The day after the 2016 American Presidential election I was still in denial, which turns out is quite an American trait. I told myself it was a cosmic joke and somehow the punchline would reveal itself, like, ‘Hey Americans, gotcha! You’ve been punked. Now continue buying your snow tyres.’ As I wrote this sentence, we were a mere eleven days from truly appreciating that the joke was on us.
On 20 January 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth President of the United States of America in Washington D.C. The next day, I drove with several of my female friends to descend on the nation’s capital and show the new President that we were no longer in denial and that we would resist him at every turn that required resistance. So many things have changed since then. I am now a dry-eyed pragmatist. Having Trump as president is not surreal to me any longer because every day brings with it some fresh horror. Like the appointments of Steve Bannon, the former chairman of what I assume will be our new state-controlled media outlet, the right-wing Breitbart News, as Trump’s chief strategist, and Jeffrey Sessions – a man deemed to be too racist to be a federal judge in the Deep South and who views civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as un-American – as attorney general. And the passing of a bill by a majority Republican congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act that will leave millions of Americans without health insurance.
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