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.