Remember that scene in The Office when David Brent gets promoted at the expense of the rest of his team? I imagine the faces of utter bewilderment that he was met with are quite similar to the gawps we all shot at our television screens yesterday morning waking to the news that Donald fucking Trump is the new President. “I know, gutting”, the Brentmeister General said, “but on a more positive note, the good news is….”
There is no good news. That’s the gaff. And there certainly ain’t much in the way of silver linings to pick at this time. A Presidential candidate backed by the KKK who has views on gender equality, race relations and welfare that would rival the fuhrer himself is now the boss of 2.7m employees and commander-in-chief of the mightiest army on earth. To all intents and purposes, that ain’t cool. As one person observed in The Evening Standard, Trump’s victory is “the reverse of the Arab Spring: the people rising up and demanding a less democratic future”.
But in true Brent style, it must be noted that even in these dark times every cloud has a silver lining. So we’ve picked out a few of the best reasons to be optimistic about America under Trump:
We Can Ship Our Bigots
The one thing that is guaranteed to make you smile is the possibility that both Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins could soon be US residents.
Farage is in line for a plum job in Trump’s administration according to the Daily Mail and Hopkins promised to move to America if the Republican candidate was successful.
However, it should be noted that the latter promised to run naked through London with a sausage between her thighs if Sadiq Khan was elected as Mayor of London, and the former is according to the Mail, so guaranteed not to be true.
We Look a Little Less Bad
When Britain voted to leave the European Union I was inundated with messages from my American friends reminding me of what a foolish nation we are.
We don’t look so bad now hey! In fact, we look comparatively smart compared to the clusterfuck they find themselves in.
Brexit was a calamity, this is a catastrophe.
We Can Be Fuckwits Together
So given that we have both made mistakes on either side of the Atlantic we can be rest assured that our special relationship will remain special. We can be moronic bedfellows, the Morcombe to their Wise.
Trump’s victory seems to have put us on slightly better terms with the US than the ones we were facing under Obama. We’ve gone from the back of the queue to the front and could even craftily work that to our advantage in our negotiations with the EU.
“Britain. The slightly less idiotic gateway into the heart of idiocy”.
We Become United
Thomas Paine wrote in The American Crisis that “these are the times that try men’s souls”, and it also unites people.
Adversity has a nack of bringing people together, much of which we are seeing already. And I’m not just talking about the people on the streets protesting, I’m talking about the posts of disbelief on Twitter, the sobbing pictures on Facebook, the emails and the office conversations.
Soon, these people will become disillusioned enough to do something about it, and if that happens, we can turn adversity into opportunity.
Rhetoric of fear won this election, now it’s time for good people to start engaging with politics.
