The UK doesn’t like Donald Trump. We politically correct, superior, civilised Democrat sympathizers think he is a bully, a brute, a Neanderthal and not sensitive at all to the feelings of minorities and women. We campaign to stop him getting into our country. Our media campaigns against him, especially Channel 4. We see countless interviews with US celebrities who don’t like him and it reinforces what we already knew. God knows why those ignorant Americans would ever vote for him. Don’t they listen to Hollywood like we do? Didn’t they learn from the Bush years? We didn’t like him either.
But hey, most Americans couldn’t find France on a world map. What do they know? Most Brits couldn’t locate Texas, but that doesn’t matter. France is a country. They are worse than us. Look at gun control. No civilised human would want guns in the hands of anyone but the state. OK, it seems the police has been killing a few blacks lately, but that doesn’t prove that she state shouldn’t have guns, that is a proof of racism. They are racist! And they let their poor people die on the streets. They believe in God but not in socialised health care. That should settle the dispute.
They did get it right the last couple of times. They elected a democrat. A black democrat, even. He is doing much better than Bush. We hated Bush because he went to war in the Middle East. He said it was in the name of democracy, but we know it was oil. Ironically we would have supported a war for democracy, but now we fear the outcome of the democratic process in the US. Democracy is great, but people shouldn’t just be able to vote for anyone they like. Obama is no war monger. He bombs away freely and is especially fond of drones – and hasn’t quite closed Guantanamo. But he has a good heart. He must have; he got the Nobel Peace Price.
We do recognise that millions of Americans have a feeling of being left behind, which Trump is tapping into. Our hero, President Obama, says things are going swell, the American economy is steaming ahead and the Republican doomsday prophets are peddling nonsense. But even though we want to believe the first black president of the United States, we have an unnerving feeling that he might be wrong on this one. There is a disconnect between Washington and blue collar Americans. There is after all a similar disconnect between Westminster and blue collar Brits…
So we know, actually. We do understand. They have Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. We have Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn. Trump and Farage offer scapegoats. Sanders and Corbyn offer easy solutions. We probably know that they are all wrong. But we also know that things are not right the way they are. So we are susceptible to anyone offering an alternative. That’s why Trump might beat Hillary Clinton. Channel 4’s worst nightmare might come true…