Any Brit who has spent time in America will have met a Donald Trump. He might take a seat next to you on the Red Eye from Boston to New York wearing one of those suits. Unless your money is so old it has Abraham Lincoln’s fingerprints on it, America is a classless society which means, unlike Britain where the wrong sports coat can mean social death, it is ok to wear golf shoes, a pair of green trousers, a tweed jacket and an orange tie.
‘You from England?” (He heard you speak to the air hostess).
A big, warm, welcoming hand, heavily ringed, is extended.
‘Donald Trump, Trump Realty.’
You glance out the window. An endless queue of identical airliners to yours are taxing into a blinding blizzard. Each has a hundred Donald Trumps aboard, off to sell the American Dream.
A tiny drop of sweat gathers on his temple as the aircraft begins its take off run. A pill is swiftly transferred from breast pocket to mouth.
Then, safe above the clouds, Bourbon in hand, the pitch begins.
Donald is about to sell you a dream. He has spent years studying the art of the sale, he knows all the human weaknesses. By the time your plane touches down in New York, that little cottage on the Nantucket shore is yours, at least in your head.
How, you say to yourself later in downtown New York, contract in hand, could you have swallowed such a preposterous idea? You been been in the hands of the greatest salesman in America. Who else could persuade a whole nation to buy his impossible dream. ‘Make America Great Again.’
An America wracked by racial divisions, an America of preposterous wealth and grinding poverty, an America with its vast internal prison Gulag, an America whose universities have abolished history. An America which will be Spanish speaking by 2050 its English traditions of law and constitution forgotten.
Such weighty matters are not for Trump the Salesman. He is a dealer. He has just bought the investment opportunity of a lifetime, and wants to offer discounts, it explains his reversal on Obama Care. There will be more deals. The visit to Putin, a pathologically vain man, will be a magnificent sales trip. Britain’s anxieties about Brexit will be soothed by the visits of his assistant sales director (United Kingdom) Nigel Farage.
Some things will stay. The Mexican Fence is too good an advertisement – a giant advertising hoarding for ‘Trump’ – not to continue with. Many legally settled Mexican Americans support it and walls are comforting to people who fear being overrun.
Trump’s real problem, already spilling onto the streets, are riots by America’s spoilt generation of entitled brats. They have a different dream, they want martyrs. They want to provoke Donald to call out the National Guard, they want gunfire and bodies in the streets.
Will this be Trump’s ‘Fargo‘ moment, the moment when he breaks and seeks unconstitutional means, arbitrary detention, fire at will ?
In the film a panicked car salesman, unable to close his books, hires criminals to kidnap his wife in the hope that his wealthy father in law will pay her ransom ? It turns out very badly with a leg sticking out of a wood chipper.
If Trump panics he will not make a second term, indeed he may not make it at all.
I qualify as an Englishman in America, 37 years now. I also have a lot more experience than Mr. Harris in the skies above America, including a ten year stint of four flights a week. I have never met anyone remotely resembling the creature Mr. Harris constructs. Let me describe a few of the people I have met who occupied the adjacent seat: A Harvard University professor of archaeology returning from a conference at Stanford to a dig in Syria, a lady with two PhD degrees in anthropology who educated me about the lost Caucasians of Mongolia, a lady escorting her 19 year old, blonde, 6’4” daughter (one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen) to Dartmouth College where in addition to her academic scholarship she expected to play on the university volleyball team. I could go on and describe many others, equally interesting but not anyone resembling Mr. Harris’s American. There is a reason for this of course; Mr. Harris’s creature does not exist, he is entirely a product of Mr. Harris’s imagination.
“Wrong-headed”, “Politically incorrect”: No, just an entirely conventional and predictable English snob. I particularly like the reference to America being a “classless” society, by which I believe he means vulgar, boorish and uncouth, as opposed to not riddled with phony social classification strata. This snobbery is quite amusing, emanating as it does from a country 95% of whose culture is comprised of excessive beer drinking and the premier league. America will not be “Spanish speaking” by 2050, we have just headed off any movement in that direction. But you are of course aware that a parallel social and legal system, of Sharia law, exists in England today?
Mr. Harris is apparently as ignorant of American geography as he is of the American character; you don’t take the “red eye” from Boston to New York, those cities are only 200 miles apart. The “red eye” is taken from West Coast to East Coast, LA to NY for example.
It is interesting that Mr. Harris references a movie in his rant, I suggest another one, this is a clip from “Glengarry, Glenross”, a film depicting life in a real estate sales agency: Please be aware that this is fiction, this is not a window into reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrhSLf0I-HM
Mr. Harris; are you seriously suggesting that Donald Trump seeks civil war? Or that he will be assassinated?
That is a very interesting airline Roger from Florida traveled on. What was it called ? Blind-to-Social-Reality.com? Airlines, railway stations are where society forms a melting pot and stereotypes fall fall more thickly on the ground than snow in Alaska. In his travels, or even sitting in his office, Roger from Florida must have met a American Insurance salesman, (The film ‘Groundhog Day’?) In my time I could never shake them off.
Conversely some of the most cultivated people I have ever met have been American, but I do not think anybody would include Donald Trump in that league. I don’t think Trump wants civil war, but his enemies on the left see a golden opportunity to bring it onto the streets of America. I would imagine the US security services have never faced a greater threat both from his possible asassination and even worse the creation of left wing martyrs. Trump is the left’s dream. As for America becoming another corrupt Latino country – its inevitable,
http://qz.com/441174/by-2050-united-states-will-have-more-spanish-speakers-than-any-other-country/
Red Eye Boston to New York ?Be my guest. Search the net
http://www.insanelycheapflights.com/flights/cheap-tickets?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&gclid=CLbxw6yXuNACFeG87Qod2EIDTw
Mr. Harris,
As late as 7.00pm on Tuesday Nov. 8th I would have agreed that the US was destined to become “Brazil North”, but the Trump victory has changed history. President Hillary Clinton would certainly have dissolved the Southern border and encouraged hundreds of millions of poverty stricken brown people to head north to enjoy the wealth that white people created, that is what her backers wanted, for various reasons; partially just plain greed (more people to exploit), then there is the Jewish agenda, so we definitely dodged a fatal bullet. Certainly there are a lot of Spanish speaking people here but outside of a few areas of high concentration they have no political power or any real influence. The Spanish speaking population of the US will be reduced by millions as immigration law is enforced, and enforced it will be.
This site has a very interesting analysis of the election:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/
Look at the County results and you will see that the US is very much a right of center country. The democrats counter that most of the red space is empty, that is partially true, but that red space is where wood is hewn, water is drawn, coal is mined, oil is pumped and food is grown. The leftist insurgency, if such a grand name can be given to the riots of a few malcontents, has no chance of attaining any real political power. Of the fifty States only five have democratic party control of Governorship, State House and State Senate, compared to twenty five with Republican control, essentially Trump’s victory has reduced the Democratic party to a rump. A few riots in Portland, a city of no importance, are irrelevant. The confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions as AG will see a clamp down of the BLM and occupy wall street troublemakers.
As for red eye flights, that term describes flights that result in the loss of a nights sleep, as I often experienced on the Delta flight from LAX to Tampa; take off 11.00pm Friday night, land in Tampa about 7.00am Saturday morning.
Incidentally I am not “from” Florida, I am “from” Wembley, just very happily living in paradise.
So far, Trump has disproved all the doubters and naysayers.