In essence, then, America has just voted for Homer Simpson to be its 45th president. Crass, uncouth, inexperienced, boorish - the list goes on. Trump is the braggart sat all night at the bar getting steadily louder and steadily more pissed, pontificating on everything and anything he thinks he has an opinion on. At some point in the evening he will make a crude pass at the pretty blonde sat a few stools away, not realising that her 6ft 6in cage fighting boyfriend is just coming back from the toilet. It won't end well.
But this is where, precisely, the United States of America finds itself. 2016, eh? The year of unprecedented disruption, of our musical icons leaving us and our political expectations going completely awry in the midst of simply awful campaigning. Brexit was hard to accept, given the toxicity that had gone into the campaign - the outright lies and personal ambition of the Leavers, and the anaemia of certain sections of the Remainers.
The Trump victory, however, is harder to take, but there are blindingly obvious parallels with Brexit, particularly the apparent reaction it represents from a disaffected and squeezed middle. However, the fears of post-Brexit Britain pale by comparison to the potentially dystopian nightmare that might come from Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest economy and third largest nation by population.
Forget, for a moment, his own personality flaws - the implied misogyny and casual sexism, the racism, the complete disregard for anyone who could consider themselves part of any minority. What kind of administration will he offer? What will be the effect on the global economy if he goes through with his pledges on trade reforms? What will be the effect on world peace with his relationships with both China and Russia? What if he does pull the US out of Europe, militarily, effectively removing NATO's backbone, with Putin sabre-rattling and circling his wolves around the Baltic states and maybe others in Eastern Europe? All this from a man who has never held public office before, whose history of business collapses is not good, and whose reputation was largely built on the personality cult of being the host of America's version of The Apprentice.
Of course, anyone can become president - that's the dream every American child is brought up to believe. And, today, 'anyone' has. Trump is hardly Everyman, even if he talks up America's working class as well as his own family backstory. He has talked throughout is campaign about inclusiveness, and yet he couldn't have done more to alienate large sections of the population. Even in official photographs of Trump watching the results last night at his campaign HQ failed to depict anyone who wasn't corn-fed white.
There is no denying that he has connected with a large segment of the country that isn't the college-educated, liberal, metropolitan elite who populate its coastal cities, but is a sizeable slice of the country's heartland. But the truly troubling thing is that he has also opened a portal to right-wing hell with his folsky rhetoric. One female Trump supporter interviewed yesterday on Sky News actually talked up the idea of armed revolution if Hillary Clinton got elected. No wonder Trump's shock victory has been so warmly embraced by a cavalcade of the far right, from the notorious David Duke to France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders. It's like that scene in Blazing Saddles where a queue of reprobates - including, Nazi stormtroopers - are queing up to join Taggart's band of troublemakers to wreak chaos on the town of Rockridge.
This is where bar-room philosophising gets you if you're not careful. And the irony of all this is that not only has America voted Homer Simpson into the White House, The Simpsons actually predicted the possibility of a Trump presidency as long ago as 2000. The episode Bart To The Future imagines a future in which the ever-ambitious Lisa has become the US president - taking over from Trump.
"We predicted that he would be president back in 2000," Simpsons creator Matt Groening told The Guardian, "but [Trump] was, of course, the most absurd placeholder joke name that we could think of at the time, and that’s still true."
Dan Greaney, who wrote the episode, recently said in The Hollywood Reporter that the episode was meant to show a vision of America "going insane". "It was a warning to America," he said. "That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that's why we had Trump be president before her."
Scarily precident - let's hope they don't prove to be too acurate. Only the next four years will tell us...
But this is where, precisely, the United States of America finds itself. 2016, eh? The year of unprecedented disruption, of our musical icons leaving us and our political expectations going completely awry in the midst of simply awful campaigning. Brexit was hard to accept, given the toxicity that had gone into the campaign - the outright lies and personal ambition of the Leavers, and the anaemia of certain sections of the Remainers.
The Trump victory, however, is harder to take, but there are blindingly obvious parallels with Brexit, particularly the apparent reaction it represents from a disaffected and squeezed middle. However, the fears of post-Brexit Britain pale by comparison to the potentially dystopian nightmare that might come from Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest economy and third largest nation by population.
Forget, for a moment, his own personality flaws - the implied misogyny and casual sexism, the racism, the complete disregard for anyone who could consider themselves part of any minority. What kind of administration will he offer? What will be the effect on the global economy if he goes through with his pledges on trade reforms? What will be the effect on world peace with his relationships with both China and Russia? What if he does pull the US out of Europe, militarily, effectively removing NATO's backbone, with Putin sabre-rattling and circling his wolves around the Baltic states and maybe others in Eastern Europe? All this from a man who has never held public office before, whose history of business collapses is not good, and whose reputation was largely built on the personality cult of being the host of America's version of The Apprentice.
Of course, anyone can become president - that's the dream every American child is brought up to believe. And, today, 'anyone' has. Trump is hardly Everyman, even if he talks up America's working class as well as his own family backstory. He has talked throughout is campaign about inclusiveness, and yet he couldn't have done more to alienate large sections of the population. Even in official photographs of Trump watching the results last night at his campaign HQ failed to depict anyone who wasn't corn-fed white.
There is no denying that he has connected with a large segment of the country that isn't the college-educated, liberal, metropolitan elite who populate its coastal cities, but is a sizeable slice of the country's heartland. But the truly troubling thing is that he has also opened a portal to right-wing hell with his folsky rhetoric. One female Trump supporter interviewed yesterday on Sky News actually talked up the idea of armed revolution if Hillary Clinton got elected. No wonder Trump's shock victory has been so warmly embraced by a cavalcade of the far right, from the notorious David Duke to France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders. It's like that scene in Blazing Saddles where a queue of reprobates - including, Nazi stormtroopers - are queing up to join Taggart's band of troublemakers to wreak chaos on the town of Rockridge.
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| Picture: 20th Century Fox |
"We predicted that he would be president back in 2000," Simpsons creator Matt Groening told The Guardian, "but [Trump] was, of course, the most absurd placeholder joke name that we could think of at the time, and that’s still true."
Dan Greaney, who wrote the episode, recently said in The Hollywood Reporter that the episode was meant to show a vision of America "going insane". "It was a warning to America," he said. "That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that's why we had Trump be president before her."
Scarily precident - let's hope they don't prove to be too acurate. Only the next four years will tell us...
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