And In The Fake News…

The days before Donald Trump’s inauguration are trickling away from us with frightening pace. Obama has said his farewell speech and Trump gave his first press conference as president elect. (If you could call it a press conference, it sounded more like an aggressive string of vowels and consonants from a barely sentient life form.) Trump mumbled with confidence one strident proclamation after another: “It’s all fake news, it’s phoney stuff – it didn’t happen … I think we have one of the great cabinets ever put together … Don’t be rude. Don’t be rude. Don’t. Be. Rude (said, might I add, as he spoke over someone) … I’m not going to give you a question. I’m not going to give you a question. You’re fake news.”

It certainly was a very surreal interview from the president elect, a figure we could surely at the very least expect some decorum from, if not some skill as an orator and a filter between what he thinks and what he says. He really is quite an absurd figure, almost laughable, lacking any apparent dignity or human thought processes. Each president, even the terrible among them, has been at the very least able to give a coherent speech and answer questions without babbling and coming away from the topic. His behaviour isn’t presidential in the least, and shouldn’t America (and the rest of the world, even) be worried if this is what we have to look forward to from the 45th president of the United States? He is an insanely odd choice for the role, holding few qualities you expect and barely able to string a sentence together. You couldn’t make it up; it reads like the ‘fake news’ he proclaims to hate (forgetting how many favours it did him in his campaign), certainly odd enough that you wouldn’t be surprised to find out it had all been some terrible hoax or distraction from impending alien invasion.

We can talk all day about how dangerous it is to have a man like Trump as president, but the most shocking thing is how unreal it is to have a man like Trump as president. There have always been dangerous leaders, and many have them have been elected, but Trump is a breed of his own; he acts like a TV personality or a pantomime villain, not a serious politician. Even now, after months and months of strange act after strange act, he continues to surprise us! He is an awful, awful gift that just won’t stop bloody giving. He ended an actual, literal speech as president elect with a catchphrase from The Apprentice! Could you imagine Alan Sugar becoming prime minister and finishing one of his first major speeches with ‘You’re fired’? No, because that is something which belongs in a dystopian drama, not our real lives where a man from reality TV is about to destroy Western Civilisation. A strange man who you wouldn’t invite to your dinner parties because he always brings up how much he hates the licence fee and makes everyone uncomfortable with sexual innuendo is about to take over one of the most powerful countries in the world, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.