THE thing I remember most vividly about my first visits to the United States all those years ago was the depth of my surprise at finding out that the movies hadn’t lied after all.
I travelled there fully expecting to be disappointed, but holey camoley, New York taxi drivers really do communicate to the city and to each other via an orchestra of beeping horns – a din that seemed at once incredibly familiar and impossibly exotic. In Los Angeles, raucous games of street basketball were played against a background of swaying palm trees and when I swam in the Pacific I’ll be hornswoggled if I wasn’t watched over by young, tanned lifeguards surveying the booming ocean from wooden huts on stilts. Vegas was indeed surreally, disorientatingly, compellingly vulgar. San Francisco still had a hippy-dippy vibe 20 years after Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love; Washington DC and Capitol Hill felt as cool and exciting to a young journalist as if Woodward and Bernstein were still knocking doors and making phone calls. The tyres of the first car I drove even squealed as I exited an underground car park, for god’s sake.
It all seems so far away now, and not just in years. It all seems as if it happened not in a different time, but in a different country with different people. I once walked the streets and travelled between cities my chest aflutter with excitement and anticipation. Now I can’t decide whether the numb indifference I feel about the prospect of getting on a plane to the United States ever again is down to a burgeoning disgust, a recessed fear, or a corrosive combination of the two. I’m not alone. We learned this week that expressions of interest in flights, tickets and accommodation for the US games in this summer’s World Cup have plummeted and that cancellations are accelerating.
Where once the United States seemed cool, vibrant and exciting, it now seems to me nasty, squalid and vindictive. And yes, of course I know that it has always been the most violent country on Earth when it comes to taking what it wants from other countries; yes, I know that it’s a country infested with inequality and sanctified greed. How could I not know these things? I’m from republican West Belfast, where, while the United States may not be viewed as the Great Satan as it is in large swathes of the Middle East, its infamy is well-noted.
PACK MENTALITY: Ice agents swarm Alex Pretti before shooting him dead
I’m at an age now where I have to do the mental math to decide whether I’ll ever be back in a United States that doesn’t fill me with dread – and that mental arithmetic is only called for in the latter of two scenarios that vie for space in my mind. The first is that Donald Trump does what they say he can’t do and wins again in 2028. There’s more than a few constitutional and electoral hurdles for him to clear to get a run, never mind a win, but since he governs by Executive Order surrounded by a Praetorian Guard of Supreme Court flunkies in hock to him for their status and careers, the two-term rule seems like a mere inconvenience at this stage. If he pulls it off and gets another four years, it’s over for the United States. There’s a strong possibility that he will attain the position of Supreme Leader in the three years left to him in this mandate – a dicey-looking mid-term elections cycle this coming November notwithstanding. But four more years in 2028 will most assuredly see him shrug off the increasingly rusty and flimsy restraints of his country’s pesky bicameral legislature.
And that would be that.
The second scenario is Trump failing to attain his 2028 apotheosis, either by a Democratic Party win or by a convergence of congenial circumstances, possibly including a GOP realignment, Trump mental or physical incapacity and legal pushback. But even if that happy outcome were to be arrived at, how long will it take a new President, a new administration, to clear up the epic mess?
The sad truth is that I’ll likely never again see the US that once enthralled and beguiled me. Whether a generation – or perhaps even generations – to come can ever erase the stain left by what’s dripped out of Trump’s massive incontinence briefs is not entirely clear, and I’ll not be around to get an answer. Many things militate against national redemption in a post-Trump US, but two seem particularly worrisome. The first is a Democratic Party that chose to raise a mildly disapproving eyebrow over Trump’s egregious excesses when they needed to raise an almighty stink. If they failed so abysmally when their country needed them most, what hope is there for them to suddenly locate the gumption needed to spearhead a political, legal and moral revival?
The second is the endless range of possibilities opened up by Trump for the ruthless, the scheming and the greedy. The 30-stone man-child has picked ceaselessly and effectively at the stitching of US democracy and the extent of the remedial work required in his wake will be daunting. The scale of that Augean task will combine powerfully with the improved opportunities for graft and self-enrichment opened up by the new status quo to make it seem like something worth keeping. Or at least, something not to be swept away completely.
TripAdvisor: Keep pointing me to the east, please.
