Oh, dear God, no

This week: well, here we go again. Also: some notes on the dodo.

The best thing to be said about last night’s election result is: at least I didn’t stay up to see it.

Normally, in presidential years, I obsess about US elections, poring each day over maps and polls and refusing to go to bed on the night itself, even though the time difference means it’d make far more sense to just get up early. This year, though, for the first time in over two decades, I didn’t do any of that. Having spent the night of the Brexit referendum playing the part of Cassandra at a party where no one else was reading tweets from pollsters – and then flown, that autumn, to the US, so I could be in Washington to experience the same night again, but worse – I didn’t much fancy watching hope die live on television. I’d know in the morning. And anyway I had work to do today. (The episode of Oh God, What Now? I’m recording later will helpfully double as therapy.)

So, I crashed out about 1am, by which time it was already clear the “unexpected Harris blow out” theory, suggested as a possibility by that rogue Iowa poll and a couple of friends on the ground, was not coming to pass. And when I woke up in the night, I broke with habit by refusing to even glance at my phone. It was Schrodinger’s election result: so long as I didn’t check the news, it was possible that the US had elected its first female president, and repudiated Donald Trump forever.

When I finally let the waveform collapse, sometime around 8am, Trump was still some way short of the magic 270. But he had won swing states in both sunbelt and rustbelt – Pennsylvania! – leaving Harris no plausible route to victory, and world leaders had already started congratulating him. At least the excitement didn’t stop me from going back to sleep.

There are some things in life that are simply too big to digest all at once, events so world-shaking they render everything else irrelevant. The day Britain locked down for Covid, I remember realising that we simply had no frame of reference for a news event that would wreck public, private and social life simultaneously: that would blow up businesses, and wreck educations, and prevent some people from finding partners, and keep others trapped with their abusers, and do a bunch of stuff that I’m not even aware of, all at once. There are some events – you can probably guess what else I’m thinking of – that irreparably carve time into before and after, where it can take months to even notice the implications, let alone to process them. 

We will, I think, be extremely lucky for this not to fall into that category. Here are just a few of the things worrying me right now:

• If the new/old president goes through with his plan to throw up huge tariff barriers, that’ll be terrible for the entire rest of the global economy. The old cliche goes that, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold; Trump’s plan amounts to forcibly injecting it with flu. 

• That means those who’ve spent their entire careers in an area of flat productivity – that is, anyone aged under about 37 – is going to be waiting even longer for a pay rise.

• That in turn could wreck the chances of the growth the Labour government is relying on to fix its creaking state. 

• Which probably increases the chance of an anti-incumbency vote, driven by economic anxiety – of the sort I suspect to have been a huge factor in the US – at the next election, and a return of Tory government after just one term.

• Which increases the odds of Kemi Badenoch being Prime Minister.

• Boris Johnson may attempt a comeback. Nigel Farage will be emboldened.

• But never mind any of that because Trump has also promised to end the war in Ukraine on Day One, by making a deal with the Russian government – and we can all imagine what such a deal might involve. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is already tweeting his praise for the new president's strength, which feels like a good strategy, but nonetheless: he might be about to see his country carved up.

• Which might embolden Russia to march on, say, Lithuania, a country which is in both NATO and the EU, but which Russian nationalists remain convinced is theirs.

• At which point our foreign policy choices are surely “the complete collapse of NATO and the post-war order” or “land war in Europe, if we’re lucky”.

...I’m going to stop there, because it’s becoming overwhelming. You’ll notice I’ve not even mentioned the future of a polling industry that underestimated Trump’s vote share for a third election running, or public faith in future polls, because even though that’s a bit that interests me it hardly seems to even matter right now. (For what it’s worth, Professor Ben Ansell thinks they were quite good.) I’ve not touched on the implications of all this for women or minority rights in the US. Or those for Israeli policy, and the future of Palestine. Or the threats to the immigrants Trump has promised to deport, or the chances of JD Vance ending up as a president and trying to deliver the horrendous Project 2025, or questions over whether Donald Trump meant it when he told Americans that after this one election they’d never need to vote again.

At least the far right will not be attempting to overturn this election result through violence, I guess?

I kind of wish I’d left the cat in the box, if I’m honest. 

It’s the end of the links as we know it 

Mixing up the order this week, to reflect a world in chaos. Before we begin, though, here’s a comment on a link I am no longer including, because it’s been rendered entirely irrelevant by the news:

(I am writing this on Monday morning, in full knowledge I’ll have to delete this bit if he’s wrong, which is quite a hostage to fortune in itself.)

You’ll never know for sure. Anyway, the links:

1. Matt Taylor, who I’m mentoring as part of New Writing North’s “A Writing Chance” programme, continues to do brilliant work on his substack, Underclass Hero. I particularly enjoyed this piece, which he wrote for National Care Leavers Week: “There are more people in space than care leavers at the University of Oxford”. 

There are more people in space than care leavers at the University of Oxford

2. At some point, a friend reminded me a few days ago, I seem to have made a Spotify playlist named Trumpocalypse Now. I have no memory of this, but the fact it contains a bunch of songs I don’t recognise suggests I may have crowdsourced it. Anyway, enjoy.

3. By the end of the election, the Economist’s polling model had the odds of each candidate winning at 50/50. (LOL, etc.) This is frequently described as a “coin toss” but, notes Alex Selby-Boothroyd, an actual coin has a 51% chance of landing the same way up as it started. So, now you know.

4. This piece on Wonkette, by my friend Dominic Gwynne, was an infuriating bit on the duplicity of Jill Stein.

5. Hey, here’s another picture of my book A History of the World in 47 Borders in the window at Foyles on the South Bank, because (did I mention this?) it’s shortlisted for book of the year:

No, I am obviously not as famous as Sally Rooney, which is why you can see her a lot more easily than you can see me. I am there, though (second from the left on the bottom row) Anyway, you can buy the book from Foyles, Waterstones, Amazon or my US publisher, The Experiment.

6. Living in 1999? Going to the Millennium Experience, in London’s up and coming North Greenwich district? Friend of the newsletter Ed Jefferson has found you a helpful map: