For ten days, I roamed parts of Ireland, from the city of Dublin to the tourist mecca of Killarney to the tiny seaside town of Doolin, and everywhere I went, in pubs, at castles, on a trail to a goddamned waterfall, nearly every single Irish person I met had a variation on the same question as soon as I said I was American: "So Donald Trump? What the fuck's up with that? Is he gonna be president?" It wasn't asked in a hopeful way, oh, no. Do not misinterpret. It was more along the lines of "What the fuck is wrong with all of you?"
And you gotta feel for the Irish at this point. On one side, the United Kingdom lost its collective shit and voted to leave the entity that has provided economic stability and peace for decades, something that will directly impact Ireland. On the other side, way on the other side, the United States seems, to the appalled onlooker, on the verge of electing Trump, an ungrateful twat-flea who acts as if we should be on our knees, thanking him for giving up his precious fucking time to run for president.
This madness is all around Ireland, and, honestly, the only answer I could give was "Don't worry. We're not going to elect him." Which is all well and good, but how do you try to explain it, especially since, as far as a great deal of the world is concerned, we seemed to have righted ourselves in the US after the disaster of electing and then, what they holy fuck, reelecting George W. Bush. As far as many other countries see it, we're on the verge of something worse, of being the Incredible Hulk on meth, a big-ass destruction machine without the ability to calm the fuck down.
Here's an engorged tip for every conservative dogfucker who thinks that the United States has lost its leadership around the globe because of Obama doing some Kenyan hoodoo or some such shit: We haven't. Not by a fucking mile. In fact, as far as much of the world goes, Bush diminished us, Obama brought us back, and, now, this Trump thing is making the world think we're just a bunch of petulant children, so enamored of the smell of our crap that we can indulge in the most reckless behavior without consequences.
When a friend was in Mexico recently, she got the same thing. Ask anyone who travels anywhere and they hear it repeatedly. "What the fuck is going on with the United States?" "How the fuck could you allow this to happen?" And, in the case of some countries (as a traveler to the Ukraine told me), "Wow, and we thought we were fucked up." These are often followed with some level of disbelief over how excruciatingly long our elections are. "How many months do you have until you vote?" asked a disbelieving woman who had paused with her kids near me on the waterfall path in Kerry.
Trump is everything ugly about the US in one bloated, grotesque, smug package: incurious to the point of blithering ignorance, arrogantly confident about that ignorance, and defiantly dismissive of anyone who would challenge that ignorance. It's a fucking embarrassment, like trying to explain that the rest of your family isn't all child molesters despite the fact that you've got a couple of cousins who fucked small kids. No one gives a shit that John Wayne Gacy's sisters may have been perfectly nice people.
And the biggest goddamn fart joke in the whole crude Adam Sandler film that is our election process is that we are still pretending as if this patent liar, this demonstrable fraud, this ignorant piece of shit who gives honest turds a bad name, this Trump, this child, this trash heap that prances and preens like an inbred prince, has anything legitimate to say about anything. We must seriously contemplate one of his mock serious speeches about, say, the economy of the nation, where he says absolutely nothing of any meaning at all. Fuck, it'd be easier to explain away having a clown-rapist-killer as a brother.
We live in the world, the whole world, and there is no such thing as "America First" anymore. That is a toddler's fantasy of geopolitics. Let's at least pretend like we're grown-ups.
