Well, at last I’ve ceased hand-wringing about the awfulness of the candidates for the presidency of the United States and have made up my mind.
Published: 18 July 2024
In 2016, I watched election results gloomily, equally appalled by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I couldn’t stand his vulgarity, grossness, egotism and unnerving unpredictability.
Nor could I stick her smug elitism, undeserved sense of entitlement, and cynical embrace of identity politics. Like Martin Luther King, I believe people should be chosen for their character, not the colour of their skin or their sexual preferences.
Having realised as the results trickled in that I couldn’t even decide which of them I most wanted to lose, I went to bed.
When I woke up and found Mrs Clinton was probably a goner, I found I was pleased.
I had never got over the speech she gave at an LGBT campaign fundraising event during which she described “half” of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables – racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”.
In 2020, I was still torn. Trump was still weird, gross and narcissistic, but he’d been a better president than I had anticipated and his vice-president Mike Pence was decent and competent and mostly hated for being a believing Christian, which had become anathema to smart people.
Biden seemed reasonably sane, though showing already some worrying signs of age, and his vice-presidential choice of Kamala Harris, apparently because she ticked the sex and colour boxes, seemed dangerous.
If you’re old, surely you owe it to the country to choose someone who communicated clearly rather than speaking fashionable gibberish, like one of her favourite phrases: “I can imagine what will be, unburdened by what was”.
She has proved to be what people who believe in recruiting and promoting on merit – rather than in rigid obedience to the human resources tyranny of EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) – privately call a diversity hire.
Biden has got a lot wrong, and – clearly suffering from dementia – is behaving atrociously now in demanding his re-nomination as of right. And it looks as if the useless Kamala is a fixture.
Trump behaved appallingly in defeat in 2020 and Biden is different but just as anti-democratic in 2024.
But though at 78, Trump is only three years younger, he has, as far as I’m concerned, proven himself by far the better candidate with one brilliant decision. He has chosen Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate.
I’ve been a fan of Vance since in 2016 I read his inspirational Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which tells the story of how America’s political elite have consistently betrayed Hillary’s “deplorables” – the Protestant Scots Irish people who have always been intensely loyal to their country but are ignored or mocked as rednecks and white trash.
Despite a family background of poverty, divorce, drugs and alcoholism, with the help of his grandparents Mamaw and Papaw, Vance graduated from high school and enlisted in the Marine Corps where he developed a sense of purpose which would take him to Yale, a law degree, the marriage to another lawyer, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants, financial success and the Senate.
Vance had been a bitter critic of Trump until over the past few years he gradually began to appreciate his virtues.
Trump – who relates to his working-class followers – for his part, chose a brilliantly articulate man with a first-class, questioning, independent mind who is still loyal to his roots rather than a box-ticking acolyte.
I think it wonderful that at last loyal people who have been despised by their rulers and often these days live lives of opioid-ridden hopelessness at last have a champion who may soon be able to fight their cause in the White House.
I’ll be cheering for Trump.
