If he can’t handle one polar vortex…

Pretty sure today will go down in history as one of the days to remember. I still find it incredible that mass delusion is an actual thing, and that the American populace (or at least the majority of its voters) suffer from it. No question about it this time: Americans chose Trump fully aware of what and who he is and of what he plans to do this time around. You get what you deserve second time around. No excuses. If you want a convicted felon in charge, someone who will break agreements willy nilly; has been acknowledged as a fascist by his own chief of staff; is a suspected Russian asset; is a racist misogynist… then go ahead. The billionaire kleptocracy are gathering around to support – that really has to be a good thing for the Hispanics and Blacks, the working poor, the young in education and the sick, doesn’t it? If not, why would they vote for him? And why would any country sign any agreement with the United States again? Why would you stick to your trade agreements, or military agreements, or research agreements, or land agreements? Why would you ever trust an American signature on a piece of paper? If a president can come in and arbitrarily change anything, what is the point? And this Panama Canal thing pisses me off more than most. This claim that Americans died in its construction is just bullshit. The vast majority of the workers on the canal’s construction were from Barbados, with other significant numbers coming from Jamaica and Martinique and Guadeloupe. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that if Trump says anything at all, it is most likely untrue. If it isn’t untrue, then he’s told the truth by accident.
 
Not sure whether I managed to give myself a bit of psychosomatic sickness today, but woke up dizzy with what I suspect is a touch of vestibular neuritis. It’s coming and going in waves, so am taking it easy today. I am not currently watching the Drumpf inauguration, for example, although am getting a stream of “pings” on my phone with messages such as “comedy gold”, “what a twat”, and “ROTFLMAO”. Not sure whether these are directed at me, or are about the inauguration – but I hope, and suspect, the latter.
 
It’s pretty hard to take anything else seriously when the fate of the western world is in the hands of psychopaths or, at the very least, sociopaths. As I watched the odd things throughout the day, I noted Musk’s Nazi salutes; the presence of a gaggle of rapists in the crowd; various knob-jockey politicians hoping for a sniff of the Orange Glove; and the presence of inveterate arseholes such as Farage and Johnson. As someone said, the Farage and Johnson attendance from the UK had the unexpected and unusual effect of raising both countries’ average IQs quite significantly.
 
But it was the ever-brilliant PNG Courier that carried the day. Here I quote from its article on the anointment or investiture or whatever it is that they do over in Disneyland.
 
“To Washington DC, where a Who’s Who of the world’s worst people just descended on Donald Trump’s inauguration. Like flies drawn to manure, Miloni, Musk, Milei, Bezos, Bolsonaro, and Farage buzzed into the Capitol Rotunda to witness the first adjudicated rapist become the 47th President of the United States of America.
 
The stench was everywhere; being a brownshirt was important, but a track record of brownnosing was vital. Hence, there was no invite for Marine Le Pen who, despite being a bigot, is not a bootlicker.
 
Not that the lack of an invite stopped an A-List of Britain’s most limited people – think Laurence Fox, Ant Middleton, Liz Truss – from crossing the Atlantic to be in the vicinity of a man who laughs at disabled people. Like Avengers Assemble if the Avengers in question were Britain’s biggest dimwits.
 
Another hatecrasher was Suella Braverman, who on arrival looked distinctly unslept and unhappy, as if she’d just remembered she was Suella Braverman. When asked if she’d been invited to the inauguration she unconvincingly swerved the question and said she was looking forward to going. Which is odd, because when she was Home Secretary she used to dream of deporting uninvited guests. I guess dreaming’s hard when you’ve got jet lag.
 
And so it comes to pass that ‘political strategy’ is reduced to chasing Elon retweets, that cringe and fringe politicians are now mainstream, and that Trump tells us he was “saved by God to make America great again”. US oil and gas will soon be shipped around the world in the presence of evident reality – 1.5 degrees of warming, anybody?
 
Denial of truth in the interests of oligarchy and nativism might seem to be the most alarming thing about Trump’s presidency, but its defining marker will be his graphene-thin skin. Due to concerns about bums on seats, he moved his $170mn inauguration indoors. (“If he can’t handle one polar vortex,” quipped Greenland’s premier Múte Egede, “he can’t handle Greenland.”) Going indoors limited proceedings to 400 attendees; the other 220,000 tickets (reselling on Craig’s List at $500) were deemed ‘commemorative’.
 
The faithful didn’t care. The rest of us, however, wait for Trump to deem votes merely ‘commemorative’ too. Or for that God he mentioned to wake up and stage a coup.”
 
I spent the evening watching Ted Lasso in the vain hope that I would be able to find something in it that would save America for me.