to be caught. Meanwhile, the orange grove farmers are going spare because their fruit is remaining unpicked.

Then there the question that these immigrants, partly no doubt because they are keen to keep a low profile don’t object to doing the dirty jobs good ol’ patriotic Americans feel is beneath them. Well, get rid of the immigrants and someone will have to do them. It seems ‘joined-up thinking’ is not in the Trump MAGA playbook.

Several years ago, the magazine the Economist organised a survey in Britain about ‘the number of immigrants’ and how people felt about immigration.

The odd result was that opposition to immigration and condemnation of the then government’s immigration policy was highest in areas with almost no immigrants at all. And those who did live in those – quite affluent – areas were professionals who rubbed along quite well with their neighbours. On the other hand in cities where a large number of immigrants did live, there was not a great deal of enmity to them.

At least 80 million of its people are prepared to accept the kind of violence we saw live on our TV screens on January 6, 2021; that at least 80 million people are prepared to believe that black is white, that ‘the election in was

 

An American patriot exercises his constitutional right on January 6, 2021, to smash his way into Congress to disrupt the peaceful handover of power

stolen’, that Donald Trump is ‘the victim of “lawfare” and is as innocent and pure as the driven snow’; the list would go on, but you reading this are familiar with it.

The elephant in the room which is studiously ignored by the United States of America it that this state of affairs did not develop from overnight, or from one week to the next, or from on year to the next or even from one decade to the nest.

There is something very rotten in the United States of America yet no one, but no one is prepared talk about it. Trump has been guilty of many crimes, but perhaps the most egregious because as supposed Republican who professes to champion law and order, he pardoned all those convicted of any crime committed in the January 6 invasion of Congress.

Some of the crimes were compartatively minor, rather a lot were violent. Trump pardoned them all: he had continually described those jailed as ‘hostages’ so one wonders why rather a lot of those hostages admitted violent acts on January 6.

Pertinent is that at least 78 million Americans are quite happy to accept Trump’s hypocrisy and see nothing wrong with what in less blinkered eyes was an insurrection. Yes, it is now that bad in America.There is a very long, very broad yellow streak in the US and it will only grow longer and broader if it is not addressed

I might end on a gratuitous gibe, but one which from these shores seems less fantastical than might at first appear: what else can expect in a nation where millions insist on their right ‘to bear arms’ so that shooting up a nearby elementary school and killing fifteen young children is now something of a weekend sport.

America: do something before you go the way of the dodo!

Think 2024 was bad? Breaking news: 2025 could get a lot worse if Lady Luck doesn’t smile on the world. And from what I hear Lady Luck has taken the decade off

There was a comment by someone or other in one of the Times Radio interviews (many of which are available on Youtube) which, for me, sums up why after 80 years of comparative peace, the world might now be in for a colossal and very unpleasant shake-up.

Peace? Well, the relevant word above is ‘comparative’, and certainly when we think of the Congo, Libya, Vietnam, Biafra, Malaya, Cyprus, Korea, the Gulf and so on, there has been precious little peace for those living ‘locally’ in these past 80 years.

But, ‘locally’ is the second relevant word: however awful each war was, it was always ‘local.

What the Times Radio interviewee (I think it was Phillip Ingram) pointed out was that the huge danger facing the world – except, possibly, South America which tends go its own merry way, though it, too, has its troubles – is that the current crop of ‘local’ danger hotspots might ‘merge into one global hotspot’ (though cv above South America).

What do we have? Well, as far as war is concerned there is, at present, Ukraine and the Middle East. But a growing danger is the indisputable rise of and the indisputable growing support for the the far-right in Europe: in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and, if Nige’s Reform does hi-jack the Tory Party much as a virus can hi-jack a body, contentiously even Britain.

Hungary already has it’s own – in his own cynical words – ‘illiberal democrat’ in Viktor Orban (below right with his pal Vladimir Putin). Slovakia and Georgia are heading down that road, and there is active, if as yet reasonably

dormant and ineffective, far-rightism in Italy, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Poland.

One of the attractions of those far-rightists for the many ‘ordinary voter’ is that they are vociferously against, not just immigration, but immigrants who have already settled in their countries. And like all authoritarians those far-rightists like to play on ‘people’s fears’.

I have the usual and necessary respect for my fellow individuals, but something happens to individuals when they coagulate into ever larger groups: they become very stupid.

To be blunt, I have no respect at all for ‘the people’ or as it all too often manifests itself ‘the mob’. Sadly, ‘the mob’ thinks in monochrome – if it thinks at all – and is far too easily led. Furthermore, ‘the people’ is almost wholly an artificial construct which can be used to mean pretty much whatever one likes depending one what you are selling.

More obvious are the dangers in the Middle East: Iran is domestic pressure from a younger generation fed up with the old ’uns and its stooges in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza are getting their comeuppance. We do not have a clue how matters will pan out in Syria.  None.

 

And backed into a corner, Iran might choose to act is desperate ways. It does not, we think, yet have a working nuclear bomb, but it does have the necessary for a dirty bomb.

Furthermore there is the problem of Israel or – a far better way of putting it and more to the point – of its government of right-wingers, far-right-wingers and monsters.

I have and will not make a secret of my initial admiration for how Israel stood up for itself but since October 2023 increasingly Netanyahu (below right) has completely lost it: there’s ‘standing up for yourself’ and ‘how you stand up for yourself’, and the government – which must be distinguished from the people of Israel and, most

pertinently ‘the Jews – long, long, long ago overstepped the mark. Morally it is now on the same level as Hamas.

Putin, too, is in a corner, to put it mildly. And as I’m sure we have all heard over these past few years from someone or other, when in a corner Vlad gets ever more dangerous: he does NOT like giving up and it might seem now he has very little to lose.

Even if ‘after talks’ (and why should Ukraine surrender territory?) ‘the war ends’ that will not be the end of the troubles he will face by any measure.

Finally, there is Trump: the soft-bellied, blinkered, cuddly liberals out there – of which I am usually one, by the way – like to preach that Donny ‘likes to shake things up, he ‘likes to see how others react’, he ‘won’t do most of the things he has promised to do’ and so on. Really?

That thinking is flawed if only because it assumes Trump is rational, that he has an understanding of geopolitics, that he actually does understand economics and does not really believe his own barfly bore interpretations of ‘how things work’. I suggest and fear that he does not.

Ingram (if it was he) also pointed out that if the endgame in Ukraine sees the conflict ending with Putin and Russia acquiring a sizeable chunk of the south-east of the country, there might be ‘concern’ in the West, but after a few months it will die down. As the Arabs say, the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

His point was that Xi Jinping (below) might make the following calculation: take Taiwan now in the aftermath of attention being on the ‘war ending in Ukraine’, settle for the resultant global uproar and possibly hit to China’s

economy but that eventually ‘the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on’.

If Xi did move on Taiwan, what would America do? Trump has vowed he does not want to get involved in any more ‘foreign wars’ and might pass as ‘well, that’s Taiwan’s problem’.

Even far brighter folk in the US than Donny might counsel caution about getting involved as they would not know what outcome they are seeking – what’s in it for America? And Xi will know that and it will be part of his calculations.

Thus 2025 might seem to be taking on a rather bleaker hue than did previous years, however bleak the hue was in previous years.

As Ingram says ‘things are bad, but they would get a damn sight worse if all those ‘local problems’ merged into on big problem, rather was happened in the 1930s.

Well, well, well – a genius writes! Shame that it took until 2135 for the fucking world to catch on (by which time he was long dead)! And it’s not as though I didn’t do my fucking best to alert them! Fuckwits! What CAN you do!

In the previous post I suggested that, broadly, those who insist they ‘write only for themselves’ are talking bollocks. However, despite my apparent Attila the Hun persona, I do have a smidgin of ‘the liberal’ in my make-up (and stop sniggering at the back!) and I am obliged to concede that, yes, some folk do ‘write only for themselves’. Why, I don’t know, but I must accept that occasionally there are some and there is no faux modesty at play.

For example, my aunt, Ann Cipriani, (who is my stepmother’s sister but I regard her as an aunt) wrote short stories and poems ‘only for herself’ and knowing her, I believe that is true, or better, almost true. NB She chose for herself the pseudonym Annie Leary if you do look up here stories and poems.

What I mean by that is that a year or two ago she allowed me to have printed up a slim volume of four of her short stories and a second volume of several of her poems. If you do come across this blog – and again more later – you can find them here: the stories and the poems.

The printing was done by Amazon’s excellent KDP service which I have also used. It is ‘print on demand’ service which means that the books they print are all, as part of the printing process, listed on the Amazon websites (and worldwide if you ask them to so list them). That means that if you buy a book, that copy or copies of it are printed to order, i.e. there is not a stock of books.

I have used the service several times to have printed (and are thus ‘for sale’) a short novel, four volumes of verse, five volumes of short stories and my ‘magnum opus’ The Hemingway Enigma: How did that fraud finagle his status to become for many years, and possibly still, as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 2oth century?

That is not the title of the book (the true title is The Hemingway Enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame?) but it will give you a taste of my views).

But now to get back on track: I don’t just ‘write for myself’. However, despite having what I produce printed by Amazon’s KDP and put on sale ‘worldwide’ (fancy!), it is very, very, very unlikely to be read by anyone else despite my pious hopes and drams. And perhaps writing that is even overstating the case.

However, I do write to be read. As far as I am concerned, and to use the example I always use, cooks prepare meals to be eaten by others and writers write prose or verse to be read by others (and some of us, myself included and, as here, despite the preamble in the previous post) write blogs to be read.

You reading this – if anyone actually does come across it, might now be puzzled: didn’t I previously suggest that this was a ‘private blog’, not for anyone else’s eyes? Well, to be very clear and wholly unambiguous so there is not chance of any confusion: yes and no.

Yes, in as far as the posts relating to my private thoughts about family and friends are concerned, but most certainly no when it comes to this and subsequent entries are in play. THIS entry – even the version which appears in my ‘private blog’ – is fully intended to be read! And not just read, but admired and quoted and recommended and passed on! So do that now! The problem is, of course, that here being part of my ‘private blog’, the chances of anyone just happening across this are as close to none at all as it is possible to come.

As I have started drinking rum ’n Coke as I write this (well, actually Pepsi not Coke, but let’s not get anal) and have had rather a lot of ‘small ones’ to avoid becoming unsober, it is rather running away with me, but what the hell.

Anyway, this will be the last post I shall double up in that way, that is post on both blogs, from now, so enjoy it while you can. And to those reading this entry on my ‘main blog’, I shall make damn sure you cannot find the ‘private blog’.

. . .

The whole point of this post is that I, who does not ‘write for himself’, but most certainly ‘writes for others’, finds it quite useful to write down my thoughts by way of clarifying them when trying to think stuff out. For me that works and I don’t know why. And that is what I shall be doing from now on.

I began my main blog as a ‘diary’ at some point in the early 1980s (fucking more than 40 years ago! Damn, am I ‘getting old’? Yes, Ed). I did so as someone who has ‘wanted to write’ since I was 16 and had showed ‘a poem’ to a kind English teacher at my school. By the way, I far prefer call what some refer to as ‘poetry’ as ‘verse’.

This was at the Oratory School and the teacher was ‘Timmy’ Hinds, who did not take me for English, however, and was nicknamed C.T.S. Hinds because he kept posting Roman Catholic tracts. He read the poem and advised me to ‘carry on’. In fact, he simply did 

In fact, he simply did what all adults should do: encourage the young in whatever they are attempting, but being very young and a little stupid, I misinterpreted what he had told me as ‘frankly, Powell, you are a literary genius!’ and more or less believed that for the next 40 years until I, er, sobered up a little. 

And I believed it religiously despite writing next to nothing in those 40 years. It was not completely nothing, but I am certain that what I did write was in no way worth attention.

At some point in the early 1980s, I began reading East Of Eden (of which I can remember nothing) and somehow and somewhere (perhaps in the publisher’s introduction) I came across the fact that Steinbeck was having an attack of ‘writer’s block’ and found it difficult to start writing in the mornings.

So his publisher’s editor gave him a hard-back journal and advised him to try to get started by writing a short diary entry on the left-hand page to exercise his ‘writing muscles’ – my phrase, not the editor’s – and then to carry on writing his novel once he had ‘warmed up’ – again, my phrase.

Being very conscious that I was writing fuck-all for a guy who thought himself to be a ‘literary genius’, I decided that if I did the same, I might also start writing. Well, I bought myself a hardback A4 ledger and did start ‘keeping a diary’, but did I start ‘writing fiction’? What do you think?

As it happens I now have about ten or more of those A4 ledgers and carried on writing in them until I married in 1995, about 12 years later.

(NB My handwriting is so appalling I can very often not make out what I have written. And more to the point, I haven’t tried to read any of those diary ledgers, which, anyway doubled up as commonplace books as a dialy account of stool motions of every kind don’t much interest me and I can’t think mine will interest man others.)

The blog, my main blog that is, began as a kind of ‘son of diary’. But the rum has got to me and I am back off the track, so let me start again.

. . .

Those who have read my ‘main blog’ (from now on referred to without the rather coy quote marks) will know that I have already written ‘a novel’ and have had it printed and published by Amazon. Furthermore, I have plugged it rather a lot in my blog as well as the volumes of verse and short story collections, but so far no one has taken the hint and bought any them.

I am rather proud of that novel, to be honest. I do believe that I tried to do in writing it succeeded though it is perhaps not what one might expect and we should also bear in mind – and I do – the very wise and useful observation that

And for Christ’s sake don’t persuade yourself you are the exception, or even try to persuade yourself. Do yourself a big favour and accept that the observation is true.

Anyway, for several reasons I have not tried to get a publisher to accept it, and there are several reasons for that, one of which is that I hate loathe being obliged to ‘sell’ myself and always made a total fuck-up of it when I have tried.

However, what also occurred to me is the ‘second novel / second album’ dilemma, assuming, of course that the ‘first novel / first album’ was ‘a success’. So I thought that before I try my luck hawking that first novel around ‘the publishers’, I would have a second novel at the ready to be supplied as and when. And writing that second novel is what I am now engaged in and what this post is all about.

. . .

But here I shall end this particular entry as the rum ’n Pepsi is now getting to me a little and I want to go upstairs and bang away on my acoustic guitar. But don’t worry, more to come tho’ from now on only on my ‘private’ blog (and those fucking coy quote marks again).

Pip, pip!

Face it, America, you have finally fucked yourself

I am baffled. Although I am ‘merely’ a Brit and some might feel I am not at all qualified to criticise America, I’m going to do so anyway. Because I am baffled, so why not.

I pretty much have only yer average layman’s knowledge to the late 18th-century independence struggle, culminating in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but I’m sure the few facts I know are pretty correct.

I have long given up on dutifully swallowing the myth that good, true and honest colonial British subjects – as then they still were – rebelled because they did not want ‘taxation without representation’ or some such.

Similarly, I have long stopped believing, as we are intended and expected to do, that the aim of the rebellion was to promote ‘liberty for all and universal happiness’.

From where I sit, the essence of the rebellion was a power struggle between the landowners based in ‘the American colonies’ and those landowners sitting in their estates back in ‘the old country’.

The colonial British landowners simply wanted more of the action: and they finally got it and have not relinquished their grip one little bit since. As the French so pertinently say ‘plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose’.

The ordinary ‘colonial Brits’ – the indentured folk, the servants, the labouring classes, and the otherwise disadvantaged – felt they really didn’t have a dog in that particular fight: if you are at the end of the broom being swept willy-nilly this way and that, you really don’t give a flying fuck who is doing the sweeping, whether it is a rich Brit overseas or local colonial Brit.

And they were not too keen on risking their lives in an ‘independence’ fight from which they would not at all benefit. Hence the need for the, albeit, limited conscription the rebel leaders often felt was necessary to drum up fighting men.

Granted that all nations have national myths which they cherish beyond any possible reason: we Brits do (that the world envies us and our institutions), the French do (that they are a nation of intellectuals), the Germans do (that they know best, always) and you Americans do.

So it doesn’t matter whether or not I believe the United States genesis account. It doesn’t even matter whether or not it is true, completely false, partly true and partly false or anything in between.

Only one thing matters: that it is believed. The Roman satirical poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, known as Martial hit the nail on the head when he wrote ‘It is not he who forms idols in gold or marble that makes them gods, but he who kneels before them’.

And to this day Americans whether Democrat or Republican, gay or straight, old family or immigrant-descended kneel before the myth and therey thus make it ‘real’. Shit, even black Americans, at least those with ‘aspirations’, feel obliged to ‘take the knee’ and salute the flag in spite of the unspeakable horrors afflicted their forefathers and even parents until very recent times.

How dare someone who is not American so rudely criticise the United States? Perhaps I should inform you who have so far not heard and remind you who have that no country on the planet regards itself as ‘the second-greatest nation on Earth!’

Sadly, given the irony implicit in that observation there might well be some who simply do not even understand the point it makes. And that would be an irony in itself.

I cannot square the notion that the much-vaunted ‘land of the free’ which has a total population of 335 million also has 1.8 million of its people in jail – a higher rate of incarceration than ‘Red’ China. China has a a total population at 1,400 million – four times as big – but ‘just’ 1.69 million under lock and key. Fancy.

For many Americans it would seem the ‘American Dream’ is not the usual one but simply to stay out of jail for as long as possible. And in a country where not using a designated road-crossing but ‘jay-walking’ can get you banged up, that might often be a tall order.

So far many, if not most, of you will think this is just another bloody lefty Brit on his high horse sounding off.

Well, first of all I am not ‘lefty’. Secondly, I am simply repeating a number of facts about the US which puzzle me a great deal. And one or two of those facts are really bizarre given the mythical genesis of the US, not least the US president’s right to pardon offenders.

Worse still, it seems to me to be very obvious that not all US citizens are ‘equal before the law’. That, too, is a myth.

Even those of you here who have by now come to loathe me and my ramblings above might agree that one Donald J Trump, an adjudged rapist, a convicted fraudster and a suspected insurrectionist and a man who – if the guilty

 

pleas of three co-conspirators are to be believed – attempted to rig the 2020 election result in Georgia and, finally, who finally stole any number of secret government documents, is now above the law.

You might disagree, but in your hearts you know he is: Trump has got away with it.

Even if he is as innocent as a newborn lamb of insurrection, alleged election rigging and theft, the American people will now no longer be able to find out: he will not come to trial.

The great United States myth you guys subscribe to includes that you were fighting to ‘free yourself from the yoke of the English crown’ and rid yourself of fealty to a king ‘who was above the law’. Well, face it, ladies and gentlemen, in the past 249 years you haven’t done that at all: all you have done is, in effect, created your bloody own ‘monarch’.

In 2024 the president can pretty much do what the fuck he likes – just as English monarchs could do what the fuck they liked until we chopped off head of one of them in January 1649, 375 years ago as a way of saying ‘not any more, matey!’

You Yanks adore our colourful pageantry at ‘royal’ weddings, trooping of the colour and state opening of Parliament. So you come up with your own ‘colourful pageantry’ – a 20-vehicle calvacade of armoured cars every time your prezzy ventures out and a pukey reverence for ‘Mr President’ that would nauseate even a hardened Brit sycophant.

What you don’t seem to realise is that we know all our pageantry is just for show, pure make-believe, pure colourful bullshit. But yours isn’t.

Face it: you have created your own king. And that process has involved the slow, slow, slow corrosion of those supposed ‘patriotic’ ideals before which you kneel and worship.

Granted that all – or perhaps only many – of you reading this wouldn’t piss on Trump if he were on fire. But you all still carry some of the blame for American creating King Donald I. Your sin: you took your eye off the ball. Your second sin? You now believe your own bullshit.

Because that corrosive process occurred of several decades, possibly over a century, it cannot and will not be rectified at all soon. And realising this, when I’ve had a couple, often about this time of day (18.02 as it happens), I become a little maudlin and believe that after almost 80 years of comparative peace and prosperity in the Western world, it will, over the coming decades, be ‘all change’.

Mass migration not experienced for centuries will be one catalyst for that change, certainly, and the impact it will have on trade relations.

But, in my cups, I also fear that after almost 400 years the ‘United States’ will gradually become rather less ‘united’, that the pressures it faces from the undemocratic inclinations of ‘King Donald I’ will be too much for some states, especially the ‘liberal ones’: why would New England any longer want to share a bed with Arizona or Texas of the loons in the North-West mountains?

On the other hand, out of my cups – so to speak – I think it’ll be fine, that that is all tosh, stuff ’n nonsense. But as someone who has increasingly read a lot of history these past few years I am these days less inclined to take much for granted, even when I suffer from a bout of optimism.

Would anyone in the mid-1980s have taken someone seriously who insisted that within four years the Soviet ‘empire’ would be no more. You get one guess, but you would be wrong. He or she would be sent off with a flea in their ear and told to stop being so silly. The US slowly fall apart? You think?

Now for another drink and hope that Donald fucking Trump really is just a bad dream.

This post is dedicated to reader John OC and the millions of other MAGA morons who have fallen for Donald J Trump’s bullshit

Yesterday I posted a dire warning about what Donny Trump’s presidency will mean not just for America but, given the size of of the US economy, the world. In response reader ‘John OC’ took me to task and commented

‘Wow - such a rant. Thanks for reminding me to come back to you on your
superb TDS rant last week. Was thrilled with the result last night’.

Well, to that all I can respond is ‘sucker’. But time will tell what a disaster Trump will be, given his economic naivety, his ultra-short attention span, his narcissism, his fatal flaw in believing his own bullshit.

Readers such as ‘John OC’ who were ‘thrilled’ by the election result will be crying into their beer with a year or two when Trump manages to make inflation soar again, millions are made unemployed and Trump manifest health problems – why are your afraid of releasing your medical records, Donny? – make him just a figurehead for the crooks and right-wing thugs such as Musk and Thiel who wanted him in the White House.

NB First of all the global covid epidemic, soon followed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine sparked global inflation – as in throughout the world not just America – and as such it was beyond the control of any government.

The problem with inflation is that its effects lad. So although it is right down again everywhere, prices are still high and that has fooled cretins like ‘John OC’. Don’t believe me? Well, take a look. This chart (below) showing US inflation over the past five years is provided by YCharts.

But morons like ‘John OC’ and his fellow MAGA suckers aren’t interested in ‘detail’ and ‘facts’ and they take the view, rather like six-year-old children that if a ‘fact’ doesn’t suit them it is ‘fake news’.

Remember, it’s all very well for ‘John OC’ to sneer at what he calls my ‘rant’ but he conveniently forgets the ranting is orange pin-up is a master of: take time out to listen to any of Donny’s speeches to see and hear for yourselves.

Morons like ‘John OC’ prefer to cosy bedside story, cut kittens and kindly fairy godmothers and all the other bullshit Trump provides for them for the real world.

The writer H L Mencken is supposed to have observed (though he probably picked it up somewhere) that

Nobody ever went broke underestimating
the intelligence of the American people

Trump has now proved just how true that is.

MAGA suckers, you will have no one to blame but yourselves

We have a saying in Britain, ‘Turkeys don’t vote for an early Christmas. To adapt if for American readers (and for the sake of those such as ‘John OC’ I shall use BIG LETTERS)

Turkeys don’t vote for an early Thanksgiving.

The problem now facing the US is that 72,641,564 of the nation’s voters have done just that.

PS Get a good night’s sleep, y’all, you’re gonna need it.