Trump triumphant. The circus comes to town.

Trump triumphant: the circus comes to town.

There are some unhappy people in my ‘hood, as this neighbor’s sign declares. Unhappy children, too, but for another reason: The Big Apple Circus went bust this week. Critics have called such circus acts ‘another display of human exceptionalism and dominance over animals.’ So the circus bit the sawdust.

But brush away those tears, children, because a new circus is coming to town. From January 2017 you’ll find an exceptional human housed between locations in New York City and Florida and Washington DC. And you know of whom I speak.

And, dear neighbor, take down your sign because maybe – just maybe – your ‘mourning’ in America might become ‘morning in America.’ That was the promise made by the last movie star to become US President, Ronald Reagan.

After twenty mind-numbing months the US presidential election is over. We all know that, like Brexit, the smart people got it wrong. The ‘forgotten people’ were given a voice and a vote and they used it in the service of the man who would be king.

And Donald Trump, we can all agree, is exceptional, regardless of your political or personal views (readers will know mine are opposed to most of his.) The man is a one-off - a guy who uses blunt sentences to rally blunt people to his cause (‘Proud to be a Deplorable’ is not loaded with nuance.)

But the after-shock is over, at least for me. It has taken two weeks to muster what’s left of my mental faculties in the service of my blog. We must face The Age of Trump. Or as others term it: ‘We’re screwed.’

So what is new here?

What astonishes me now is that some of the same media ‘smart people’ are – with characteristic arrogance - forecasting a foreshortened tenure for the president-elect. One New York Times columnist wrote that Trump ‘will have resigned or been impeached within a year.’ Right. This is the same guy who said The Donald would never be the Republican nominee - oops! Okay, he’s the nominee but he’ll never be president - double oops.

The media misfire, wrote one, was the result of ‘smart people’ taking Trump literally and not seriously but his supporters taking him seriously and not literally.

In some quarters, the national anguish continues. National Public Radio (NPR), America’s listener-supported channel (a kind of BBC Lite with a fraction of the resources) is running a nightly talk-in called ‘The United States of Anxiety.’ This program gives the nation’s pessimists a forum for public handwringing. To which my response – and I’m sure the response of most pragmatic people – is ‘get a grip!’

Other stunned liberals watching Trump’s first days as president-elect have concluded ‘the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation…. should now be a distant memory.’ (The New Yorker)

Clearly none of these people have had bad bosses thrust upon them, or relatives that they have to mix with at family events. Otherwise they’d know that the sensible courses of action are: Keep your head down. Suck it up. Eat the turkey.

Does that mean we embrace ideas and actions that repulse us? Not a bit. I’d suggest it means it's a sign of strength to wait for events to unfold. The late Mario Cuomo, sometime Governor of New York, famously said that ‘you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.’ Donald Trump’s rhetoric is far from poetic but, so far, he has exhorted his followers with ideas that others find repulsive. We have yet to see actions. And already the ‘prose’ sounds different: he has modified his views on climate change and water-boarding terrorists. He has declared no interest in ‘hurting’ the Clintons.

These are early days, however, and we need to wait and see (and protest vigorously) if Trump follows through on some of his more outrageous ‘poetry.’

After the election, I listened to the few Republicans I know to hear their reaction to the result. Professional people, they were pleased but thoughtful. None of them had warm feelings towards Obama; they didn't think he’d done much for America’s standing in the world and they judged his healthcare plan deformed on delivery.

Neither did my friends speak highly of Trump as an individual (‘he’s a zero’ said one) but they admired his ability to engage with working class folks who have felt – for many years – ignored by the ‘arrogant elite’ in political and media circles. And they could relate to Trump’s belief that globalism had caused America’s struggling manufacturing, its teetering infrastructure, and its rotting inner cities. Above all, they admired Trump’s ability to triumph over the fee-seeking ‘Clinton machine’ and to push over the ‘hollow trees’ – as Peggy Noonan in the WSJ termed them – of the Washington establishment.

Before this election only eight in one hundred Americans believed that the US Congress  - the arm of this establishment - was ‘doing a good job.’ With Trump as their tribune, sixty million of them have voted ‘to drain the swamp.’

So let’s watch what happens when tribune Trump steps on dry land because, as military men remind us, ‘the map is not the territory.’

Happy Thanksgiving!

Brian Clewly Johnson

Amagansett, NY

November 2016