Donald Trump. It is hard to know where to start, with a stupid, nasty, malevolent, greedy, lying, thieving, unethical, amoral, self-serving, corrupt, narcissistic, hypocritical, misogynistic, bullying, pussy-grabbing, blowhard, rapist.

But start we must. Because unless he has a heart attack or a brain tumour, or an as-yet-undiagnosed terminal cancer to announce, he will still be shouting and screaming for our attention, like a demented three-year old with a hideous vicious streak, in four years’ time.

Donald Trump. This, friends, is the pathetic fraud chosen by the American people to be their President, for a second time. America is stuck with the swine now. So, sadly, is the rest of the world.

It is a sickening thought. Honestly. Sickening. In any gallery of grotesques, he would be out front as the main attraction: the man who is the worst of the worst.

Oh, I know. Hitler was worse. He killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.

But – to take a different view – maybe that was just a matter of timing and opportunity. And perhaps, if Trump can drag the full complement of sycophantic MAGA gargoyles he has been nominating this past fortnight across the line and into government, he will feel emboldened enough to slip into extermination mode. Nothing he has said suggests that he is incapable of it, and – if he does – they will likely wallow, gloating like cartoon nasties, in the blood.

Trump is the fear-monger supreme. There’s a lot of people he hates. And he has made it clear that – as President – he intends to give vent to that hate as soon, and as widely and effectively, as he can. He will target his political opponents. He will take aim at journalists. He will disembowel the public service. He will attack academics. He will demonise immigrants. And he will then use the army to forcibly deport millions.

How utterly self-deluding and genuinely depraved can any one individual be?

Anyone who has a human heart is aghast. But there is only so much aghast-ness that is allowable. The votes have been counted, the madness revealed. We have no choice but to get on with it – whatever ‘it’ might turn out to be.

It is almost December. It is hard to imagine, right now, that this might be a happy Christmas for anyone who is sane. There is just too much evil in the atmosphere. Too many wars being prosecuted by murderous brutes. Too many dead bodies uncounted in Gaza. Famine bloating children’s stomachs and then killing them. And a brutal promise of more of the same to come, only worse.

Illustration: David Rooney

Are we approaching the end of times? We just might be…

CHEAPJACK CONMAN

How did it come to this, that a man so thoroughly sick and twisted – and utterly unsuited even to the role of President of an old folks Tiddlywinks club in a two-bit frontier town (he’d cheat) – has been elected President of the United States of America?

Pause and think about it. How did this come to pass?

I’ve read fifty different variations on the theme. Joe Biden should have withdrawn even before the race got started. The Democrats failed to ensure that there was a competitive process to decide the post-Biden candidate. The focus of the Kamala Harris campaign was far too narrowly on women’s reproductive rights. Americans couldn’t stomach the idea of a female President. All true.

Kamala Harris should have distanced herself from Biden’s appalling – and ultimately genocidal – policies on Gaza. They ran a shit campaign. The shooter who allegedly hit Trump in the ear did the monster a favour. There was nothing in the Democratic message that resonated with blue collar workers. The Democrats failed to recognise that there is legitimate anger at the fact that the status quo has enabled the gap between the wealthy and the rest to expand hugely – and so on. All true too.

Donald Trump and his conniving cronies saw that anger. He stoked it, stroked it, groomed it and then exploited it. He promised people a rose garden, even if they had to step over dead bodies to get there. He lied about the past. He targeted scapegoats. He invented the enemy within. He vilified journalists. He threatened to use the army to enforce deportations of undocumented citizens, describing them as thieves, criminals, rapists, murderers – and worse. He demonstrated every petty, vindictive, irrational prejudice you could imagine and still more or less 50% of the voting population failed to see what an irredeemable, despicable, low-rent, cheapjack conman and cheat he is.

So let’s step back and ask again: how could this happen? Why, really, is so much of the world tilting right-wards? Why are fascists – like Marine Le Pen’s so called National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany – back at the forefront of political life? And why are those institutions – including the United Nations and the International Criminal Court – that were formed to help ensure that we would never be plunged into a crazy, monstrously destructive, and outrageously costly conflict like World War II again, being treated with such complete contempt by those who think they are above the law – any kind of law at all – including Israel and Russia?

I’ll tell you why…

SINISTER ALGORITHMS

There is, of course, always more than one causal factor in any major societal shift – and the complete failure of Neo-Liberalism is indisputably a major factor here. The fact that the top 1% own 43% of all global financial assets is an outrage. Or, looking at it through a different lens, that the same 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity combined is an even greater affront.

The fact that wages have stagnated, while corporations make record profits is a symptom of the same malaise. Add to that the fact that people are being priced out of the market for houses even in the wealthiest parts of the world and you have a recipe for alienation and unrest. But you’d expect this to spark a shift to the left – and yet the opposite has been happening.

Why, why, why, why, why?

The answer has been staring legislators and regulators in democratic states in the face for years now. There is no doubt whatsoever, I believe, that social media is the crucial new ingredient which, over the past ten years and more, has changed the political landscape completely, in a way that is extremely poisonous, damaging and dangerous.

– It has drastically coarsened the language and the conduct of political debate and disagreement.

– It has given an open-door welcome to people whose raison d’être is nastiness, aggression and hatred.

– It has encouraged partisans of any and every type to believe that attacking, shouting at, and abusing people, online is an acceptable form of behaviour.

– And it has enabled individuals and organisations – who should know better – to systematically find others guilty in the court of public opinion and then to set about destroying their lives or cancelling them.

It is worth saying here that this kind of vindictive vilification has not been the preserve of the political right or even the far right. Hordes of people who claim to believe in liberal values and in freedom of speech have been among the worst offenders, betraying those principles completely by deliberately setting out to ‘cancel’ people or have them cancelled, often simply for expressing a different point of view about one issue or another. To see good and decent individuals being the victims of a herd-like pile-on on social media is extremely distressing. But for the people who are the victims of a frenzied attack, it is anyone’s worst nightmare.

People who might style themselves as being on the left have been guilty in this respect too. But it is the far right that has gained by far the most from the impact of social media.

The reason for this is also clear. None of this is taking place on a level playing pitch.

The polarisation of people into deeply entrenched, antagonistic groups incapable of listening to one another is a serious problem in itself.  The erosion of subtlety and complexity from political discussion and debate is a recipe for conflict and confrontation. But, however toxic we may know that to be, it is only scratching the surface of the utterly indefensible ways in which social media is specifically designed to enable a sustained, ongoing assault on democracy itself.

For a long time, social media and tech companies got away with presenting themselves as neutral platforms with the interests of “the community” at heart. Under that guise, they were permitted to get away with covertly and sometimes fraudulently amassing a vast amount of data and information on every aspect of user’s lives and activities.

They also set out to create a climate of addiction, by using sinister algorithms to manipulate the responses of users. In particular, they designed the algorithms that decide what gets viewed or read the most to favour nastiness, aggression, vitriol, hostility, unpleasantness, violence, extremism and so on.

Worst of all, they have been – and are – willing to sell access to users to anyone who has the money and is prepared to pay; and they are also happy to aid and abet those individuals, institutions or governments to specifically target groups of people based on an intimate knowledge of their prejudices, insecurities, vulnerabilities and obsessions.

THE MOST MALIGN

In practice, what this means is that any bad actor can pump vast sums of money into exploiting people’s feelings of anger, alienation, frustration and powerlessness in whatever way suits their agenda. Of course it won’t always work. But the intimate knowledge of individuals and groups, which has been gathered, and the ability that affords to target people strategically and to maximum emotional effect offers leverage that is off the scale, to anyone with sufficient resources.

You want to undermine democracy? Promote fascism? Foment disorder? Spread fake news? Disrupt elections? Spread conspiracy theories? Roll up, roll up! Whoever’s got the biggest cheque book first, please! Thank you. Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Stay in line, I have to deal with this man from the USSR – I mean from Russia – here. Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching.

If they were  – and indeed are – willing to let people glamourising anorexia or demonstrating ways to self-harm run riot, then they have no morals whatsoever. They try, pathetically, to hide behind the right to ‘free speech’ – and then merrily facilitate those who would curtail that right at the very first opportunity.

But, of course, free speech has nothing whatsoever to do with it, when billionaires and rogue states are very deliberately and with malice aforethought piling vast fortunes into spreading lies, disinformation and misinformation; and giving wings to groundless conspiracy theories, to racial hatred and to explosions of violent protest. This is actually about ‘paid for speech’. It is about access bought and sold. It is about a deeply corrupt process of enrichment of a small number of corporations and individuals at the expense of truth, justice, honesty, balance and fairness. And increasingly, it is at the cost also of a ruthlessly aggressive and cynical attack on democracy that is working.

Indeed, in America right now, and increasingly in pockets across Europe, it is about social media and tech companies being enriched in the promotion of fascism.  Remember: social media companies have no problem whatsoever working with oligarchs, dictators and tyrants across the world (and are happy to agree to be censored). Why not in their home base too?

It comes down to this: the tech giants and social media companies are happy to take the money and run, whether it is coming from some mega-rich sponsor of Donald Trump’s twisted, increasingly fanatical MAGA ideology or from the Russian state via an invented intermediary.

Intrinsically, this is an arena that favours the richest and the most malign, unscrupulous, dishonourable and dishonest. And that is really why Donald Trump – with the smirking assistance of the ludicrously self-serving Elon Musk – is the incoming President of the Disunited States of America.

Democracy is fighting a losing battle. It is up to Europe now to take decisive action to end the rot in this part of the world at least – before it is too late.

Glad to have been able to cheer you up.

Happy Christmas.