Maeve Higgins: We all deserve better — perhaps now that Trump is gone, we'll get it

Men erect flags on top of a building as residents of Ballina, Co Mayo, Ireland. File picture: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

It was the shrieks of my neighbours that told me who won in the end.

After long days of waiting and watching, I did not find out from the TV or the phone; it was the excited yells, honking car horns, and clattering pots and pans from the street outside that told me Trump was out.

He lost, a one-term president, soon to be gone. Only four incumbent presidents have been voted out in the last 100 years - Trump becomes the fifth - and it is an exceptional result in many other ways too.

I grabbed the dog and headed down my Brooklyn block, waving and clapping to my older neighbours standing on their steps, waving their Biden/Harris 2020 signs and hooting: “We did it!”.

I got to the big avenue at the end of my block, closed to traffic on weekends so that the restaurants can use the space for outdoor dining, and that is where the party really started.

Crowds of us danced to makeshift beats, stopping and starting to laugh and cheer with friends we recognised behind their masks. Children sat high on their parents’ shoulders clapping like it was the Thanksgiving Day parade, which was cancelled this year because of Covid-19.

This was better anyway, consisting as it did of two post office trucks slowly making their way through the crowds. The mailmen inside waved like kings, we filmed and screamed our thanks, one woman bowed to them theatrically and my friend Steve started a chant to the tune of ‘USA’ except with the words ‘US Mail’. Not exactly brilliant, but emotions were high!

Postal workers are essential workers, who kept the country, and crucially the ballots, moving throughout the pandemic, despite the Trump administration’s sustained efforts to cut the United States Postal Service’s funding and undermine their work.

After living under this administration for four years, the feeling in New York City this weekend was primarily one of relief and joy. I believe this relief and this joy are more about Trump losing than about Biden winning. Trump lost not only the popular vote, but the electoral college: the complicated and problematic process that has too often put all of the power over a majority of people into the hands of a minority of people.

As analysis continues, a clearer picture of who put Biden over the top emerges. Young black voters in Georgia, Native American voters in Arizona, and black women throughout the country. In her speech on Saturday, Kamala Harris said that black women are too often overlooked, but “so often prove they are the backbone of our democracy".  

As a black woman herself, a South Asian woman, and a daughter of immigrants, she will take the reins from a president who told white supremacists to stand by, making her ascent something even more stunning and important. She vowed too that while she may be the first, she will not be the last.

I am putting aside, for now, the fact that more than 70m Americans did vote for Donald Trump. Those voters endorsed Trump’s actions over these past years, they saw clearly what he stands for, and decided they wanted more of the same.

I am putting aside too, for now, the intensity of the fight that lies ahead of us to deal with all of the same problems we faced before this election, like the virus, the climate crises, and the cruel inequalities of late-stage American capitalism.

I am taking a moment to fully enjoy just what the American people have put a stop to, I want to see where they have drawn the line, and understand why.

Similar to one in three New Yorkers, I was not born in the US. Today, I am understanding what his defeat means to me as a woman, an immigrant, and an Irish person.

Forgive me if I have not been clear about this already — I never wanted Trump to get into office.

I have seen first-hand the danger of the media pretending to be objective. That pretence may come from a misguided notion of ‘balance’, but it is essentially a lie to say you don’t have a point of view, particularly when dealing with a fascist.

George Orwell is my guide here, stating in his essay 'Why I Write': 

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.”

Donald Trump is a racist: referring to people attempting to cross the border as animals, banning many Muslim majority nations from entering the country, demanding and almost completely achieving a halt to immigrants from what he terms "shithole countries". He is a liar, of extraordinary proportion: he lies about why he never served in the military, he lies about his tax returns. He even lies about his racism. He is allegedly an abuser: more than 26 women have credibly accused him of sexual assault and, in at least one case, rape.

Under his wilfully neglectful watch, almost 10m people in this country have contracted Covid-19, and 237,000 have died from the virus. The economy has faltered and over 10m of the initial 22m jobs lost because of the pandemic have not returned.

White supremacists have murdered Black Lives Matter protestors on the streets and immigrant children have died on the floors of his prisons.

As deadly as these lapses have been, his successes have been disastrous as well. He has appointed judges who threaten our bodily autonomy with their ideologies.  He has decimated the asylum system, alienating formerly friendly nations and given out passes to unfriendly ones.

This, we all know. I have never experienced living in a place so keenly watched from afar.

My family and friends around the world, from Dubai to Sydney to Cobh, pay closer attention to American politics than their own. There is a grotesque fascination with any cartoonish, autocratic figure of course, but it is more than that. Whatever happens here cascades throughout the world.

The US has long replicated and reinforced its global power, from invading Mexico in the 1840s to rigging elections in South America in the 1970s, right up to supplying bombs to the Saudi Arabians’ war on Yemen today. The country spends more on its military than any other country, but it is not just a threat in those obvious ways. By pulling out of the Paris Agreement, the entire global response to the climate crisis we are facing was irrevocably weakened.

President-elect Biden recognises that climate change is the number one issue facing humanity.

He says it is his number one issue, and he has promised to tackle it. This could quite literally improve our species' chances of survival. The world is deeply invested in the future of America because we have to be.

Irishness seeps into a Democratic win, the way it always does. President-elect Biden comes from Irish stock, and claims it often. He borrows the culture too, quoting Seamus Heaney when he accepted the party nomination and again in campaign videos throughout the election. The Biden campaign manager is a woman by the name of Jen O’Malley Dillon, with ancestors from Galway; she too is proudly an Irish-American.

More pertinent perhaps is who he will appoint to his cabinet, but it is important to remember that having the Irish diaspora in power is not necessarily something to celebrate. There was no shortage of Irish Americans in the Trump administration and they were as depraved as their boss, if not more so.

US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, Mick Mulvaney. Picture:Gareth Chaney/Collins

I still wince when I think of Mick Mulvaney, wearing a pocket full of shamrocks in honour of St Patrick’s Day, announcing sweeping cuts to famine relief under his proposed budget in 2017. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget before becoming Trump’s chief of staff for a spell, then falling out of favour and ending the term as the US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland.

While it is not important who is Irish in the Biden administration, it is important that the people he places in the West Wing, and across all government agencies, alongside his lawyers and his policy advisors, are the most capable and most humane people available. It is also important they represent the diversity of this country, that they range in ethnicity, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation. They have much to do, and a short time to do it in.

I want nothing more than to fully feel that Trump is gone, but of course that is not the case. Trump’s trajectory is tied to America’s; he did not come out of nowhere, rather he is of this place and from this place. In some form, what Trump represents will be back. 

For now, I am going to put my mask on and go back outside to celebrate. My neighbour just yelled up the steps that there is a man outside wearing a Puerto Rican flag and he is tossing out paper towels. I love these people, and they deserve so much better than a tyrant in the White House.

We all deserve better — and perhaps now, we will get it.