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It was no less a political analyst than Bruce Springsteen who called it in 2016: “The trouble at the moment is you have Donald Trump, who is talking about rigged elections,” he told Channel 4 News, prophetically before the-then presidential candidate returned to his obsession with rigged elections four years later. Springsteen goes on in the interview to predict that Trump would lose. He clearly got that wrong, but it was his next statement that struck home then as it does now with even more purchase: "He's such a flagrant, toxic narcissist that he wants to take down the entire democratic system with him if he goes."

“Toxic narcissist.” Two words that perfectly capture the man who became the 45th President of the United States, and when he did, subjected us to four years of unrelenting madness. You can decide for yourself whether this was real insanity or a form of eccentricity, but madness it has mostly resembled from the get-go, from the all-caps rants via Twitter to the endless revolving door of firings and hirings of cabinet secretaries and key staffers, plus the fanbase-bating dog whistles towards targets as varied as Mexico, Europe, China and even the UK’s “Muslim problem”. 

To his defenders, he’s been a breath of fresh air. “Drain the swamp,” he promised, as he took on Washington’s institutional culture and the mainstream “fake news” media (i.e. any outlet who didn’t sycophantically provide ra-ra for him). Week in, week out, day in, day out, the  “Me! Me! Me!”  tweets and self-regarding speeches have been endless. Quite what Trump actually achieved over these last four years in office is, actually, hard to ascertain. Jobs - at least until the pandemic - are up, they say. The economy - at least until the pandemic - is up, they say. The populist view is that America never had it so good, they say. History will judge.

Picture: Channel 4 News

Later in his Channel 4 interview, Springsteen added the following to his appraisal by saying how Trump was so unreflective: “He simply has no sense of decency, no sense of responsibility about him. The words that he’s been using over the past several weeks really are an attack on the entire democratic process. I think it’s very dangerous. He does have a lot of people’s ears, and I don’t think he’s going to go quietly, gently into the good night, I think he’s going to make as big a mess as he can, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but we’ll find out shortly.” Well, fast forward four years, and we are where we are. Tomorrow Trump will leave the White House, board Marine One and chopper out to Andrews Air Force Base. From there he’ll fly to his own Camelot, Mar-a-Lago, the sprawling but surprisingly modest golf resort in Florida that will presumably be the bunker in which he plots his next move. It's anyone's guess as to what that will be, even if we can optimistically hope for a period of quiet reflection out of the spotlight. Donald Trump, we have seen over these last four years, doesn’t do quiet reflection.

What he does leave behind is a ruptured America, scarred by the events on Capitol Hill and fearful for what might happen now. And well they might be, when you see scenes of heavily armed militiamen, like the 'Boogaloo Boys' roaming city streets with a staggering belligerence. This is not Mogadishu or the lawless reaches of Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq. No, we're talking about streets in the world’s biggest economy and its most powerful democracy. In fact, right now, there are more American soldiers in their nation’s capital city than currently in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq combined. That might be overblown precaution, but then it’s clear that the attack on the Capitol had been strongly hinted at beforehand by chatter on the Dark Web, so a chastened law enforcement establishment will not want to make the same mistake again before tomorrow’s inauguration.

The scenes outside and inside the Capitol on 6 January filled me with genuine sadness. I’ve spent more time in the United States as a visitor than any other country, spending annual holidays and long weekends there, visiting for work and even living there for two years. In fact, I was at home in California during 9/11, the last time the country felt genuinely afraid, but which rallied in the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. 9/11 showed America at its most resilient. Trump has shone a light on America at its most divided. 

He was always going to be an unconventional president, but that, going back four years, would have been a polite way of calling it. Twitter comes in for a lot of attention, but then, rightly so. It’s been his medium of choice. Rather than use conventional presidential mouthpieces, the 140 character limit (later raised to 280) provided unbridled access to his audience. At first it was even amusing: the actual Donald Trump (emphasised by the @realDonaldTrump handle) tweeting, not a team of millennial social media hotshots with Harvard degrees. No, the prez himself, from his very own iPhone, and often at a time of day when many assumed he was sat on the Shanks Vitreous, performing his morning ablutions as he ripped into individual opponents, institutions and topics that raised his ire. This daily, diarrheic river would drive the narrative of the next 48 months or so.

But, even if you regard this as eccentricity or, merely, an unconventional leader at work, another view emerges that goes beyond egomaniacal craziness. Eight months after he was sworn in, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote an excoriating profile, questioning whether he was, in fact, really all there. It was fascinating and frightening. Taibbi’s conclusion was that President Trump had become a very difficult personality to Donald J. Trump, celebrity property developer and reality show host. Irrationality, Taibbi argued, was, on some level, working for him. Until last November’s election result, the daily madness just became par for the course, the Twitter rants more tiresome, the firings and hirings monotonous, and even the brain farts about foreign targets (e.g. “Rocketman” Kim Jong-Un) sinister bluster. Somewhere along the way, however, we’ve gone from a Johnny Rotten figure saying “Boo!” for shock effect, to the apparent marshal of an insurrection. Trump’s leadership since the election has looked more like that of a cult chief, desperate even, with his “stolen election” rhetoric, blatant untruths and conspiracy theories, and even the hectoring of Georgia’s Secretary of State by phone. 

6 January seemed to be the final act. In hindsight, that rally in front of the White House now resembles an effective call to arms, Trump's very own Agincourt speech. The loud post-election grumbling about votes and other apparent injustices - the repeat cycle of 2016's theme - escalated to the point that Trump was now the leader of a fully mobilised militant cult. His  tacit endorsement of the extreme component of the audience assembled on Pennsylvania Avenue, fuelled by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “combat”, lit the blue touch paper. The crowd that stormed the Capitol had more than a wild staring eyed nature about their zeal. One pony-tailed backwoods type who leered into a television camera even resembled Dennis Hopper’s whacked-out photographer in Apocalypse Now (“Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense.”). Trump as Colonel Kurtz? It's not that ridiculous.

The Capitol insurrection might not yet be the final act: the 20,000 National Guard troops, augmented by Secret Service special forces and a beleaguered police, are still expecting more, and even worse. Trump's final day in office is unfolding, and with it the potential for further mayhem, not least of which, the pardoning of hundreds - something in the president's gift - that could even include the president himself. Even this adds further to the exhaustion we’ve all been suffering from. I actually stopped following Trump on Twitter a while ago, as it was actually affecting my mental health. But now, in theory, it’s over. 

Whether you think Joe Biden will be a good president or not, we can’t have anything worse. Regardless of your politics, America was, mostly, doing fine until Trump came along. To return to the punk theme, that musical movement came along, briefly made some noise, shook the tree a little, and then things returned to normal. Trump as America's first punk president? Not so wild an idea. But instead of presenting a refreshing alternative, he's left a legacy of division, drawing out demons that have always been there, but thankfully had been kept hidden. Brexit had a similar effect here, and comparisons between what happened in Washington and the murder of MP Jo Cox shouldn’t go unnoticed.

The way forward, however, is now partly in Biden's hands, and partly in the hands of a Republican Party that made a Faustian pact with Trump to acquire power. Even if the Congressional impeachment vote last week showed a resilient latent support for Trump within his own party, the sentiment more broadly is that he’s a spent force, and a toxic one, too. If an impeachment trial in the Senate does render him unfit for any further public office, thus denying Trump a tilt at the 2024 vote, the party will have to move on and reflect. Right-wing fanaticism, however, didn’t end in April 1945 with a self-applied bullet in the Führerbunker. Acolytes of that particular strain have festered ever since, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's impassioned video the other week drew necessary comparison to.

Like it or not, Trump hasn’t gone for good. Even if he does choose to spend his time now trying to fix his ailing business empire or just playing a lot of golf, the Senate impeachment trial will keep him and his cult firmly in the spotlight. The madness is not quite over. Perhaps, though, America will be given the chance to heal, and return to the kind of political discourse led by intelligent reason, and not the ravings of a glorified bar room braggart, a Homer Simpson character perched on a stool in Moe's Tavern, giving forth his views on anything that enters his noggin.

Universal exports - David Hepworth's Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There

In early December 1992, 25 years of age and recently furnished with a decent redundancy package, I touched down at Los Angeles International Airport with mouth agape. The America I’d grown up with, vicariously, through the myriad TV shows recorded in Southern California, was finally right in front of me. And it didn’t feel in any way unusual. 

Normally, when you travel abroad, you are immediately assaulted by new sights, sounds and smells. You visit a local supermarket and, by a rite of passage, groceries with amusingly rude brand names bring out the inner sniggering schoolboy in you. But not in LA. There, the sky was as blue as I’d seen it on The Rockford Files and the Six Million Dollar Man, my childhood television staples. The freeways were just as they were on CHiPs, the mountains just as they were used to substitute for Korea in M*A*S*H. And, yes, Santa Monica Beach was just as it appeared on Baywatch. Even the Hollywood sign didn’t seem that startling: “Oh yeah, that,” as I made the first of many ridiculous attempts to find the perfect vantage point in Beachwood Canyon to photograph it.

Of course, I loved it, and that visit to California became the first of many, including two years living there and living the dream for real. Four months after my maiden trip to the US of A, I went to New York (also, the first of many visits since). This proved to be a cultural reawakening of similar stature to my Californian experience, walking the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan, doing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tours, splurging on cheaper CDs at Tower Records, eating in diners and enjoying the exchange rate benefit by cleaning out Macy’s of clothing at more than two dollars to the pound. You can repeat these patterns in any one of a number of pleasure and work trips in the 28 years since that first visit.

All of this is brought to mind by Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There, the latest instalment of David Hepworth's impressive run of brilliantly researched book-essays on pop music culture. It starts with the premise of the so-called ‘British Invasion’, the wave of British pop bands which commenced with The Beatles travelling to America in 1964, closely followed by the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and many others. Collectively, they effectively imported the very rock and roll that had been exported via somewhat nebulous supply lines, be they Elvis Presley’s music heard fertively via offshore radio stations, Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock in cinemas, or the blues records entering Britain via its seaports, which so famously found, in that fateful meeting at Dartford railway station, kindred spirits in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Britain, it shouldn’t be forgotten, wasn’t long out of the economic and social austerity of World War Two when John, Paul, George and Ringo landed at Kennedy Airport to make the first of three appearances in February 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, the top-rated Sunday evening institution on the CBS network. They had, actually, appeared before on American television the previous November when a news report covered Beatlemania in Britain. Such was the interest it generated that 4,000 fans turned out to meet the band at JFK when they landed on 7 February. While my first visit to the US wasn’t met with anywhere near the same fervour - in fact no fervour at all - Hepworth examines what it must have been like for The Beatles, four twentysomethings from lower middle class Liverpool backgrounds, to suddenly experience an America they probably had significantly less cultural experience of than I had. At least I’d seen Charlie’s Angels on a weekly basis.

David Hepworth

What must still be admired today about the Fabs’ arrival in America - their first live appearance on the Sullivan show garnered an audience of 73 million - is that it established a new relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Just twenty years before, more than a million GIs had been been based on British shores in anticipation of D-Day, grabbing the girls and splashing their not insignificant disposable income around in country pubs to the annoyance of impoverished, ration book-imposed, horny local adolescents. “We saved your ass,” was probably the inbound refrain. But here, in Hepworth’s book, a reverse tide made gods from state-to-state out of young British men, playing mail order-purchased, American-made Fender guitars, as the rock and roll and blues America had inadvertently sent our way, was brought back in spades by these Limey upstarts. 

The Rolling Stones, Hepworth cites, were prime examples of this. Starting out as exclusively a covers band, their evolution into “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” - a description they continue to earn, 56 years later - was founded in America. Hepworth notes that their first signature hit, Satisfaction, came to Keith Richards as a riff while staying at a Florida motel. Lyrically it’s a song about American life, not a lad from a bombsite suburb in Kent who’d never set foot abroad until a couple of years before. Whether Satisfaction was autobiographical or simply a song that worked, it, Hepworth demonstrates, undoubtedly channeled the America that Richards had been infusing via his Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters imports.

While some of these fresh-off-the-boat young men (and they were, exclusively, young men) inevitably found themselves guppy-mouthed at king-sized beds and en-suite hotel bathrooms, as opposed to the provincial B&Bs they’d had to endure in Britain, Hepworth moves on from the initial landings and teen-screamfests to examine how these bands evolved in an America that, itself, was undergoing social movement with the emerging war in Vietnam in the background. 

One of the most interesting sections of the book examines what made Led Zeppelin, ultimately, the most successful British band in the US during their tenure. The contrast, Hepworth notes, is that while the early British invaders - even the Rolling Stones - had a certain cuteness about them, which somewhat appealed to American heartlanders, Zeppelin built their case with sex appeal, musicianship, amplification and sheer momentum (so the legend goes, the band were totally different animals while touring the US, or during their notorious stays at the ‘Riot House’ Hyatt hotel on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, than they were when back home in their bucolic English country piles). While U2’s proclivities aren’t as documented - or even existed at all - Hepworth also examines their ambition to conquer America. Arguably, it took The Joshua Tree and all its Mojave desert imagery to do so - but, like Led Zeppelin, they found the US to be a receptive market, and set to master it, “give it what it considers it wants and needs,” Hepworth quotes a modest Bono saying in 1981.

By the time that U2 started to break America, along with bands like Culture Club (with Boy George causing quite the sensation - remember his appearance in an episode of The A-Team?), British bands had blazed a trail. American charts in the 1970s had been dominated by the likes of Elton John, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and even Fleetwood Mac, if you can consider their ‘classic’ line-up three-fifths British. It is, perhaps, no surprise, that American comedy scion Rob Reiner chose, with co-writers and American actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, to spoof a British touring rock band in This Is Spinal Tap. Led Zeppelin’s notorious tours, in which manager Peter Grant literally took suitcases of cash away from gigs, provided a model for British acts to be as gargantuan, stadia-fillingly successful in America.

Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of Hepworth tomes that brilliantly and richly get under the skin of popular music. Like it’s most recent predecessor, Nothing Is Real, and the earlier Uncommon People, A Fabulous Creation and 1971 - Never A Dull Moment it is another collection of artfully considered, not to mention highly entertaining thoughts about the music business. Each has been a superbly researched gathering of thoughts around a single theme - be it the rise of rock stars, the LP as a limited concept, or 1971 as the year everything happened (and forget anyone who says otherwise about ’66, ’67 or ’70…). 

The level of detail in Hepworth’s books is always impressive - if you like the history books of an Anthony Beevor or John Julius Norwich you will appreciate the same degree of narrative and insight - but not without the wit that Hepworth has applied in his music journalism career, in particular as editor of Smash Hits and founder editor of The Word, but also his period as co-presenter of Whistle Test with old mucker Mark Ellen. Indeed, I’ve had the pleasure of spending many highly entertaining evenings in both their company for recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcasts, pre-lockdown, in which they gently interrogate authors of similar books about music on their specialist subjects. Hepworth’s own books are also quite substantial, too, which means that, at his current rate of output, another - like the DFS Sale and the Oscars - will be coming around shortly. Which means I’d better get a move on in finishing the new one.

The feeling of helplessness as the Trump card gets played

It might be wrong to reduce the great office of President of the United States by comparing it to a science fiction film, but when the incoming 45th President is little more than a petulant child himself, treading such ground is not without its merits. Because, I can't help comparing Donald Trump's inauguration tomorrow - speeding towards us like one of those pink stretch limousines used for hen nights in Essex (a lot of noise, crass behaviour and fake tans) - with Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith. 

This third of the thoroughly underwhelming Star Wars prequels found the scheming Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (who is really the Sith Lord Darth Sidious) engineering the transformation of the Galactic Republic into the Galactic Empire, with him as Emperor, thus propelling the galaxy into decades of oppression, bolstered by the Dark Side of The Force. Got all that? 

The point I'm clumsily trying to make is that since Trump's unexpected victory on November 8, his transition from President-elect to Commander-in-Chief has been unfolding with us looking on, helpless, as he has, mostly, outlined his thoughts in a random stream-of-semi-consciousness via the medium of Twitter. He'd barely won the election before tweeting, in the early hours of November 11, "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!".

Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised: ever since he started using Twitter in 2009, Trump - then just a billionaire businessman with a history of exotic wives and a side career as America's version of Alan Sugar on The Apprentice - had used the platform for his wonky, archly dumbed-down observations, such as claiming President Obama's birth certificate was "a fraud", along with more inciteful suggestions that have mirrored the inflammatory nature of his presidential campaign. 

Since the election on November 8, Trump has, in 140 characters, declared Nigel Farage his preference for UK ambassador to Washington (breaking any number of diplomatic protocols in the process); waged personal war on Meryl Streep, branding her "overrated" and a "Hillary Flunky", just for her thinly-veiled comments about him at the Golden Globes (and this after he once included her in a glowing tweet about Hollywood's greatest talents); derided the cast of the hit Broadway show Hamilton for making a speech to Vice President-Elect Mike Pence, and had a go at Alec Baldwin for his note-perfect Trump impersonation on Saturday Night Live; and he's taken on everything and everyone from CNN and the "unfair" media to the US's own intelligence agencies.

Despite more sensible views to the contrary, Trump refuses to drop his Twitter account, declaring in typically bombastic style that it "has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.". Methinks some self-inflated opinion of his own authority here. Earlier this week, in Michael Gove's less than objective interview for The Times, the incoming president gave the following, typically rambling statement on keeping his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle, as opposed to taking over the official Presidential account:

"So I've got 46 million people right now - that's a lot, that's really a lot - but 46 million - including Facebook, Twitter and, ya know, Instagram, so when you think that you're 46 million there, I'd rather just let that build up and just keep it @realDonaldTrump. It's working - and the tweeting, I thought I'd do less of it, but I'm covered so dishonestly by the press - so dishonestly - that I can put out Twitter - and it's not 140, it's now 280 - I can go bing bing bing...and they put it on and as soon as I tweet it out - this morning on television, Fox - 'Donald Trump, we have breaking news'." Twitter, itself, must be beside itself at the publicity. 

It's amazing that with such a lack of self-editing Trump is able to tweet at all. But there, in that last line, is the crux of the matter: Trump tweets, Fox News runs it as breaking news. The White House press team will be feeling particularly redundant at this moment. Not to mention the strategy teams and all the other political advisors that would normally populate the White House staff.

Trump's supporters and a few commentators will cutely say that this break in protocol is all part of Trump's populist appeal, that he won't stand on ceremony and will tweet exactly what he wants, when he wants to tweet it, and without any consideration for who might be uncomfortable about it. Some will say that without the confines of tweets being filtered through officials and advisers, as any other form of official communication, Trump is doing what he said all along would be central to his philosophy, that "making America great again" means connecting with America, not hiding behind the Washington Beltway.The trouble is, his tweeting is beyond folksy engagement with the supposed disenfranchised of Middle America. Most of it is thin-skinned reaction. Are petulant responses to actors' joshing really what we should be seeing from the US Commander-in-Chief when there are more pressing matters to attend to, like Syria, Russia, China and the global economy? 

It brings me back to another comparison I've made - just after the election result itself - when I noted that America had elected Homer Simpson as its president, a boorish, bar hog with oddly coloured skin who'll drunkenly say anything outrageous to make him look popular. That may have been a persona to get him elected, but so far it doesn't seem to have come to an end. And nor can we expect it to for the next four years at least.

This is not America

© Simon Poulter 2016

It would be something of an understatement to say that I’ve visited America a lot. Indeed, the pages of my old passport were almost exclusively full of US entry stamps. I guess, then, that I am an Americanophile: I have embraced - pretty warmly, as it goes - its music, its culture, its fashions and its habits. Like many, I’ve been drawn in by aspiration and an odd mix of glamour and normality, by what I’ve seen on television and on the cinema screen.

Because everywhere here is a film set or a line from a song. New York is no exception. Almost 200 movies are shot in the city every year, and every avenue, every cross street, every square and every park has a ring of familiarity about it. The same was the case when I first visited the country 24 years ago, spending a month touring the West Coast. Unlike most new experiences of a different country, I felt perfectly at home on the very freeways I saw in CHiPs as a child, or amongst the hills and mountains which doubled for Korea in M*A*S*H or rural Georgia in The Dukes Of Hazard. Even for a city fame for its smog, the LA sky was as blue as I’d seen on all those myriad Glen A. Larson productions.

It’s this familiarity that has kept me coming back again and again. It requires no effort to fit right in. It might take a little getting used to tipping at first, but apart from that, even something as mundane as having breakfast in a diner immerses you in your own scene from a movie. There’s a convenience here, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a ‘can-do’ spirit and an energy not replicated anywhere else.

You could say, then, that America and I have enjoyed a highly addictive relationship. Until now. Last week's gold-blinged, Cheeto-tanned, bizarrely-bouffant presidential election result has called into serious question my loyalty as a tourist.

For a start, the good times are over. By that I mean being a British tourist able to take advantage of exchange rates that, at one point, meant that a single pound bought you more than two dollars. That was the sort of incentive that made buying everything from CDs to the MacBook I’m writing this on worth the splurge. But at risk of sounding mercenary, the pound’s prevailing weakness since the Brexit referendum means that you start to notice your hotel charging $25 for breakfast, or Pret-à-Manger asking almost eight dollars for a tuna baguette.

The price of a sandwich has brought this year’s dramatic political events into sharp focus. The economic impact in the UK of June’s referendum on Europe is only just being understood. Christmas will be a big test, as families come to terms with inflationary prices. Here in the US, inflation has also been on the rise, feeding into the very rhetoric that fuelled the Trump victory, as he appealed to America’s squeezed middle. The parallels with the Brexit result are brutal. Listening to chatter in coffee shops and on the subway, it’s clear how America was polarised last week in a shockingly similar way to the deep chasm June's referendum carved between the liberal values of inclusion and conservative division, but also between the so-called metropolitan elites and the fiscally challenged provinces.

New York is something of a paradox in this regard: average rent here is $3208 (£2545), with a one-bedroom apartment costing around $2829 (£2244) a month; Donald Trump’s grotesque palace and HQ is here on 5th Avenue, and yet he took just 10% of the vote in this city. In Washington DC, his soon-to-be home, he took just 4% of the vote. Head out into the middle American heartlands, however, and the reasons for his victory become blindingly obvious, as small-town sentiment warmed overwhelmingly to his Route 1 philosophy. The racism and xenophobia - both implied and overt - that coloured the British referendum were a central pillar of the Trump stump, with the added air of latent misogyny to create a cartoon-like monster out of the tangerine-tinged billionaire.

As I blogged last week, Trump’s campaign persona was largely that of a Homer Simpson-like figure, loudly bragging in a bar about what he’d do if he was president. The reality, of course, is that he will, now, become president, but time will only tell whether  as to whether Trump follows through on his campaign promises. The “beautiful wall” he said would be built along the Mexican border is more likely to be just a fence, he told the CBS TV network yesterday. Hmm… What else? The ban on Muslims entering the country? Let’s see.

The bigger fear is what threat he poses to world economics and even world peace that his critics claim he will be. As some were pointing out in the aftermath of Tuesday’s result, presidents don’t just get their own way without due political process. But you can’t help feeling that America - particularly from a liberal-minded point of view - has just commenced an era of almost helpless nightmare. The prospect of Trump forming a government - with his ultra-conservative running mate Mike Pence, the excruciating Sarah Palin, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani all being mentioned for cabinet positions - has an air of comic villainy about it. Like The Joker forming a syndicate of all the worst super criminals in Gotham City. He’s already started by appointing Stephen Bannon, head of the far-right Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Except, it’s not a joke. This is the world’s most powerful democracy. The world’s largest economy. The seat of the last global recession. If you have a mortgage, savings, even a job with an institution reliant on global trade, Trumpageddon should worry you. Because it worries me.

Rational argument would dictate that Trump’s presidency should not cut me off from the America I’ve enjoyed as a tourist. Unless white, middle-aged Englishmen are added to the list of people Trump wishes to keep out, all the things I come to America for should still be there for me. But something quite profound has happened. Something has changed in the last seven days about a country normally so tolerant, so beholden of The New Colossus - “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” - that it somehow doesn’t feel like America anymore. Stupid, I know. But when your president-elect’s first words of congratulations come from a notorious white nationalist and Holocaust denier, from French and Dutch far-right politicians, and from the gurning Nigel Farage, it’s probably time to give the country a miss for a while, at least until it can elect a president who offers more than just populist bar-room jingoism, and can instead make the values of respect, dignity and tolerance central to their philosophy.