About where do we go from here?

So. The sky over here has well and truly fallen. The weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth can still be heard around the world. We have enjoyed two or three days of the calm after the storm, but the inevitable hurricane that was always bound to follow is already gathering pace. One week on and the reality – and enormity – is beginning to sink in.

America as a nation seems right now to be suffering the same conflicting emotions as the UK did post-Brexit. I’ve chatted with a good many people since the election, some are distraught, some are delighted to see Trump as the victor, others are equally delighted to see the demise of Clinton. But, even among the most ardent Trump fans, there is a sense of ‘what the hell have we done?’

I didn’t have a vote, I’m not a US citizen. So, my view doesn’t matter. But for the record I find Trump an abhorrent individual. We have had bitter experience of him in Scotland. I think he is genuinely unhinged, and possesses a range of deficiencies that a team of psychiatrists and psychologists would have a field day with.

However, let’s strip away the obnoxious nature of the man, and look at what has happened here. If this was anyone else, America and the world would be hailing last week’s result as one of the greatest political achievements of all time, a triumph for democracy – and rightly so.

Trump, pretty much single-handedly, took on the might of the corrupt and crooked US establishment and won. In doing so he turned American society on its head and demolished both the Republican and Democrat parties – two of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful institutions in the world.

The establishment hasn’t been toppled of course, but it has had a serious and long overdue kick in the butt. It’s difficult to accept that the man has, in any way, been a force for good but he does deserve credit where it’s due. He won, against all odds.

It’s quite strange, in a way, being here but not having the chance to be part of it. That means that, despite my anti-Trump feelings, I can take a detached view of events, almost as an outsider looking in. So, let me take the chance to put right a few general misconceptions, some put about by the media, others just wrongly accepted as true.

First, that Trump supporters are all ‘uneducated whites’. You know, like big Bubba the farm boy with a rifle in one hand and a bottle of Coors in the other. A guy with few brain cells to rub together and who, as one media commentator put it recently, enjoys shooting his neighbours’ cats.

Wrong. That portrayal may be easy, but it is very far off the mark. I know a good many people who voted Trump and they are well educated and intelligent people; they are middle-class and living the happy American family dream in comfortably-off suburbia; they are successful, dynamic business people. These are folk who take their politics and elections seriously and think before they vote.

Some I have spoken to voted Trump because he was standing on the Republican ticket – that simple. Others said they could not stomach voting for Clinton. Others that they felt a change was necessary.

The second misconception is that Trump is a Republican. He’s not and many party members are aghast that he stood in their name. He often sounds more like a Democrat. However, he saw a weakness in the Republican Party, took his chance, and won.

Thirdly, Trump is not a Washington insider and therefore not part of the problem. Of course, he is. He’s been a high-ranking schmoozer for decades now and how many Congressmen do you think have had their palms greased with Trump cash?

Fourth, that Hillary Clinton was unlucky and deserved to win. She deserved everything she got; she ran a dreadful campaign and lost touch with her voting base along the way. While Trump was roiling the populus, Clinton was like a cardboard cut-out. It sometimes felt like watching a bad Roger Moore film.

The most revealing story about Clinton is that she never once visited the state of Wisconsin  during her campaign. And, why should she? Wisconsin, after all, had voted solidly Democrat since the 1920s except for the Nixon landslide of 1972. So, while she sat back and waited for it to drop into her lap, Trump campaigned there vigorously – and Wisconsin went Republican.

The Democrats have lost an election, albeit painfully. It happens. They will now go away, lick their wounds, put the Clintons and their ilk out to pasture, regroup and come back strongly in 2020. The Republicans may have won but the party has been divided like never before, and where it goes from here could be the next fascinating political story.

I believe that Trump’s greatest danger is from within, from the thousands of Republicans, many of them high ranking, who cannot stand him. If he steps out of line, they would be happy to pull the trigger on his Presidency. Don’t be surprised if two parties emerge, a traditional conservative Republican party, and a more extreme right wing ‘Trump party’.

Many people have said to me that Trump has been telling Americans ‘what they want to hear’. The same people will say that Trump is not a racist. What he has told Americans is well documented, I don’t need to repeat it, but if that’s what they want to hear, what does it say about 21^st century American society?

There’s no point in beating about the bush. Racism is a cancer in America, it always has been, ever since the country was colonised. I started visiting regularly in the early 2000s, and quickly became aware that the issue was bubbling on or around the surface. Since Trump took to the campaign trail, it has erupted like Mount Vesuvius.

White supremacist groups have become emboldened and have emerged from their underground shadows into the mainstream. I listened to a radio show the other day when the leader of one such group, a chap called Richard Spencer, said his goal was the creation of a ‘white ethno-state’ and that Trump had ‘slingshotted us to respectability’.

Another avowed white nationalist, Jared Taylor, was quoted in a newspaper as saying that Trump had made it ‘socially acceptable’ to talk about previously off-limits topics such as ‘the Globalist Jewish agenda’.

A few weeks ago, in a public place, I heard someone referred to as a ‘thick-skulled darkie’. That is language straight from the Civil War era.

That may not make Trump a racist in the eyes of some – although to my mind he is an out-and-out racist – but it certainly makes him guilty of enabling an unsettling new chapter of racial disharmony in America. In a court of law, he would be an accessory, a bit like Al Capone’s driver.

But, as the saying goes, you dance with the partner you are given, and very soon we will all be foxtrotting and waltzing with Donald J Trump. His defeated foe Hillary Clinton said last week that America now ‘owes it’ to Trump to chart the way ahead, whether we like the guy or not. She is right.

I fervently hope, for the sake of my adopted country that I have grown to love – warts and all – that I am wrong and that the dark side of the Trump campaign fades away. Love the guy or hate him, he has achieved something truly seismic. But if I’m honest, I’m not holding my breath.