Outside a bar in Brooklyn after the third and final presidential debate, two young women digested what had just happened. “We apologise on behalf of America,” they said to me, the dramatic nature of the statement cut with absolute sincerity. It appears that many Americans, grappling with what Trump has become, the type of ludicrous dystopia he pedals, and his denigration of American politics, just want this whole sorry episode to be over. But hoping that Trumpland will simply disappear come November 8th is wishful thinking. There have always been dramatic divides across American society, geography, and politics, and what Trump has done is driven a wedge between such chasms, driving things further and further apart until these versions of America have become so polarised that an existential crisis has filled the gaps. How can America come back from what has happened throughout this campaign?
Trump’s angry messaging began as dog-whistle and has ended as wolf-whistle. He used to speak in code, now he screams in bald brutality. The most pressing issue, besides Clinton winning the election, which all polls have pointed to for some time, will be the immediate aftermath of the election. When Trump refused to say during the debate whether he’d accept the results of the election, he was no longer speaking in code. His cries during rallies that the system and the election was rigged, his invention of widespread voter fraud, his insinuation that the election was basically being stolen from him, are of course ridiculous accusations. Does he believe his own lies, or is he just trying to disrupt a game that he’s clearly lost?
Can we be sure if Trump realises the gravity of what he’s saying, that smirking “I’ll keep you in suspense,” about whether or not he’ll accept the election result is just a warped version of “tune in for the next episode” in his reality TV world? But this is not a gameshow, this is American democracy. Trump has created his own version of so-called scripted reality. In scripted reality, television shows that portend to be “real”, but are in fact manufactured, require a certain leap and buy in from an audience that understands they’re being played. But Trump has created a fake reality, doing away with the simplest things that are meant to guide us; fact and truth. Once you do away with the very idea of facts as a baseline, it’s hard to go back from that. If someone insists the sky is green when it is so clearly blue, how can there possibly be any engagement or debate? When Trump insists he hasn’t done or said something when his opponent points out that he clearly has, and when the record shows that he has, how can that be engaged with at all?
When Nigel Farage stood in front of a billboard that depicted a line of refugees with ‘Breaking Point’ as the tagline, the fascist tones were front and centre. Trump too has appealed to the most basic and base of fears, the mystery bogeymen that are concocted to scare people into trusting that he is the one to protect them. Farage subsequently tried to extricate himself from the consequences of such messaging, one of those consequences being the murder of Jo Cox. Trump’s racist, fascist, misogynistic rhetoric and actions cannot be removed from the atmosphere and actions that are consequences of that rhetoric. Creating more divides in an already divided society and country does nothing but agitate for more hatred, less tolerance, depleted empathy and an abandonment of unity.
We don’t yet know whether Trump will in fact not accept the result of the election. But what we do know is that his constant and baseless assertion that the election is rigged and therefore the result and the entire American democratic process is a bunk will appeal to every crackpot conspiracy theorist, every tinfoil hat-wearing rage-filled person, everyone who thinks America is in fact on the brink of a civil war, everyone who thinks a race war is the way to “take their country back”, everyone who is waiting for the rapture or sees things in biblical terms of good versus evil. There are those who hear these dog-whistles turned wolf-whistles and interpret them as a literal call to arms, validation for militia-forming, political assassinations or coups.
Trump has brought this craziness right into the mainstream. People with extreme points of view have been given a platform, legitimacy and a cypher through which to vocalise what is unacceptable and outright dangerous. Regardless of the election result, fair-minded Americans can only hope that damage he has done will magically contract towards a version of national sanity where his points of view are not front and centre but return to the fringes. Right now, that fringe feels worryingly large, or at least very loud.