Suzanne Harrington: We're living in an alternative universe, there's no other explanation for Trump
In April 2016, the Large Hadron Collider – the biggest particle accelerator on earth – temporarily broke down when a small furry animal, thought to be a pine martin, although it could have been a weasel, chewed through a cable. The creature’s carbonised remains were found somewhere inside the 17-mile science fiction machine. This really happened.
It was probably at that precise moment the universe was zapped into an alternative reality, one from which scientists have as yet been unable to zap us back, which is why for the past four years we have all been living in a parallel universe where Donald Trump has been the president of the United States. David Bowie had prior knowledge, and exited before we were flipped into this new dimension, warning Prince before he left.
I see no other logical explanation for the past four years, do you?
The problem, now that we have all been immersed in the minutiae of how the US election system works, is not Trump anymore, but what Trump has unleashed. A Pandora’s box of toxic fuckery; the White House’s loser is merely the inflamed orange tip on white America’s seething hate pustule. Drain the swamp? Lance the fascist boil more like.
One of the starkest images of the US election was a mannequin with the word Antifa on its chest, strapped to the front of a gigantic white 4x4 covered in Trump slogans, fake blood smeared all over the bonnet, so that it looked like a person who had been deliberately run over. The ‘fa’ in ‘antifa’ is short for ‘fascist’, so if you are anti antifa, then you are... fa.
From the land of the free to land of the fa, Trump has reignited America’s ingrained apartheid, giving its baked-in racism a front-row seat and a loud hailer, and a whopping dose of aggrieved entitlement. Not for any ideological reasons – he doesn’t have an ideology beyond his own hairdo - but so that he could harness the hate to grab power, the way the monsters harness the screams of children to generate electricity in Monsters Inc. And it worked. Oh boy, how it worked.
Perversely, Trump supporters regard ‘antifa’ – those who oppose racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and other forms of hate - as extremists. These are the same Trump supporters who have been turning up at legal polling centres with guns, denying science, supporting putting toddlers in cages, and remain devoted to a narcissistic billionaire who thinks contagious diseases can be cured by injecting bleach. Surreally, they also believe he cares about them.
The true horror of all of this has not been some orange-dipped cockwomble in the White House since 2016, but the fact that around 40-45% of American voters – after four years of witnessing him in action – voted for him again. They can’t all be missing a chromosome – these are ordinary Americans, voting for four more years of fascist chaos. Excuse me while I seek answers via the cremated remains of a small mammal in a tunnel somewhere underneath Switzerland.
