TRUMP WAS JUST WHAT WE NEEDED

Happy Sunday, top-tier gang! As you're no doubt aware, I remain locked out of my @mrbiffo Twitter account. I'm kind of resigned to it now. It's frustrating in that I have 2.5k more followers on that account, and people are still tweeting at it/tagging me in it. And, of course, most people who followed Memory Assistant - now @TheMrBiffo - followed for funny pictures, not me. Which is why, for the first time in an age, I've seen followers going down whenever I tweet about Donald Trump. 

I mostly stay away from politics. That's not to say I don't have any firm beliefs - I do, and they seemingly tend to lean left - it's just that aligning myself to one camp seems absurd when the individuals change, and positions shift. I prefer to believe I can think for myself, and won't just tow any party line, because of some decree from the top.

"We've decided that this is what you must now believe and support". 

I've never defined myself in such narrow, linear, terms.

I mean, I'm of the opinion that all politicians are cut from similar cloth, whether on the left or right - barring a few outliers. And I am firmly against the notion that ALL those who support any political ideology are inherently bad. I've got friends and family members who are die-hard Tories, even though I've never voted Conservative in my life. Yes, there are the radicals and the extremists, who tend to be the vocal ones, but most of us just want to live our life. 

I also find myself getting wound up by those extreme elements, regardless of political affiliation; the ones who shout the loudest, and ensure those on the opposite side dig in deeper. You can't move forwards if you remain entrenched. There has to always be a search for common ground, a compromise with those who might listen. You can't do that by gloating, or mocking, or screaming.

However, Trump always felt different, which is why I've been unable to stay silent. Likewise Brexit. They felt more like existential moral issues to me (and I mean no disrespect to anyone who feels differently; I hope we can disagree respectfully), ones that had the potential to directly affect my family. They felt like mistakes, borne upon misinformation and lies.

Trump might not be our president, and we might have our own shower of amoral buffoons in charge right now, but there's the old adage that 'America sneezes and the world catches a cold'. Trump, even in the year of Covid, has dominated the news around the world ever since he got elected. America, for all its faults, and as foreign as it is, remains the most powerful country on the planet. What happens there affects us all. Especially now, with the globalisation created by the Internet. 

Trump's slim defeat feels like there's a chance now to win against a dangerous ideology that began just as I re-emerged with Digitiser2000. As has now been established, Steve Bannon saw what was happening with Gamergate, and applied it to politics. Gamergate was the canary in the coalmine, warning us that there was this whole underground element of the disaffected that wanted to lash out at the establishment. Trumpism was that writ large.

I'm a member of a Reddit group called AskTrumpSupporters, where non-supporters can ask questions of those who are, and it's clear in there that they knew Trump's flaws, but that it's precisely why they supported him. They wanted a hand grenade in the White House. Mercifully, they seem to have accepted that he has lost, and now needs to stand down with some degree of grace. The chaos is what many of them voted for. And many of them voted for Trump because they generally believe he was sent from God to save the world, but that's by the by.

I don't think for a minute there has been any conclusive defeat here. Trump isn't going to shut-up. He'll remain a powerful figure. MAGA is a movement that isn't going away. And Biden, with a Republican-controlled Senate nipping at his heels, and what will be a lingering belief that he cheated his way to the presidency, has his work cut out. 

Nonetheless, it's a glimmer of hope after four years when I felt the world I knew was sliding out of whack. Slipping back to an era of autocrats and chaos. I was worried that might be the natural order of things, and that we were in for even darker times. So that's why I was celebrating last night. Just the sheer relief I felt that the bulwarks of democracy held against an unprecedented assault.

This election was never about Biden. It was always a vote against Trump, because - frankly - anything and anyone would be better than him. I hated the cult of personality, how all of us were living in the shadow of one damaged, dangerously narcissistic, ill-equipped, amoral individual. Nobody should ever wield that level of power.

We've been shown how easy it is for a society to concede its freedom and control to the wrong person. If nothing else, I hope that Trump's greatest achievement is to have served as a warning to us all to stay alert to it happening again. It has been 75 years since World War 2 ended. Maybe he was just what we needed.