Another November in America

It is uncertain whether Trump’s triumph and what he stands for will not repeat itself. In any case, it is unfortunate that the only candidate the other side of the political aisle found to run against him was Joe Biden.

The last time I was in New York was the November that Donald Trump won the presidential election. Trump had not caused my city friends, mostly progressive Democrats, any concern even when the polls began to favor his election following the critical announcement by the FBI director about further damaging revelations concerning Hillary Clinton when she served as secretary of state. Nothing came of the revelations, but Clinton’s lead nevertheless began to ebb, and those who had believed the famous Trump tape about grabbing women “by the pussy” would bring him down were bitterly disappointed. In my Upper West Side neighborhood, the epicenter of Democratic activism and a neighborhood of Jewish intellectuals, the electoral environment was one of strange apathy. The polls continued to show Clinton winning. However, the mood on the streets raised doubt and was discouraging. It made one wonder whether people remembered the liveliness of eight years earlier when Barack Obama’s face and name were everywhere, on car bumpers, in store windows, even in the colored chalk drawings made by a passionate artist on the neighborhood sidewalks.

Upper West Side progressives were not enthusiastic about Clinton, and those who did not distrust her as much as her husband openly detested her and were infuriated that the Democratic Party had not found another candidate. They did not take Trump seriously. It was difficult to give any credit to a former television showman or take him seriously, someone who dressed up like a suburban New York mobster from the outer borough stomping grounds that resembled Tony Soprano’s New Jersey; someone who gestured and talked exactly like the mob. Trump’s words and body language are that of a wise guy, not like the melodramatic and lying mobsters typical of Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese, but rather the crude and vulgar lackluster reality sort who surfaced in the tabloid cover photos of The New York Post or the more detailed passages of “The Sopranos” series. Those long coats with colossal shoulder pads and that haircut, at the same time gaudy yet grotesque, are reminiscent of the late godfather John Gotti, who himself aspired to resemble the Corleone family, whose dons were played by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. They’re all parodies of parodies, dishonest businessmen, corrupt beneficiaries of city waste management concessions, extremely aggressive in their accents and mannerisms. They build mansions of marble and gold for themselves with the same gaudy aesthetic that permeates Trump’s apartment towers and casinos.

People in Manhattan and in affluent areas of Brooklyn look down upon the suburbanites in the outer boroughs just as much as those in New Jersey whom they call the “bridge and tunnel people” because they commute to Manhattan through the tunnels under the Hudson River or over the George Washington Bridge. The fact that there are a significant number of working-class people, blue collar workers, police and firefighters, the lower middle class and white residents with a small house on Staten Island or in Queens who always vote Republican is an indication of the political fractures that reflect the social chasms in the United States. Trump was not a great businessman, his business skills were a travesty, and the only place he naturally belonged was on his television show, “The Apprentice,” where he gained immense popularity by playing an even more exaggerated and fraudulent version of the person he was in real life. He signed very successful books that he did not write. He flaunted riches as dubious as the gold leaves that shined on the letters of his name on all the buildings he built. Educated New Yorkers who vote Democratic and who view the rest of the country as vaguely as they view the city’s own outer suburbs found no reason to worry about the candidacy of such a character.

A week before the election, I had lunch with a friend of mine and his very bright 20-something son who had just graduated from college. To the father, Trump seemed so ridiculous and alien that he felt Trump was not worth his attention. The son left me dumbfounded when he said that because he couldn’t vote for Bernie Sanders, and since Clinton seemed so obnoxious to him, he was willing to vote for Trump.

I had an appointment with another friend the morning after the election. He was a former 1960s progressive and had voted halfheartedly for Clinton. Still, I didn’t see him alarmed or even dismayed by Trump’s victory. American institutions were very robust, he told me. As crazy as Trump might be, he would have to accept the limitations imposed by the separation of powers and the rule of law. And in any case, after four years, there would be another election, and Trump would most likely lose, and everything would more or less go back to normal. At no point was there even a glimmer of that collective sense of urgency and outcry among the people I knew, the kind that led so many French voters to vote for Emmanuel Macron in order to avoid a Marine Le Pen victory at all costs.

For those of us who grew up in more turbulent countries, our New York friends’ trust in their institutions seemed rather foolish and even somewhat arrogant. (In the case of American exceptionalism, not only evangelical Republicans believe in it.) Four years later, the feeling of collapse is all the more serious because, at this point, there is no guarantee that Trump’s win in 2016, and all that he stands for and covers up, will not repeat itself. Not even the most pessimistic imagination could have foreseen the scale of the coming calamity in November 2016. The despotism of money, the breakdown caused by inequality and poverty, have corrupted American politics. These issues favor those who have the most, and feed into social resentment among multitudes of the dispossessed that drives them to direct their messianic hope to a gangster who acts at the beck and call of the masters of the world.

These are leaders who take advantage of tax cuts, who become even richer thanks to the denial of climate change and the sabotage of all environmental protection measures meant to limit the profits of companies who extract resources from the earth. Trump’s antics are irrelevant; they serve as a distraction from underlying policies as destructive in the long run as the filling the Supreme Court with justices who serve for life and who are dedicated to eliminating regulations and controls on the economy, and perhaps on personal freedoms such as abortion as well. The American electoral system is very complicated and very archaic, and a few thousand or hundreds of votes in one state can influence more than several hundred thousand in another. But it is unfortunate that in the face of the threat posed by Trump and all the overwhelming forces that support him, the only possible candidate that the other side of the political aisle has been able to find to run against him is Biden, an establishment politician, a well-meaning but hesitant older man.