In the Spectator offices, my colleague Mary Wakefield and I often end up talking about young people while we’re making tea. She thinks I’m a bit too cocky about civilisation. Apparently when she starts telling me something weird that she’s seen my generation doing, my eyes start darting madly, looking for a way out. She probably looks at me and thinks I’d open the gates to the barbarians to avoid the horror of an earnest opinion.
The re-election of Donald Trump has us feeling different ways too. Mary has written this week about the phenomenon of ‘Trump trauma’. There’s some pretty wild examples in there, all of which are deserving of our laughs. But I found these people strange, even though they’re of my generation, and I didn’t recognise them. I wondered, are these people just attention seekers?
I went to Cambridge to find out more. If there was one place in the entire country that might have been expected to look traumatised about Donald Trump’s re-election, it would be Cambridge.
Cambridge isn’t the only great liberal institution whose reaction looks comic, rather than sincere
So on a Friday night, it should have been the centre of the resistance. The organisation Stand Up to Racism, which had been organising counter-protests against the summer rioters, had been rallying people to meet at various locations across the country last week. As I walked through Cambridge’s side roads, and passed the ghost of the Gaza encampment, I listened out for the drums, the hollering, the chanting.
And then I got to the church, Great St Mary’s, that the ‘protest’ was being held outside, and there were fifteen people there. Fifteen very nice, very principled, very up-for-talking-to-me people. But also, fifteen people. The leader of the rally, a nice man with glasses, was addressing the group with a megaphone, despite all of them being within a three-metre radius. ‘WE ARE SMALL HERE TODAY’, he said through the megaphone. ‘BUT WE ARE GROWING IN NUMBER’.
‘It would have been great if we’d have had more people’, one protestor told me afterwards. ‘It’s very cold, of course’, and cold it was, although I wondered how warm it would have to be for a good turnout. ‘It would have been great if there were three times as many people here’. He told me that in 2016 there had been a much bigger sense of shock in Cambridge, and much bigger protests during the Trump presidency.
In July, the popular economist Tyler Cowen blogged that there had been a ‘vibe shift’. People weren’t so hysterical about Trump this time around, he said. Cowen suggested 19 reasons why, but the final one was the clincher: Biden’s team, obscuring his senility, were the ones that really looked mad. Cowen proudly re-posted his piece the morning after the election (‘Much maligned at the time, I might add’).
In Cambridge, the group sounded morose, but not heartbroken. The organiser’s tone of voice wasn’t so much ‘a fascist had been elected to lead the free world’, more like he’d messed up an omelette for his son. One student – in fact, the only university student I could see there – tried to raise the energy, and led the crowd into a round of ‘Donald Trump, we know you! You’re a racist, through and through!’ I spoke to her afterwards, wondering whether the university higher-ups had emailed the students to offer them support following political events, as they had several times since 7 October. No, was the answer. Her supervision following the election was strange, but it wasn’t suspended. She told me that many of the students regarded Trump’s re-election as ‘inevitable’. ‘We need to mobilise. We have seen a rise of fascism across Europe, and we can see it today in Trump’s election, and it’s only because there has been a strong tradition of anti-fascism since the 1970s, seeing people off like the BNP, and the EDL, that we have not seen the same here’.
I saw the organiser looking a bit flappy. He’d had to deal with a bit of a situation. Some teenagers had started filming themselves at the protest, with their front-facing cameras, looking like they wanted views on TikTok. I spoke to the kids afterwards – they were 16 year-old-boys in trackies. They didn’t like that the protest was being held outside a church. ‘They are doing this outside a place of God’, one said. I wondered whether this was sincere, or a wind-up. The organiser protested that there wasn’t a service on, so I checked and there wasn’t. Evensong was the day before.
The teenagers didn’t seem too fussed about the election of Trump. They found it pretty hilarious. Besides, ‘America is far away. We are in the UK’, they said.
That sentiment, said by two teenagers in trackies in Cambridge on a Friday night, seems to be what most people are thinking this time. If there has been a reaction, it’s been farcical. Dolly Alderton led her fans in a group ‘scream’ at an event in Sydney the night after the re-election. Is that what people would really do if they thought a Hitler was in power?
Cambridge isn’t the only great liberal institution whose reaction looks comic, rather than sincere. On the morning that Donald Trump was elected president for the second time during her Guardian editorship, Katharine Viner told journalists in their editorial conference that America had elected ‘a fascist and a rapist’ to lead them, I was told. Later that day, she sent an email to all of her London staff, urging them to ‘contact your American colleagues to offer your support’, and offering ‘free access to free support services’. The email, one staffer said, ‘was tonally reminiscent of a spirited, yet clearly shaken, kindergarten teacher filling parents in about an incident in the playground’.
‘Seeing Kath’s email made me incredibly relieved that I was no longer working there’, one former Guardian staffer said. The Guardian has become an ‘organisation which seems to have so little grip on reality’, and assumes that all of its journalists will think the same way: ‘working for an institution where you constantly feel on the wrong side isn’t much fun’. A current employee was amused by the offer of ‘mental health services that could help [staff] work through the unthinkable trauma of America having elected someone Kath Viner does not like’.
Viner’s email to staff was immediately the subject of mockery in the press, and produced some surprise in the Guardian offices (it was leaked pretty quickly). Would that really have happened last time Trump won? A journalist at the BBC, another organisation you might expect to be in pieces, said ‘a Trump victory is awful to most Brits, but he’s so entertaining: it’s good if you work in news’. Unless the vibes change again, this is what the real story is here: a curious liberal aloofness to the re-election of Donald Trump.
What other types might we have expected to pipe up? Someone like Dua Lipa, perhaps, who the Evening Standard has called ‘the most political popstar we have right now’. The Dua Lipa Manifesto is long: she was an early backer of a ceasefire in Gaza, endorsed Jeremy Corbyn, opposed Brexit, called Boris Johnson a ‘disaster’, supported Bernie then Biden, denied the existence of Kosovo (OK, that one’s slightly odder), and in 2020, urged her followers to vote against Donald Trump. But this time, on the morning after the election, she just posted pictures of her in Singapore: Dua going to a street market, Dua eating nasi goreng. I rubbed my eyes and looked elsewhere for the Insta-anguish. Story after story, there was nothing. The only topic I saw was Gaza. Perhaps everything else is small fry.
As the protest wound down in Cambridge (half an hour after it started), and I headed back to the station, a man with an Irish accent walked past and read a leaflet. Even in this most university-educated, liberal of towns, there was a sign of different times. He read the leaflet, walked away, sighed, and I heard him say: ‘No to Trump? Fuckin’ really?’
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