Tag Archives: Trump

2020’s Plenty: It’s Been a Lung Year

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How we laughed at the turn of the year.

“Some mad wee Chinese guy has eaten a bat, and now the Chinese are cutting about looking like tribute acts to Michael Jackson and the Chemical Brothers. That’ll teach them for eating weird shit.” It could never happen to us, right?

How smug we were. How we gorged on schadenfreude. All the while comically blind to the fact that our diet consists mainly of terrified chickens bathed in the shits of their caged friends; cows fed on sheep’s brains; horses that have been secretly mulched into beef mince; turkeys tenderised by the baseball bats of bored Bernard Matthews’ workers, and – I wouldn’t be surprised to learn – the genetically modified arse cheeks of some vile abomination like the croco-penguin. Even still we heaved the wrecked, diabetes-ridden husks of our bodies from pub to pub, takeaway to takeaway, chewing chocolate bars through one side of our mouths while smoking three fags out the other, just managing to say, ‘I dunno, the shit those people put in their bodies’ before pouring a carafe of vodka down our throats.

And, while we were lost in our completely unwarranted sense of western superiority, we forgot about something else: planes. The Great Wall of China doesn’t encircle the entire population, hemming them all in. Millions of people from all over the world fly to thousands of places each and every day, doubtless many hundreds of thousands of them Chinese. [Side fact: if you got all of the Chinese people who travelled by air each day and got them to link hands along the Welsh coast, it would be completely and utterly pointless] Maybe we didn’t forget. Maybe we just sort of figured that if there was a highly infectious disease with the potential to bloom into a pandemic rampaging around the continent of Asia that the UK government would do something to block or control entry from those countries that had been affected. That was a bit silly of us, wasn’t it? Even though we didn’t really trust our beloved Boris all that much to begin with, I dare say we trust him now about as much as I trust a fart after a surprise horse vindaloo.

For the first few months of the outbreak we decided to play a nationwide game of Supermarket Sweep, with the ghost of Dale Winton shouting encouragement at us from the clouds: “Fasta fasta, grab all the pasta!”

And, of course, booming out the show’s famous slogan: “Next time you’re at the checkout and you hear the beep, think of the old woman who now can’t wipe her arse, you inconsiderate freak.” Why toilet paper? In case we needed to wipe our lungs? What would we have stockpiled if the WHO had warned us of an impending diarrhoea outbreak? Halls Soothers?

The first lockdown confined most of us to our homes with the option of one hour’s outdoor exercise per day. We were essentially prisoners, but with worse diets and even greater substance-abuse problems. Subsequent lockdowns kept some shops and amenities open but essentially stopped people from socialising, prevented them from going to pubs and for nights out, and pretty much compelled them to stay at home feeling miserable and grumpy, thereby turning large sections of the population into, well… me before the coronavirus.

Refuses to wear a mask, but for some reason he’s down with safety specs.

The arrival of the Track and Trace system made rebels and doomsayers of a large swathe of the country’s intellectually challenged. ‘Slip siding into a fascist state, are we?’ they cried, though perhaps not as articulately as that. ‘We’ll see about that! If those hired goons at McDonalds think they’re going to write down MY name and address at the door, like the fucking Stazi, they’ve got another thing coming… oh, McDonalds is doing an on-line promotion where you can win free Big Macs for a year?! Hold on, I’ll just type in my name and address…’

I understand being wary of governments and corporations in our digital age. It’s perfectly possible that the ostensibly innocent gathering of information in our – thus far – only mildly corrupt society (see Analytica, Cambridge et al) could one day be turned against us should the right (or possibly wrong) person or organisation take the reins. That’s why I admire that rare breed of zealot who dedicates himself to a life off the grid, living in a shack, or up a tree, in the wilderness, roaming naked or in rags, eating wild potatoes (much more dangerous than the domesticated version), shitting in a hole in the ground, and teaching badgers how to do basic CPR should they one day go down from a heart attack. But as for the rank and file? Those who participate in modern life while at the same time decrying it? If you’re going to holler ‘Invasion of privacy! Infringement of civil liberties! What’s next: a microchip??’ it’s best not to walk around all day with a hand-held device that contains an actual micro-chip. Your phone knows where you are and what you’re doing at all times of the day and night, and any gaps in its knowledge can be helpfully filled in by you voluntarily narrating every movement of your excruciatingly pointless existence – even your bowel movements. If this technology had been around in the 30s and 40s we’d all be reading ‘Anne Frank’s Instagram Feed’ instead of her diary, and it would feature just one picture: a selfie of her in the loft with a caption reading, ‘I’m in this loft, but, shhhhh, don’t tell the Germans #secretloft #loftnights #letmebeFrank’.’

Masks, too, were another source of upset, with angry people – whose only source of news was the digestion of headlines on anonymous blogs posted in a Facebook group called WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, SHEEPLE – spluttering that masks had no proven track record of preventing harmful microbes or virus-laden effluent from passing through them, much to the shock of surgeons and SARS-blighted Asians everywhere, who’d happily worn the efficacious face-panties for years.

On a side note, the Tories have appointed a ‘Minister for Loneliness’. The Tories. The party of ‘every man for himself, pip pip, if you slack or fall it’s your fault, bally ho, no such thing as society’. This is like finding out that Ted Bundy was once appointed the minister for ‘Making Sure People Don’t Get Brutally Murdered by a Stranger’.

It’s got to the point now where millions of people would rather get their advice on the virus from David Icke, an ex-goalkeeper with big fish lips who believes that the Queen is quite literally a shape-shifting lizard from outer space, than from thousands of epidemiologists and scientists who’ve spent their lives studying and combating viruses.

It is, however, understandable that people have grown weary of restrictions and lockdowns, given that the guidelines sometimes seem like they’ve been made up by a bunch of heavy drug-users with type-writers.

“You can’t go into a textile shop wearing blue, unless it’s only on one leg, and you can’t go to the butchers’ unless your aunty Beryl is there with you, but only if she’s wearing her glasses down on the tip of her nose, and even then she’s only permitted to speak if she’s doing a David Attenborough impression. You can go swimming, but only in puddles, you can go to the cinema, but only if you’re blindfolded, you can go to the gym, but only if it’s on the roof of a council estate tower block, but, remember, Tuesday is opposites day, and every second Wednesday gives priority to Chihuahuas. In summary, then, don’t cross the streams, don’t feed them after midnight, don’t you forget about me, don’t blame it on the good times blame it on the boogie, don’t cry for me Argentina, and don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me. Don’t you.”

At core, though, if you read behind and between the lines of official communications, you’ll find this simple message: don’t be a dick. This is something that doesn’t appear to come naturally to us, in the same way as it does to people in South East Asian countries like Taiwan, who’ve pretty much got the virus licked. It’s a tragedy that we can’t bring ourselves to care more, because people are dying. Celebrities are dying, for Christ sake, this is serious! At the rate comedy double-acts were halved this year you’d have thought Thanos had snapped his fingers. Bobby Ball, Eddie Large, Barry Chuckle. All sadly gone. Perhaps the surviving members could form a triple act and call themselves ‘Little Chuckle Cannon’. I’ll just have to find a new nickname for my penis.

Regrettably, both Krankies have thus far survived.

And now, of course, we’ll be hoping that it’s all over by Christmas. Just like the Great War… You know, the one that lasted four years and was followed by the two-year-long Spanish Flu outbreak?

Happy Pandemukkah.

 

All Our Lives. Watching America.

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What has the US Presidential Election got to do with us here in the UK? Why should we care as much as we undoubtedly do? We seem better informed and more animated about the minutiae of our transatlantic cousins’ glitzy political battles than we do our own. Perhaps that glitziness has a lot to do with it. Our elections are quite drab in comparison. As Scottish comedian Joe Heenan so memorably put it: ‘You wouldn’t get this shite if the Americans did it the British way. Right now the President would be on a stage in a sports centre with a guy dressed as a squirrel standing behind him.’

In the US, politicians stroll out into vast arenas in the manner of WWE stars, with their own walk-on music booming unironically in their wake. One only needs to watch a highlight video of former PM Theresa May’s bizarre attempts to connect with the people of Great Britain through ‘dance’ to understand why we should never, ever, under any circumstances, abandon our reserved political discourse for the ratings-chasing, reality-TV-show grandstanding of the states. Whenever Theresa May – woman of the people – danced on camera she looked either like a drunk stork pretending to be a bear, or a shy Al Jolson trying his best to perform his act during an earthquake. Let’s stick to the drab, and let the Americans worry about the fab.

Donald Trump, of course, has turned the pomp and circumstance up to eleven. Even if the world had any choice in the matter, which it doesn’t thanks to Trump’s depressing ubiquity, it wouldn’t dare turn away from that fat car-crash in a suit for even a second: he’s got more plots than Stephen King, less shame than a back-street flasher in a face-mask, less scruples than Ted Bundy after Happy Hour, and more bullshit than a farmer’s field in spring-time. Some people out there have been watching too much television, and think they want a fictional character in charge of their country. But the qualities it’s easy to admire in an unpolished, rebellious, blue collar, tells-it-like-it-is character like Happy Gilmore, or an alpha-strongman like TV’s Tony Soprano, don’t necessarily make for a good president. Trump is a cartoon; a buffoon; a shark with legs; a great big bag of narcissistic contradictions; a circus ringmaster in Hell, who uses Twitter in place of a whip.

All of that, then, goes some way towards explaining why America has always been so grimly fascinating and strangely compelling to us, especially now, with yet another ‘celebrity’ in the hot-seat. But it doesn’t explain why we do – and why on earth we should – care so much. After all, Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden weren’t, aren’t and won’t be our presidents.

Perhaps it’s down to the Butterfly Effect. America is the heir to the British Empire’s dead hegemony. Its existence and actions have always affected us, and the world. But it’s definitely the case that how the US comports itself, and who it chooses as its figurehead, affects us now in a much more impactful, instant and targeted way than ever before, thanks to the unsleeping, unfiltered portal of the worldwide web. And what a wicked web we weave.

I remember from my youth a well-used refrain about America. It used to be said that whenever a societal trend, change or calamity took root across the pond, we should expect it to sweep our shores within six months or less. Fashions, pop-culture crazes, political skulduggery, crime-waves. We all watched the news with a sense of foreboding, wondering what would be expected of us in the seasons to come. We were powerless to prevent this tidal wave of transformation, even though we could see it coming. America was us, and we were America, bound by our shared history and language.

“Everyone in California is wearing assless chaps!” my grandmother shouted from her TV-chair one balmy summer evening*. My grandfather sighed and wandered into the kitchen to find a pair of scissors. “I’ll go get started on all my trousers,” he shouted back, before muttering to himself, “It’s going to be one cold ass winter.” But what could he do? America had spoken. *[that may or may not have actually happened]

I wonder how much of that misguided belief of ours was connected with how we felt about movies. There used to be a significant lag between a movie premiering in the states and it finally debuting here in the UK. About six months. While we waited we’d pine, speculate, get swept up in the hype and longing, before eventually – finally – getting a taste of the action.

Over the course of my lifetime the western world has become more dream-like, more cinematic, and more cravenly consumerist than it ever was; it therefore makes sense that back in the 80s and 90s we would readily conflate a six-month wait for a movie with the idea that six months after watching news reports from the US we’d be ushering in those same societal changes. American movies contained reflections of American life and thought and ideology, in which we, in turn, saw reflections of ourselves. And since all life was a movie, and we its stars, ipso facto movies and reality were interchangeable. The US electing an actor as its president went some way towards reinforcing that feeling.

Ultimately, though, we never imported all that much from America, besides the cosmetic. With the exception of the horror of Dunblane we never became a nation of school shooters. Our cities didn’t ring out with gun fire. We never abandoned our welfare state to private equity and insurance – at least not completely. In time we realised that as much as we admired and venerated and sought to emulate America, we would never be America – and that was okay. We didn’t want to be America. We didn’t need to be.

And then along came the internet, ushering in a new era of hyper-connectivity, and a new and immediate sense of round-the-clock globalism. The internet brings us together at the same time as it splinters us apart. We’re united in our disunity as never before. While the internet was initially a liberating and unifying force, it was soon weaponised by social media. Whatever power was displaced by the common man or woman having access to the world at their fingertips was soon clawed back by authoritarian governments like those of China and North Korea, or subtly redirected by shadowy organisations like Cambridge Analytica. Governments could interfere in the elections of other countries not by mobilising for war or sending spies on long-term undercover missions, but by employing a group of sun-shy tech experts to sit in a darkened room all day posing as zealots, or patriotic movers and shakers on Twitter and Facebook. Political rivals could sink an opponent not by setting a honey-trap, or paying a PI to rake through their bins looking for compromising letters and receipts, but by flooding the internet with memes of wildly fluctuating veracity, ranging from the sort-of-true-but-skewed to the risibly fantastical. The truth didn’t matter. Memes became missiles. And when you’re hit by one, the truth is a moot point.

The shadow Donald Trump casts across America falls over our land, too. His rallies and rantings and ravings don’t happen in a Stars-and-Stripes emblazoned vacuum. His opinions on race, his opposition to truth and reality, his economically-motivated scepticism on climate change and epidemiology, his aversion to culpability and compassion, have all seeped into and permeated our national discourse, and infected our cultural consciousness.

A great many of the memes we see spreading on-line – on Black Lives Matters, on the poor, on coronavirus, on the environment – carry Republican and pro-Trump stamps, and millions of Brits share them without knowing or caring that they’ve been infected by the political and ideological tussles of another country. A disturbing minority of Brits long for Trump, or someone more like him, to be our Prime Minister. Our politicians, too, have adopted the Teflon Don’s tactics of holding firm and denying objective reality just long enough for the news cycle to sweep past them onto something and someone else. Thanks to Trump’s leadership style of cult-leader cum CEO cum mad king, it’s harder than ever to hold people in power to account. We can see the effects of that even here in Scotland with the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier, a Westminster MP, who by all rights should’ve resigned after flouting coronavirus restrictions, the virtues of which she’d been busy extolling on behalf of her constituents. Ten, or even five, years ago she probably would have stood down immediately, but the lesson from America is clear: don’t listen to the media, don’t listen to the people. Tell them to go fuck themselves. Do what you like.

We care about the US Election, then, because it has consequences for us, even if we’re entirely powerless to control their direction. Like a meteor about to strike the earth. Hopefully when Joe Biden takes office a more measured ethos will radiate from the US, and spread some much needed calm across cyberspace and the world. We just have to hope that the fat, orange genie isn’t already too far out of the bottle.

Trump Campaign US Election 2020 Timetable

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Oct 26

Trump arrives at a WOMEN FOR TRUMP rally with Mike Pence, and looks genuinely happy.

“How did you manage to arrange this, Mikey? There’s a lot of them to get through. I’d better get started.”

“They’re here to support you, Donald. To support you.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, they’ll need to. I’m gonna be exhausted after fucking all these women.”

“Donald, I…”

“I knew I was right to have that fifth burger at breakfast this morning.”

“Donald, look, I really want you to start focusing on the election…”

“Don’t worry about that, Pencey, I’ll be fine. I scrunched up some Viagra into my burgers.”

“Donald, I said election, not….”

“OUTTA MY WAY! MAGA SHAGGA COMING THROUGH!”

Oct 27

  • Trump attends a rally in Wisconsin dressed as Jesus, and tells his supporters he’s got a lot in common with the Son of God, except he wouldn’t have been pussy enough to get himself crucified. Besides, Jesus wasn’t that great, because how many casinos did he manage to build? Yeah, exactly, you see? Loser. “Never trust a man who can’t afford proper shoes,” he tells the crowd.
  • Kanye West is hired to dress like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn and play the flute outside inner-city polling stations. He leads all black people not wearing MAGA hats into a holding area, whereupon an angry, hysterical white lady calls the police on them.
  • Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court. Six out of nine seats on the court are now occupied by hard-line Republican judges. Trump vows to kill the three Democrat judges by the end of the year and replace them with Dracula, Rasputin and a golden effigy of himself.

Oct 28

  • The Pope issues a rebuke to Trump following his previous day’s comments about Jesus. Various Republican and conservative Catholic organisations are furious with the President. Trump reminds them that Jesus is a total loser – who never even had his own condo in Palm Springs, can you believe it? – and they should have no Trump but Trump. If they vote for him he’ll ban abortion, keep allowing churches to flagrantly disregard coronavirus restrictions, and put as many Mexican kids in cages as he possibly can. The organisations release a joint statement that simply says: “USA, USA, USA!” eighteen-hundred times.
  • Trump holds a Super Spreader event on Jeffrey Epstein’s old island. Hopes to make it a regular thing. Mike Pence points out that, a) a super spreader isn’t a good thing and, b) that’s not the kind of spreading it refers to anyway. Trump responds by pointing out that, a) shut up Mike Pence and, b) when are we stopping for burgers?

Oct 29

  • A flotilla of screaming and naked Eastern European teenagers is discovered off the coast of Epstein Island. Trump orders a napalm strike to make sure there’s no risk of coronavirus contamination, and definitely not to ensure their silence. Trump says he’s just doing his bit to keep the country safe, and shouldn’t be considered a hero.
  • Trump orders 6,000,000 hats with HERO written on them.
  • Mail trucks carrying ballots are pulled over by Proud Boys soldiers. All ballots that smell  even a little bit socialist are destroyed.

Oct 30

  • Melania escapes.
  • Trump reveals that Elon Musk is building a space station for him and Vladimir Putin in orbit of the earth. Mike Pence apologises and says Trump stayed up all night watching Elysium. Trump orders surveillance on Matt Damon, “just in case that leftie bastard ruins everything.”

Oct 31

  • At a late-night rally, on the stroke of midnight, lightning explodes across the sky’s dark canvas, and a swarm of flies erupts from Mike Pence’s mouth. A disembodied voice can be heard shrieking ‘THE TIME OF THE EVIL ONE IS UPON US!’ as Pence shakes like a turkey on a washing machine. He later blames it on a combination of technical faults, the Democrats and the gays. “I’m definitely not Satan’s representative on Earth,” he tells Fox News. “We wouldn’t have minded, to be honest,” they admit.

Trump tells 15,000 supporters at a mega-rally in Virginia that coronavirus has been cured, and is angry when they don’t cheer.

“Why aren’t they cheering, Mikey?”

“They’re all dead from coronavirus, Donald.”

Nov 1

  • Melania is recaptured.
  • Trump is asked about his record on the environment. He says he’ll probably release it in time for Christmas. “And it’s gonna be the best song you ever heard,” he tells them.

Joe Biden takes the concept of social distancing at rallies to its logical conclusion and holds a rally on the moon. Trump orders NASA to deploy Neil Armstrong to capture him.

“Sir, Neil Armstrong died in 2012.”

“I said now, goddammit!”

Nov 2

  • Walls are built around polling stations in all southern states with high Latinx populations. Trump makes John Leguizamo pay for it.
  • Trump realises Melania hasn’t been recaptured at all, and he’s been having breakfast and attending rallies with a terrified Gloria from Modern Family. With some reluctance, Gloria is released.

Trump has projectiles hurled at him while attending a rally for all three of his black supporters.

“You shouldn’t have gone on stage wearing that, Donald,” Pence tells him.

“You told me to! You said I should do a rally in the hood!”

“DA hood, Donald. In DA hood.”

Nov 3

ELECTION DAY – All indications are that Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. Biden refuses to concede, because there are still millions of votes to count. Trump whips his cock out live on TV and says, “Count that, commie!” “Zero,” says Biden.

Nov 7

Mike Pence explodes into a fireball live on-stage during a press conference. When the flames die down everyone can see that his skin is a mottled red, and a tail now droops between his legs.

“Janice Grappily, CBNFHGS News. Mr Pence, are you the anti-Christ?”

Pence thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘No comment’, as a swarm of flesh-eating flies shoots out from his penis, and strips the flesh from Janice Grappily’s bones.

Nov 21

There are various legal challenges to counting in Republican-majority states, to which Trump responds angrily. “How can you challenge counting? One, two, five… see, it’s easy.”

Dec 8

Trump buys the Electoral College and renames it Trump University 2.

Dec 9

Trump University 2 goes bankrupt.

Dec 10

US government bails out Trump University 2 and changes its name back to the Electoral College

Dec 11

Mike Pence tries to explain to Trump that the Electoral College isn’t an actual college, and he shouldn’t really have been able to buy it.

Dec 12

Trump tries to buy the Electoral College again

Dec 13

Trump gives a joint press conference to address the issue of Mike Pence being the devil.

“I just want to say that I give Mike Pence my full support, and so should you. Why didn’t you tell me you were Beelzebub in disguise, Pencey?”

Pence looks down at his shoes. Well, at his cloven feet. “I thought you’d feel threatened by my dark lineage and powers.”

“Jealous of you, Pencey? There’s no-one more evil than me. I’m the evilest. I eat cats, for Christ’s sake.”

“Brad Fanachuk, FKWSG News. Mr President, did you just say that you’re evil and you eat cats?”

Trump points a finger. “You’re toxic.”

“Mr President, I heard you say it.”

“Get this guy out of here. Pence, squirt some flies out of your evil dick at this joker.”

“Carver Sweetchuck, CBBC News. We all heard you say it, sir.”

“Well maybe you’ll hear this: JOE BIDEN IS A PAEDOPHILE AND HE’S WORKING FOR IRAN. OKAY?”

Dec 14

  • Joe Biden is officially elected President, with Kamala Harris as his VP.
  • Trump changes the locks on the White House door.

Jan 3

  • Joe Biden knocks on the front door of the White House, and hears someone shouting, “No speaka de English, senor”, then a gunshot, then Trump screaming, “GODDAMIT, WHY DID YOU SHOOT ME?” and then someone saying, “Sorry, Mr President, I heard a Mexican voice and just acted instinctually.”

Jan 4

The Proud Boys take up fortifying positions around Trump buildings all across the US. Trump tower is engulfed by violence, gunfire, gambling, raucous noise, biker gangs and sleaze. Marty McFly arrives in the De Lorean to retrieve the Sports Almanac from Trump.

Jan 5

Civil War in America. It’s swiftly brought to an end when Ant Man shrinks himself down, flies up Donald Trump’s arsehole and disconnects his brain.

Jan 8

With the help of Mike Pence’s evil, Trump turns himself into the Lawnmower Man and takes over Twitter from the inside.

Jan 20

Donald Trump pretends to be Joe Biden at the inauguration and hopes nobody will notice. He gives himself away when he pats a woman on the pussy rather than her ass.

Feb 4

  • The White House gains a mysterious new and exceptionally ugly old dinner-lady called Desdemona Crump, who says she makes “the best rice pudding, world class, they don’t make rice pudding like I do.”
  • Joe Biden chokes to death on some rice pudding.

Feb 7

Mike Pence returns to Hell ‘for a bit of peace’.

Feb 8 

Melania becomes the 47th President of the United States

 

The Art of the Trump: A Deal for All Seasons

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“I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

Just as Ronald Reagan once plundered the toolkit of his former career – namely his screen presence and charisma – to power the presidency, so too has Donald Trump been plundering his toolkit, bringing to bear on the Oval Office a mixed bag of dirty tricks gleaned in the convergent worlds of the boardroom and the red carpet. Trump is renowned for – whether or not some or indeed all of it justifies the renown  – his business acumen, his big-balled risk taking, his chaotic and quixotic sex life, and especially for being a merciless, sociopathic, bullying ball-bag of a man; all of which made him a compelling TV star, precisely none of which qualifies him to safeguard the health, happiness and financial well-being of 327 million souls.

Trump may have been an entrepreneur, but he made his gambles knowing he had a multi-million dollar safety net behind him. Trump may have generated vast profits, but much of his success was built upon his aversion to paying tax and contractors – the real truth of his assets buried and obscured behind bank loans, off-shore accounts and IOUs.

I’ve read a lot of books about Donald Trump, but until recently I’d never read a book by Donald Trump. I plumped for the most famous and influential of them, the New York Times’ Best-selling The Art of the Deal, first published in 1987. However, it’s perhaps something of a stretch to say that it was written by Donald Trump. Anyone who’s ever read Trump’s Twitter feed or listened to his speeches knows that eloquence and coherence aren’t his strong points. Any book written by Trump and Trump alone would probably scan like a version of Jack Kerouak’s On The Road as penned by Narcissus after a massive head injury.

The Art of the Deal was ghost-written – aka simply written – by journalist Tony Schwartz. In 2016 Schwartz publicly lamented his part in helping to cement Trump in the public consciousness as some sort of munificent emperor, an image that, in concert with Trump’s appearances on The Apprentice, somehow convinced the American public that a dead-eyed orange cabbage was the best choice for Commander-in-Chief. I can well imagine the quantity of Prozak Schwartz would’ve needed to ingest to keep calm during those long months with Trump translating his grandiose, slogan-centric puffery into something palatable.

Trump’s distinct lack of empathy and rampant sense of self-righteousness and entitlement blinds him to the fact that he’s more redolent of Mr Burns and Biff Tannen than Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Let’s see if we can divine in his writing the man we see at work on the world-stage today, be it on the golf course, or tapping away on Twitter as he takes a shit.

I’ve tried to group my selected quotes into categories, with catty asides where appropriate.

The White House as boardroom and battlefield

“I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win. Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

Trump’s certainly taken that insight with him to the White House, only remove the bit that says ‘within legal bounds’.

“I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky.”

And doesn’t America know it.

“Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”

Yep. Still seems to be his signature style as president. A sort of nonchalant dictatorship.

On the Trump Organisation: “With so many regulators and regulations to satisfy, we had one major advantage: the fact that we are not a bureaucracy. In most large public corporations, getting an answer to a question requires going through seven layers of executives, most of whom are superfluous in the first place. In our organisation, anyone with a question could bring it directly to me and get an answer immediately. That’s precisely why I’ve been able to act so much faster than my competitors on so many deals.”

“I’ve never had any great moral problems with gambling because most of the objections seem hypocritical to me. The New York Stock Exchange happens to be the biggest casino in the world. The only thing that makes it different from the average casino is that the players dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases. If you allow people to gamble in the stock market, where more money is made and lost than in all the casinos in the world put together, I see nothing terribly different about permitting people to bet on blackjack or craps or roulette.”

The NYSE is a casino, except for when Trump wants to claim he’s directly responsible for its robust performance.

Man of the People

Because he really is just like one of us, right?

“And while I can’t honestly say I need an eighty-foot living room, I do get a kick out of having one.”

“In the middle of 1985, I got an invitation from Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian and a billionaire at the time, to come to his apartment in Olympic Tower. I went, and while I didn’t particularly go for the apartment, I was impressed by the huge size of its rooms.”

Yes, that Khashoggi family. That dude was the uncle of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was butchered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Interesting connection there.

“I rarely go out, because mostly, it’s a waste of time.”

I guess when your house is the size of a city park, and you own scores of buildings, you don’t need to.

“For me the relevant issue isn’t what I report on the bottom line, it’s what I get to keep.”

Trump and the press

Trump knows the press, and has learned how to wield it as a weapon. It helps that he has Fox News and the Murdoch press on-side.

“First, the press thrives on confrontation. They also love stories about extremes, whether they’re great successes or terrible failures.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from dealing with politicians over the years, it’s that the only thing guaranteed to force them into action is the press – or, more specifically, fear of the press. You can apply all kinds of pressure, make all sorts of pleas and threats, contribute large sums of money to their campaigns, and generally it gets you nothing. But raise the possibility of bad press, even in an obscure publication, and most politicians will jump. Bad press translates into potential lost votes, and if a politician loses enough votes, he won’t get reelected. If that happens, he might have to go out and take a 9 to 5 job. That’s the last thing most politicians want to do.”

“Most reporters, I find, have very little interest in exploring the substance of a detailed proposal for a development. They look instead for the sensational angle. In this case, that may have worked to my advantage. I was prepared for questions about density and traffic and the mix of housing on the site, but, instead, all the reporters wanted to talk about was the world’s tallest building. It gave the project an instant mystique. When I got home that night, I switched on the CBS Evening News, expecting to hear news from the opening of the summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Dan Rather was in Geneva anchoring the program, but after summarising the day’s developments, suddenly he was saying: ‘In New York City, developer Donald Trump announced plans to build the world’s tallest building.’ It demonstrated how powerful and intoxicating a symbol I’d found for my project.”

Prescience with a dash of irony and a sprinkling of ‘Oooo, bet you regret saying that now, Trumpy’.

“I discovered, for the first time but not the last, that politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.”

On Mitterand: “It wasn’t just that he was a socialist, and that he began nationalising companies, it was also that he turned out to be a dangerous man. What can you say about a guy who goes around selling nuclear technology to the highest bidder?”

Yeah, Trump would never do anything like that. Too much integrity.

“Atlantic City’s reputation had also been hurt by corruption charges growing out of the FBI’s Abscam sting operation. In 1980, the vice-chairman of the Casino Control Commission, Kenneth MacDonald, resigned after admitting that he’d been in the room when a $100,000 bribe was passed to a local politician by potential investors looking for help in getting a casino license.”

Imagine being in a room when some dodgy deal, bribe or attempted extortion was going down. Trump would NEVER do anything like that.

On Conrad Hilton: “His son Barron joined the company in the 1950s, and of course it was only a matter of time before he took over. It had nothing to do with merit; it’s called birthright.”

Remind me just how many of your children are prominent figures in your administration?

“But Conrad believed very strongly this inherited wealth destroys moral character and motivation. I happen to agree that it often does.”

(cough cough)

“You can probably guess how much stock I put in polls.”

Yes. It very much depends upon how favourable they are to you.

“There is nothing to compare with family if they happen to be competent, because you can trust family in a way you can never trust anyone else.”

(cough cough, IRONIC, cough cough, MAFIA)

On Ed Koch: “He’s presided over an administration that is both pervasively corrupt and totally incompetent.”

(sound of someone taking a machine gun to a barrel of fish)

“Meanwhile, no fewer than a dozen Koch appointees and cohorts have been indicted on charges of bribery, perjury, and accepting kickbacks, or have been forced to resign in disgrace after admitting various ethical transgressions.”

Imagine that…

“The irony is that Koch made his reputation by boasting about his integrity and incorruptibility. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that if the people he appoints prove to be corrupt, then in the end he must take the responsibility.”

That sort of thing doesn’t occur to a lot of people, to be fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Donald?

Simply put: guy from the big house and the guy from the book? Same crook, different deal.

We’ve got the whole world in our hands…

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Our planet is dying. At the very least it’s got a bad case of human-themed septicaemia. This is no longer a matter of Hollywood disaster-movie conjecture; it’s demonstrable scientific fact, as much as the industrialists, billionaires and corporatists scheme to deny it (it’s almost as if they have an ulterior motive or something).

Companies and industries only seem to work to reduce their carbon footprints when doing so will open up lucrative new revenue streams, or when they’re compelled to do so by an unbribable branch of authority. If every company with a potentially deleterious output had been trusted to undertake a cost-benefit analysis weighing the damage they cause to the planet against the maximum number of Bentleys and golden sceptres their shareholders could buy with the proceeds of their unbridled capitalist greed, then the human race today would be coughing up its scarred and blackened lungs, and then eating them to stay alive. There would be nothing else left to eat, presumably because all plant and animal life had been wiped out, Lorax-style, by Bob Dudley’s Need for Sneeds Emporium.

Thanks to a modicum of checks and balances, we’re coughing up our lungs, sure, but we haven’t yet been forced to eat them. We’re heading that way, though. We’re like frogs being brought to a boil in a pot, or turkeys counting down the days to Christmas.

Which begs the question…

Why haven’t we gone full French on the world’s ass? Why aren’t we pulling industrialists out of their gas-guzzling limos, stringing up CEOs of country-stripping companies from the ends of eco-friendly lamp-posts, or storming parliaments dressed as armed trees to demand action and change? I’m not advocating that we do any of these things, Mister MI5 and Senior CIA, and I’m certainly too lily-livered and self-involved to spearhead such movements. I’m just saying that, historically-speaking, for shit to get done in this world, someone usually has to get, well… done.

The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the US Civil War, the Russian Revolution: the run-up to these seismic events involved very little in the way of amusing placards or people marching the streets in floral-patterned cagoules. And the stakes weren’t as high then, because they’ve literally never been higher: the earth is dying.

Human beings the world over are being poisoned to death on a hitherto unimaginable scale by dick-swinging, money-amassing destroyers of worlds, who sail around in their million-pound yachts as beneath them sink the corpses of a billion dead fish and an embarrassment of bubble-wrapped whales. Donald Trump, as both a president and a (supposedly inert) CEO, is representative of this fatally-escalating trend towards greed and mass-death. It’s hard to imagine a person like Trump ever, ever, ever, ever stopping doing what he’s doing. Even once the planet is dead, hard-nosed industrialists and financiers like him will doubtless be selling oxygen canisters and pots of cress to our mutant ancestors at a million pounds a time.

Tough-talking, populist politicians, of the variety that are sweeping the globe right now, are more likely to be corrupt, callous and power-hungry; vessels with rich backers who have no time for nuance or nurturing. They want to get shit done. They don’t care about red-tape or the environment. They just want to make money, money, money, and won’t allow anything to get in the way of that impulse, even the death of literally everything on earth. The voters these populists attract are more likely to be angry, uneducated and malleable. It’s all too easy for the string-pullers to encourage the angry mob to turn a blind eye to their leaders’ corruption, contradiction and propensity for planet-raping by promising them that their enemies will be crushed: enemies that unscrupulous idealogues in the media will be all too happy to hold up for closer inspection, or simply invent; totem-poles to the rage of the underclass.

So what the hell can we do about all this? How can we save ourselves?

We can march, of course, (cagoules optional) substituting obstruction and media coverage for blood. We can block the roads and city centres with demonstrations comprising hordes of determined do-gooders. Unfortunately, head-line grabbing demos like the ones carried out by Extinction Rebellion don’t tend to generate much in the way of positive media coverage. Hardly surprising, really, since media companies tend to be owned by millionaires and billionaires, and thus are spectacularly unlikely to provide coverage that might compromise, or create agitation around, the activities and profits of power companies and major arms’ manufacturers in which their owners and their pals might have an interest (except, perhaps, where it might embarrass or disgrace an economic or political rival).

The largely one-sided nature of the media discourse has the rather perverse effect of placing millions of ordinary Joes and Joannes shoulder to shoulder with the very bastards who’d happily watch them burn to death if the situation demanded it. Or even just for a laugh. Thus, while a lot of blue- and -white collar workers may broadly support the aim of Extinction Rebellion – i.e. the aim of making sure that we don’t all choke to death on our own soot-flavoured, carcinogenic phlegm – they won’t necessarily tolerate any disruption to their daily lives in order to achieve it.

In one sense, this is laughably bizarre. It’s like over-hearing a peasant during the French Revolution moaning about the push towards democracy making him late for work: ‘I can hardly bloody move in this town for the angry, liberated masses hunting down the royal family to punish them for their autocratic, imperialist excesses. If I don’t get this bloody cart-load of turnips to Le Havre by 5 o’clock I’ll never be home in time for my evening class, ‘Cooking with Rats.’’

In another sense, I can completely understand the ordinary citizen’s irritation and cynicism. People have to get to work. They have families to feed, people to help, hospital appointments to attend. So a town being brought to a halt might rather piss them off, whatever the supposed stakes. And the people most responsible for the earth’s destruction – the aforementioned billionaires and industrialists – are also those least likely to be affected by an Extinction Rebellion protest: ‘Oh no, they’ve blocked some roads in Sidcup and Hull. That’s really going to make it difficult for me to reach the arms expo in my sonic helicopter.’

Plus, even if we do manage to bring our barons of industry to heel and get them to clean up their acts, won’t the world still be doomed if we can’t control the carbon emissions coming from economic power-houses like the US and China, or from emerging industrial economies like India and Brazil? It’s about as hopelessly futile as diligently tidying and sweeping your garden every day when your next-door neighbour has taken to burning six-tonnes of plastic every day in theirs.

No-one said changing the paradigm would be easy. Protests and demonstrations don’t change the world over-night. They weave themselves into the public consciousness, into magazines, documentaries, books and movies. We’re all connected in this new digital age, so lessons learned in this country are easily imparted to peoples the world over. Well, maybe not the peoples suffering under the iron rule of brutal, totalitarian regimes who won’t even let them switch the internet on, but, hey: not even brutal, totalitarian regimes last forever. Movements, empires, peoples, and cultures are all eventually swept aside by the glacially-paced, inexorable force of history. At one point the people of the US thought that slavery was an indispensable plank of their economy and culture. Hopefully one day we’ll view pollution and climate change in the same way.

In the here and now we have to push things towards tipping point, piece by piece, through grass-roots movements, education, music, movies and peaceful – though occasionally obstructive – collective action. I say ‘we’. My collective action pretty much begins and ends with this article, and in the cross I choose to put on the ballot-paper once every two to four years. Oh, and I’ve noticed that saving the world appears to involve my wife being able to shout at me for a wider range of things than ever before. ‘Don’t buy the plastic-wrapped bananas, are you trying to choke a whale to death? Turn that light off, you’ll melt an ice-cap!’ It often feels futile, but it’s all about the tipping point, baby. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, as I sit in my house, next to perhaps one of the biggest gas and petro-chemical refineries in the country. Recycle, Jamie. Don’t spray that deodorant for too long. Don’t idle the car engine…

I salute those with the drive, gumption, vision and free time to save the world, even if it’s only in installments. The only problem might be that we’re already too late. That the world is already in stage four, and there’s no stage five. In that case, all is still not lost. Human history is littered with examples of human ingenuity and genius changing and saving the world, just at the right time. We only have to hope that we’ll do it again, that some era-defining invention or scientific discovery will emerge, for which he don’t yet have a frame of reference or the means to be able to anticipate or predict.

Three hundred years ago we ran around with swords and muskets, routinely dying of the littlest of maladies. Now we orbit the earth, build robots and terraform deserts. I’m hopeful that we can pull ourselves back from the brink.

Hopeful. But still ferociously sceptical.

Riot gear and gas masks on stand-by.

America’s Deadly Shame: The National Panther Crisis

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A Citizens’ Rights group in the United States, NAW TO JAWS, has appealed to President Trumpelstiltskin to undertake an urgent review of Panther Ownership legislation. This follows the mauling of a young boy, Jackson Towtruck, at his family home in Scottsdale, Arizona, the seventeenth accidental home-based panthering this year alone. NTJ say this latest incident is part of an ‘all-too familiar tragic pattern’ that is ‘completely unacceptable and wholly avoidable in America in 2019.’

The boy’s father, Shard Towtruck, had left the panther free to roam in the garage instead of keeping it locked in a secure steel cage. The boy’s decision to play fetch with the panther while his parents stitched slogans into their baseball caps upstairs proved a fateful one that ultimately resulted in the emergency services having to play fetch with the boy’s limbs.

Tragic: Shard Towtruck

To the shock of many in the local community, the father has not only been allowed to keep his panther licence, but has also decided to retain ownership of the panther who killed his son. He told a local news network: “What y’all, snowflakes? A panther rips my son’s face off, and somehow the solution is to get rid of panthers? Maybe it’ll give my other twelve kids a wake-up call about using panthers responsibly.”

While news crews staked out the Towtruck family home, scores of pro-panther activists crowded into the sleepy suburban street, each of them wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan that’s become synonymous with American notions of liberty: PANTHERS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE DO.

Protests against panthers are at an all-time high following a chain of pantherings at schools and government buildings all across America. Some schools have installed elaborate panther-mazes at their entrances to slow down any panthers that might be released into the student body by crazed assailants.

The National Panther Association, always ready to counter-protest anti-panther protests, has called for teachers to be be-panthered in class. NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy reminded the association’s million-strong members: ‘The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a panther is a good guy with a panther.’ The former head of the NPA, the famous actor Chortles McMonkey-Chariot, last week echoed the organisation’s most famous proclamation, coined by the organisation’s founder, that they could ‘have his panther when they prise it out of his cold dead hands.’ A few days later, McMonkey-Chariot’s panther turned on him and chewed his leathery old body into a hundred different dessicated sections, after which first responders had to prise his cold dead hands out of the panther’s mouth.

The President burying McMonkey-Chariot on the White House lawn

President Trumplestiltskin has praised McMonkey-Chariot, a man he described as being ‘almost as famous as me.’ In a press conference on the White House lawn, Trumplestiltskin went on to stress his support for panther owners across America. ‘We love panthers, black panthers, but not the kind who wear those funny hats and black jumpers, and not the one from that movie, not the ‘black’ black panthers, just the black panthers, the actual panthers. Black panthers shouldn’t have black panthers, because they’re animals, and I don’t know if they have panthers in Mexico, but if they do, the wall will have to be higher, because they tell me panthers can jump. But I’m going to jump over the White House. And I’m going to do that easily. I’m the best at jumping. No-one does jumping better than me. Especially not the Mexican jumping beans. God damn Mexicans.’

The notion of panther ownership is a particularly hard one for protest groups to unpick and counter. After all, the right of US Citizens to bear panthers is written in to the national constitution. It harks back to a time when defenders of the fledging nation state were urged as a point of patriotic duty to carry a panther with them at all times in case they had to repel an invasion party of British troops, who were renowned for their deadly surprise attacks using hordes of coked-up foxes.

NTJ has been criticised by the NPA for its suggestion that citizens should arm themselves with guns to protect them from rabid panthers. ‘GUNS?’ said NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy. ‘GUNS? Are you crazy? Do you know how fucking dangerous those things are?’

‘No, I really think the best thing we can all do is just keep on thinking and praying.’

The Most Striking TV Moments of 2018

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There was a lot of great TV this year. Among the stand-outs were Better Call Saul, Future Man, Barry, Glow, The Americans, Ozark, The Good Place, Santa Clarita Diet, Preacher, Ash vs The Evil Dead, Agents of SHIELD, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and the documentary mini-series Wild, Wild Country. There was also a lot of good, but not great, TV this year: Orange is the New Black, iZombie, The X-Files, Star Trek Discovery, The Man in the High Castle, Fear the Walking Dead and Westworld among them. There was also a lot of missed TV this year, owing to a seemingly endless explosion of new shows.

There’s so much TV, on so many channels, across so many platforms, and always more and more and more, year upon year – much of it of a high pedigree – that to miss even a month of watch-time would be to find yourself a year or more behind the zeitgeist. Or so it starts to feel. Even when a great show reaches the end of its natural life, potentially freeing up a space in your schedule, another six – of equal or comparative quality – rise to take its place. As a consequence, I haven’t yet had a chance to watch The Haunting of Hill House, a single episode of This is Us or Atlanta, Sharp Objects, The Bodyguard, Castle Rock, Save Me, Killing Eve, The Sinner, the latest seasons of The Affair and The Deuce, season 3 of The Expanse, season 3 of Daredevil. The list goes on…

(I have, however, managed to binge my way through Vikings and Outlander. I’m enjoying both enormously. You can read my Outlander Binge Diary from the beginning HERE)

What I’m trying to say is that this list of ‘Striking Moments’ is in no way supposed to be exhaustive or scientific. Just in case you all start clamouring to say things like, ‘But what about this moment, or what about that moment?’ Or ‘This whole list falls apart without the inclusion of this, that or the other moment’. I’ve got two kids, a partner and a day job, asshole. I can’t just sit around watching TV all day, just to make YOU happy. In saying that, I hope that some small part of this list does make you happy, because it’s Christmas and I’m a nice guy.

Without any further ado, then, and in no particular order:

Vikings – Floki’s utopia

OK, so this is technically cheating, because the following moments/episode technically premiered in late 2017, but because the half-season spilled over into 2018, I’m including it here.

The battle to avenge Ragnar’s brutal death predictably led to further battles, bloodshed, and renewed divisions. Floki’s arc, running in tandem with and parallel to the journeys undertaken by the vengeful sons of Ragnar, also came to a tragic and bloody end, with his wife, Helga, being murdered by the half-kidnapped/half-rescued Muslim girl she’d brought back from the Mediterranean with her as her adopted daughter. Floki’s soul went into free-fall. He declared himself an empty vessel, and put himself at the mercy of fate, spending weeks in his small boat drifting aimlessly upon the tumultuous seas, letting himself be carried by the winds of fate and the hands of the Gods, wherever they saw fit to take him.

They took him to the country we know as Iceland, though he mistook it for Asgard, the home of the Gods themselves. The sequences wherein Floki wanders the empty, rugged landscape of fire and ice are beautiful and breath-taking. One minute the air fills with the rush and thunder of water, like a God’s roar breaking above him, the next silence – the silence of death; the sound of an empty world at the universe’s end. Angry waves break on beaches untrammelled by human feet, and in the distance a plume of primordial smoke slithers into the freezing air, a reminder of the violence sleeping just below the surface of this whisperingly empty world.

In the end this new world – this blank canvas of peace and promises – is corrupted, as worlds always are, by mankind. But that comes later. When Floki, a lone prophet in the ethereal wilderness, casts his widened eyes on the raw magnificence of a pre-human Iceland, we too can feel the island’s ancient power, and imagine a little of what it must have been like to walk the line of awe and terror in a world that was foreign to us in every way.

Soul-stirring.

And a great advert for the Icelandic tourist board.

The Man in the High Castle – Lady Liberty up in smoke

From the beginning, The Man in the High Castle’s world-building has been exquisitely rich and detailed. The Japanese Pacific States, the Neutral Zone and the Greater German Reich all look and feel lived-in and eerily authentic. This nightmarishly plausible landscape of a world where World War II’s winners and losers were reversed is so immersive – so grimly fascinating to spend time in – that the show was able to get away with moving at a slower pace during its first season, taking time to revel in the shadows of its mysteries.

Season three saw the show leaning into its sci-fi multiverse concept harder than ever before, plus piling on the tragedies and agonies of its deeply conflicted characters. Smith and his wife were put through the wringer (I feel I can get away with using archaic metaphors when I’m writing about a show that’s set in an alternate 1960s America), Frank struggled to find somewhere to belong, and the Nazis were gearing up to invade other universes.

The season’s most iconic, though, moment came in the finale, when a ranting Himmler presided over the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. Seeing flames and spinning debris exploding from that great monument to liberty and freedom, as people whooped and cheered, was as captivating as it was horrifying. Himmler had declared war on history and truth, and the people loved him for it.

All told, a timely and powerful reminder that nothing, not even Lady Liberty, is set in stone, and everything – even reality itself – can be undone and remade.

Fake news is in the eye of the beholder.

Or sometimes the bomb-holder.

Ozark – Drop me a line sometime

I really liked Ozark’s second season, but do you know what I really, really liked? Witnessing a character in a TV show sending a text message, and the typing and sending of that text message taking the actual length of time it would take to send that message in real life. I almost wept with joy. I know reality occasionally has to be suspended or sacrificed in order to keep a story flowing, but Christ, I didn’t realise how much TV’s two-second text messages had been getting me down. Thank you, Ozark. Thank you so bloody much.

Plus, kudos to Ruth Langmore’s line, which I vow to use often in 2019: “I don’t know shit about fuck.”

Walking Dead – Rexit Means Rexit

Andrew Lincoln was leaving The Walking Dead. Fans were bound to find out. It wasn’t a particularly large leap from that revelation to the reality of a hard Rexit. However, Rick wouldn’t be leaving in the traditional, tried-and-tested manner of every other character who’d left the series since its inception, i.e. either living dead or dead dead, but moving over into a movie-based Walking Dead pocket-universe, where fans would get to see him Rick-xercise his authority one last time. AMC certainly didn’t want anybody to know that. At least, not yet.

AMC obviously couldn’t stop news of Lincoln’s departure from leaking out – after all, we live in an age of information in an intimately, interconnected world – but the network could use the news to its advantage, and with a little creative sleight-of-hand throw the audience off the scent of Rick’s true destination. What better way to blind-side the audience than by coming at them head-on, not only peeping and shouting about Rick’s departure, but making it the lynch-pin of AMC’s marketing strategy? The network very cleverly – or infuriatingly, depending upon how you look at it – hinted at Rick’s death and told the whole truth about his fate at the same time, and using the same words.

It’s a shame that Andrew Lincoln had to bail out just as The Walking Dead was getting good again, and it’s an even bigger shame that Rick’s exit episode threw the season’s momentum into reverse. Thankfully, it recovered again, and the mid-season ended strongly, but Rick’s goodbye could just as easily have dynamited the whole show. Whatever you think of the execution (and you can find out what I thought about it by clicking HERE), there’s no denying that it was a bold gambit, and – for better or ill – AMC definitely created a piece of event television.

House of Cards – Claire stacks the deck

House of Cards’ sixth and final season – sans Spacey – started strongly, faltered at the half-way mark, and then limped through a landscape littered with more bodies and serial implausabilities than it had ever before managed to muster, before collapsing in a messy, bloody heap on the floor of the Oval Office.

Robin Wright was exceptional (as always) as the lizard-like Claire Underwood, and it was interesting to see how her grip on, and relationship, to power differed from that of the freshly-dead Francis. It might have been an exceptional swansong season had Kevin Spacey’s disgrace not forced the creative team to improvise and engineer an ending instead of letting the end-game unfold as per the original plan.

Season six did, however, have one tremendously powerful image, that will stick with me for a long time: the unveiling of Claire’s new all-female cabinet. This wasn’t a sudden burst of ultra-feminism from Claire, or some bold idelogical statement, but rather another example of Claire using her power and cunning for strategic gain, fashioning the cabinet into a people-shaped ‘fuck you’ directed out at the world, and into the face of her equally lizard-like enemy, Annette Shepherd (Diane Lane).

The stunned look on Annette’s face as the silent table of women stared out at her from the cabinet room, before Claire shut the door in her face, was absolutely delicious.

Bravo, Claire. And bravo House of Cards.

Westworld – Ooh, Heaven is a place on earth

The best episode of Westworld’s second season, and also one of the best TV episodes of 2018, was it’s eighth, Kiksuya, which took Akecheta of the Ghost Nation on a journey through sorrow and sacrifice on the bitter road to sentience. It was a beautiful paean to love and identity, viewed through the haunting prism of loss.

But as striking and memorable moments go, it’s hard to beat the image of a caravan of hopeful, frightened and confused Westworldians trudging, marching and fleeing to the top of a rugged hill, as chaos and death erupts at their backs, towards an image of heaven itself: a doorway to a new world, the promise of new and eternal life, a perfect life in a perfect world; one that uploads their ‘souls’ and ‘essences’ into the heart of the matrix at the same time as it sends their broken, empty bodies to the bottom of the unseen and unseeable cliff just beyond the portal. I’ve seldom seen such a powerful conflation of faith, hope, horror and happiness.

Final proof, if further proof was needed, that the ‘synthetics’ are just as fallibly, desperately ‘human’ as we are.

Who is America – Welcome to the party, sphincter

Sacha Baron Cohen’s fresh dose of satirical punk-nacity never lived up to the promise of its mostly very funny first episode, losing focus and drifting into disjointed and uninspired puerility as the series progressed – and I say that as a life-long fan of the man’s work. However, one new character, former Mossad agent and anti-terrorism specialist, Erran Morad, never failed to elicit laughs, and featured in what was quite possibly one of the funniest sequences Baron Cohen has ever committed to screen.

I’m talking about the third episode’s Quinceanera skit, where Morad took three, real-life, Trump-salutin’ motherfuckers under his wing to teach them how to defend themselves against the greatest evils of our age: Muslim and Mexican immigrants. The ignorance, prejudice and empty-headed racism of the three men made them perfect conduits for Cohen’s devilish brand of justice-based pranksterism. Within minutes they were smearing their faces with KY jelly, and slipping on ‘pussy panties’ and fake boobs.

But the best was yet to come. The piece de resistance, the segment that had me howling until I couldn’t breathe, was the staging of a fake Quinceanera party, loaded with drugs and drink, at which one of the dolts was dressed as a 15-year-old Mexican girl, complete with fake pussy, and another crouched inside a pinata with a hidden video camera, waiting to bust the gaggle of Mexican rapists and drug-addicts who would surely swarm to their bait after reading the giant sign Morad had erected by the road-side, which read: QUINCEANERA 5pm – FREE DRUGS! YOUNG GIRLS! YOUNG PUSSY! The moment where not Mexicans, but police officers, arrived on the scene, demanding an explanation, almost killed me.

American Horror Story: Apocalypse – It’s the end of the world as we know it

AHS is an odd beast, an absurdist collection of horror tropes all wrapped up in a slick package with sex, songs and sadism. Given that its an anthology series that renews its setting, themes and characters each year (sometimes it returns to old haunts), most of its seasons take a few episodes to find their feet; to assemble all of their many weird little pieces into something resembling a coherent story (some seasons don’t manage it at all). I really like it. Even in its weaker seasons and moments it usually manages to rustle up a great episode, or a stand-out scene or sequence.

This time around, I really admired the first few minutes of the premiere, which did a brilliant job of conveying the fear, urgency, horror and panic of the impending apocalypse. I really felt the dread, tension, helplessness and savagery of the dying world as its people scrabbled to survive at any cost.

Striking stuff.

Better Call Saul – The mask slips

This whole series is one long, unbroken striking moment, and if you aren’t already watching it, then it’s my duty to tell you that you’re missing out on one of the most immaculately-crafted, pain-stakingly plotted, perfectly-acted, richly cinematic, emotionally resonant and funny shows of recent years, wildly different from but just as powerful in its own way as its parent-show Breaking Bad. Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in particular smash it out the park in almost every episde.

So watch it.

I could’ve chosen so many moments as this year’s best – from Mike assassinating German faux-Walter in the desert beneath the cold glare of the moon; to the ‘Something Stupid’ montage that showed the steady breakdown of Kim and Jimmy’s relationship, but I’m going to plump for the exact moment at which Kim realises that the good but complicated man she’s loved and championed for so long may in fact have be the dark, irredeemable creature his brother, Chuck, always accused him of being. Maybe he’s become it, maybe he’s always been it. But there can be no doubt: the mask has slipped. Slippin’ Jimmy McGill is now Saul Goodman.

Preacher – Did I get your order reich?

At the end of Preacher’s first season, Jesse Custer accidentally sent poor Eugene Root to Hell, courtesy of a slip-of-the-tongue that was tragically literalised and amplified by the Godly power of Genesis. Eugene spent season two adjusting to Hell – imagined as a grimy, cyber-punk, dystopian space prison – and striking up a warm and fuzzy friendship with none other than Hitler himself.

Although there have been almost as many fictionalised Hitlers committed to the small screen as Santas, Preacher at least attempts to do something novel with its version of the Fuhrer: it tries to redeem him. It’s a strange feeling to find yourself empathising with perhaps the most vicious mass-killer of the twentieth century as he’s being bullied by his peers and struggling to make friends.

Thankfully, as soon as old Adolph escapes to the earthly plane he reverts to type, rushing off into the world with a renewed sense of cowardice, hatred and zest for mass-death, and we can cancel our membership card for ‘Team Hitler’.

All of this leads to one of Season 3’s funniest and most enduring moments – among a multitude of others in this gloriously ghoulish and mirth-tastically mental show – the sight of Hitler working in a low-tier fast-food restaurant. Although he still has the trademark hair-do, moustache and accent, he’s gone to great lengths to disguise his identity, evident by the name-tag he wears on his lapel, that says ‘HILTER’.

Watching Hilter/Hitler try to whip up enthusiasm for a fascist uprising, even resorting to screaming in German, while he enjoys some sandwiches with his bored work colleagues behind the bins at the back of the restaurant, is bizarre, unsettling and hilarious, much like the rest of the series.

Roseanne – Roseain’t

When Roseanne returned to our screens earlier this year after a break of twenty-one years, the eponymous matriarch cackled back into a landscape that was radically different to the one she’d left. Last time around she was a blue-collar mother raising a family in Clinton’s America (give or take a hint of Bush); this time around she was a grandmother scrabbling to survive in Trumpland, paying lip-service to the orange one’s policies while at the same time suffering under them. I say ‘was’, because Roseanne is now no more. Not the show – which dropped both the star and her name to continue on as ‘The Conners’ – but the character, who is now dead and buried, finished off by an accidental over-dose of pain-killers that she’d become addicted to because she couldn’t afford a knee operation.

In reality, though, Roseanne was killed by Roseanne Barr herself, who ended both her character’s life and her own career with one ill-advised, seemingly racist tweet, attacking a former staffer of President Obama (strange behaviour from Roseanne, who I always thought of as a former working-class hero, a champion of gay rights, and a person who always stood up for the little guy – I guess fame and pills can do that to you).

Trump tweets with impunity; his supporters and apologists, it seems, do not. I guess it’s easier to get people booted off TV than it is to get them booted out of the Oval Office. Still, if Roseanne can be re-imagined without Roseanne, then perhaps there’s hope that one day, America can be re-imagined without Donald Trump.

Whatever you think of a Roseanne-less Roseanne, or the events that led up to it, the image of Dan Conner (John Goodman) lying alone in his Roseanne-less bed, was strange, sad, powerful and affecting, and definitely one for the ages.

RIP Roseanne. Long live The Conners.

Doctor Who – Old Mother Time

I wasn’t terribly enamoured with the idea of the Doctor changing sex when it was first announced. Some of that was down to Jodie Whittaker, who somehow didn’t feel quite doctor-y enough. If you’re going to go down that road, why not Olivia Coleman, Tilda Swinton or Caitriona Balfe?

But, yes, I also didn’t like it because I felt that the change was both unnecessary, and undertaken in a confrontational spirit. I feared that the big move would be framed in ideological rather than creative terms. These were concerns that the show’s pre-air promos did nothing to assuage. Certainly my worst fears were confirmed when I saw Jodie Whittaker standing beneath an actual glass ceiling as it shattered into pieces, as the words ‘IT’S ABOUT TIME’ flashed up on screen. I had no idea that the Doctor, a geeky icon to generations of children, had been working all these years as a repressive agent of the patriarchy.

Now, before we continue, let me just take a moment to assert my credentials as a card-carrying non-misogynist, lest you condemn me as some sort of fundamentalist, knife-wielding incel for my opposition.

I’m a man who was raised in a matriarchal household, with an older sister who served as something akin to a second mother. I’m pro-choice, pro-breast-feeding, and pro-equality, even though arguably all of these things should be a person’s default position. Most of my educators have been women, certainly one hundred per cent of my nursery and primary teachers. Most of my bosses throughout my working career have been women. What I’m trying to say is, em, ‘All of my best friends are women!’ Christ, I know how that sounds. Stick with me.

I believe that while there can be biological, physical and psychological differences between men and women, there should be no differences in the rights afforded to them to control their own lives, bodies and destinies. Men and women should have equal capacity to succeed and prosper. Women can rule countries and perform brain surgery, men can be nurses and nursery teachers. Many of the gender stereotypes we’ve clung to over the centuries, decades and millennia have been harmful, regressive and nonsensical.

So, I’m pro-woman. Or just pro-human, if you prefer.

I was prepared to have my fears laid to rest. I was prepared to be proved wrong,

But they weren’t. And I wasn’t.

Picture shows: The Doctor (JODIE WHITTAKER)

Ultimately, season 11 didn’t fail because the doctor was a woman – or at least not only because of this – but because the lead actor was miscast; because the scripts were dull, corny and vapid; because the episodes were boring; because the characters were so poorly defined (including the Doctor, and with the exception of Graham, but I suspect that had more to do with Bradley Walsh’s performance and inherent charisma than any difference in how the character was written); because of weak villains; because of messages being hammered home at the expense of plot and character; and, most crucially, because it no longer felt either like sci-fi or Doctor Who any more.

So, ‘New’ New Doctor Who?

A striking moment in TV history – but for all the wrong reasons.

Thanks for reading. See y’all next year, TV fans.

Making Girvan Great Again: Meeting Trump at Turnberry

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If Donald Trump wants to prove that he can make America great again, he should start with something smaller, and see how he gets on making that great again first. Girvan, for instance: the seen-better-days, Scottish seaside town just along the coast from Trump Turnberry, Trump’s Ayrshire golfing resort (given Trump’s habit for constantly referring to himself in the third person and pre-fixing each of his projects with the Trump brand, I’m endlessly amazed that he hasn’t named at least one of his kids ‘Trump Trump’. I suppose Donald Trump Jnr is close enough).

Granted, MGGA doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but at least it’s a simple, achievable task that won’t necessitate the telling of quite so many fibs.

Well… maybe.

“We’re gonna make Girvan so great, we’re gonna take the ‘van’ and make it a truck, we’re gonna take the ‘gir’ and turn it into a ‘raaaaaaar’ and it’s going to be called Raaaaaartruck, and you’re gonna love it, believe me. And there aren’t gonna be any bad dudes from Glasgow, because we’re gonna build a wall… we’re gonna build it in-front of the off-licence. It’s going to be so great.”

Girvan, like most Scottish seaside towns, is a living ghost town, a museum to its own former glory. The occasional picture or shop-front hints at Girvan’s past life as a holiday hot-spot – a sunny mural here, a surf-board in the window there – but juxtaposed with the town’s run-down streets and decaying, salt-chiselled edifices these appear more like ironic art installations than emblems of hope for a revival.

The beach – once alive with thousands of migratory deck-chairs and swirling wind-shields as far as the eye could see – now holds nothing but the whispers of yesteryear carried on the wind along with the shrill caws of seagulls, both poor substitutes for the happy shrieks of children.

I wouldn’t blame you for assuming that I’m hostile to the once-was little town, but the truth is quite the opposite. I love Girvan, precisely because of its faded charm, its wind-swept bleakness, and its exquisite, almost poetic emptiness. I love the deathly stillness of the long, dark roads out of town, where lorries shake and thunder up and down the coast day and night; the rugged splendour of the rocky, wave-battered coastline; how the dark shape of far-off Ailsa Crag shimmers on a summer’s day, as though haunting Girvan from the horizon. It’s an eerily beautiful place; somewhere that lends itself well to writers’ retreats and retirees.

Who knows: perhaps once the Sword of Brexocles falls and punctures the UK’s heart and wallet (hopefully us Scots can cunningly extract ourselves from this brewing Dickensian nightmare tout de suite) stay-cations will supplant cheap package deals as our default holidays, and places like Girvan will rise again. As it stands, it’s pretty hard for old seaside favourites like Girvan to compete against sunnier climes and more aesthetically pleasing locales; it’s even tougher for tourist chiefs to successfully market a lonely outpost on the frontier to nowhere – except, perhaps, to odd fish like me. I can see it now…

“Come to Girvan! There’s nothing here, it’s cold, and it’ll probably rain. But at least it’s not Ayr!”

“Hate people? Sick of bright colours? Want a caravan by the coast so you can just stare at the waves until you die? Come to Girvan!”

And yet when Trump bought Turnberry in 2014 he trumpeted so much, not just for the resort itself but for the surrounding area (claims he also made on a grander scale for Aberdeenshire when he moved his circus into Balmedie): there are going to be jobs, so many jobs, the best jobs, this will be the best golf course the world has ever seen, this is going to put Scotland on the map, it’s going to be great. Believe me.

Etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Of course, back in those pre-presidential days we weren’t as inured to the bullying, blustering, bull-shitting billionaire’s rhetoric, but those with even a cursory interest in and knowledge of Trump’s business ventures over the decades wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn that only a few short years after purchasing Turnberry from a Dubai-owned consortium the resort would be making heavy losses (despite a few years of tax-breaks from the Scottish government, a loop-hole now closed) and the paint would still be peeling from the walls in nearby Girvan.

Still, you might argue – and technically you’d be correct – that Girvan isn’t Trump’s responsibility. Neither is the village of Turnberry, come to think of it: only the resort itself, which Trump purchased in his capacity as ruthless, billionaire golfing-enthusiast in order to turn a tidy profit.

https://www.jordanrussell.co.uk

After all, INEOS doesn’t compensate the dying town of Grangemouth for its triple-prong inconsideration of a) slowly choking its people to death with carcinogens and lung-killing chemicals; b) forcing them to live with the year-round risk of total annihilation; and c) continually lobbying to frack the very ground upon which they walk. They don’t even score cheap power or petrol. Just death and decay (and the occasional sponsored flower bed). So why should Trump give a flying buck (sic) about the condition of Girvan’s promenade, town centre or harbour?

As usual, the US president’s tongue is to blame; especially his puffery, posing, and outrageous claims of greatness and infallibility. Horrifically – for reasons best left to shamans and socio-psychologists to divine – his rhetoric is still capable of making people both old and new to his shtick assume that his messianic business acumen will radiate out from whatever project in which he’s currently investing, and shower the land with gold for miles around.

You would assume a town like Girvan would be instantly transformed by being in such close proximity to a billionaire’s ‘magic touch’, just as I’m sure millions of Americans assumed the same thing about their country when they helped put said billionaire into the Oval Office; namely: incorrectly.

Here’s a handy guide for whenever you’re in doubt about Trump’s intentions: if he says that a project is going to bring a large boost to an area, he means the area around his pocket. The rest is just seduction: a prelude to a fucking. And not the tepid, floppy kind of fucking he gave Stormy Daniels, but a real, strong, and hard fucking. There’s no trickle-down economics in effect here, just a flood of profits first into Trump’s coffers and then straight down the drain.

Trump makes his living building enclaves for the rich and upwardly mobile – walls, if you prefer – that take no account of the world outside of those walls. Raise the drawbridge! Lower the portcullis! Keep out the plebs! When a billionaire businessman acts that way it’s at least understandable, if still unforgiveable. But doing it as the leader of the free world? Not for nothing was Donald Trump the inspiration for Back to the Future’s impulsive, bad-wigged buffoon Biff Tannen. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure he isn’t still actively running his businesses. I’m sure he doesn’t discuss any aspect of his businesses with his sons who are now running those businesses. I’ll bet they don’t even mention it. Even when Donald Trump is staying in one of them playing golf.

Still: jobs, right? Jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s all about those jobs. Sometimes it’s about keeping the trains running on time, but it’s always about those jobs. Trump Turnberry, of course, employs a great number of people from Girvan and the nearby town of Maybole, which can only be a positive by-product of Trump’s investment in the area, right? Well. Right. Still I don’t know how keen I’d be to work for a family dynasty headlined by a would-be dictator who was formerly famous for humiliating and firing twenty-nine out of every thirty people stupid enough to walk into his building and on to his TV show. Besides, Trump’s trademark style of smash and grab, hit and run, makes it more likely that when his resort fails or haemorrhages too much of his interest he’ll drop those employees as if they were nothing more than members of his Whitehouse inner circle.

The people of Turnberry appear to love Trump, as businesses there get the chance to grow fat bottom-feeding from the big fish in their tiny pond. When protestors arrived at the resort last week to welcome Donald Trump with pointing and placards (and a paraglider that carried a message proclaiming Trump to be WELL BELOW PAR straight to Turnberry’s front door as the president and a hundred snipers glared on) many of Turnberry’s older residents worked to counter-balance the angry sentiment. One resident even proudly displayed the stars and stripes in his garden, for which he allegedly earned shouts of ‘Nazi’ – this, though, was reported in The Times, which is owned by Trumpy’s good old pal Rupert Murdoch.

The right-wing press, and its legions of supporters in online comment threads across social media, were quick to paint last week’s anti-Trump protesters in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow (and, of course, Turnberry itself) as – variously but not exhaustively – a national disgrace, a howling embarrassment, a flock of hypocritical sheep, and a bunch of left-wing hippies in dire need of a wash and a job. Why don’t they ever protest Putin or Saudi Princes? Haven’t they done much worse to human beings in general? Why only pick on good ol’ Trump? And how dare they protest a foreign president at all. None of their bloody business!

Then there are those who were broadly sympathetic towards and supportive of the protesters’ aims, but wondered if it was all a bit futile. After all, if Trump doesn’t care about demos on the streets of New York, he’s hardly likely to lose any sleep over a protest in George Square, Glasgow. Or, as Scottish comedian Jamie Dalgleish put it in a very funny Facebook joke:

“Amazing that Trump has finally resigned because Fraser from Newton Mearns held up a placard saying “BOLT YA FANDAN ROCKET BAWS”.

I understood why the protestors protested, though. Donald Trump may not be our president, but some sections of our media treat him as such – Murdoch’s muck-rags especially. Also, because we here in the UK speak the same language, have spent decades watching the same movies and TV shows, and share a lot of the same values and history, many of us feel a greater connection and affinity with America and Americans than we do with people from some other countries (I say ‘many of us’ because I recognise that many sections of British society feel no affinity with America or Americans, a reflection of the increasingly multi-cultural world in which we now live), so we feel partly responsible for Trump’s tenure, if only by-proxy.

Perhaps, though, the messages on the placards (some of which were genuinely very funny) were ultimately displayed for the benefit of our own crooked politicians, who may be plotting quietly to privatise and sell off our country’s assets and morals as part of a future trade deal with Donald Trump.

At least now they know they won’t be able to do it without a fight.

I and my family (my partner and two young children, Jack and Christopher) last visited Girvan in August 2017, staying in a friend’s lodge in a caravan park on the outskirts of town for a week. I was very curious to learn how the townspeople felt about having Trump – or some essence of him (ewww) – on their doorstep now that he was US President. This fact-finding mission was undertaken much to the consternation of my partner, who cringes with embarrassment whenever I try to ‘interview’ strangers whilst in her company, especially considering that I’m not only a reporter without a notepad, but a correspondent without a newspaper. I’m just a guy who likes knowing things. Knowing things is good. And if we don’t ask things then we won’t know things and if we don’t know things then… well, we’re Donald Trump.

We ate brunch one day in a café called Tartans & Tweeds, an eatery that could only have been made to appear more Scottish had its owners renamed it Heroin & Irn Bru. To get to the dining area we first had to walk through a repository of handbags, wallets, purses, and gloves; and also towers of tartan-covered tat, the kind of stuff – one would hope – that only non-Scottish people with an eye for the twee would ever dare buy.

Once seated, we ordered a medley of fried foods (we fed the kids fruit, sandwiches and salads we’d brought with us, lest you think us unforgivably Scottish). Our order included square sausage, because of course it did. It’s our patriotic duty. For some reason we Scots draw fierce national pride from the geometric shape into which we cut our dead pigs and cows. I wonder if any other country does this:

“Welcome to Bulgaria. Come for the cheap drink and sunshine: stay for the dodecahedronic lamb.”

Kids are better than any NUJ card for loosening people’s tongues. If you’re with a kid, especially if you’re holding a kid, people make the knee-jerk assumption that you must be a nice guy (unless you’re holding said kid in a head-lock) and tend to trust you more readily – hence why cynical politicians of yesteryear were usually to be found cradling babies in public when elections were looming.

Our kids’ boisterous behaviour got us talking to a grandmother at the next table, a short, fierce woman with short, fierce white hair. She seemed loving and caring, but in a stern, no-nonsense, very Scottish kind of a way; the sort of granny who instead of smiling beatifically and fetching you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, would denounce her neighbours as bastards, decry the state of the country and ask you what the hell you intended to do about it – and then demand to know what sort of an excuse was “But, granny, I’m only four”?!

After a brief preamble, I got down to business.

“How does everybody feel about Trump around here?” I asked her.

She pursed her lips tightly together. “Well, we don’t like him.”

“Why?” I asked, wondering if he’d perpetrated a specific outrage upon the town, a la Balmedie, where the bulldozers and the bullying and the building bunds around people’s houses had made him a local hate figure long before he’d become a global one.

But it was nothing so specific or complicated.

“For the same reason the rest of the world doesn’t like him,” said the old woman, looking at me as if I was daft. “He’s a bloody idiot.”

She recounted a tale, which may have been apocryphal, of Trump looking out of the windows of the newly acquired Trump Turnberry at the ocean vista before him, and scowling angrily as he noticed cars and coaches moving along the public road next to his property. “What are those vehicles doing on my road?” he asked his people. “Can we move them?”

“Och,” the granny said, gritting her teeth together and shaking her head, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will take a shot at him.”

To give some context to her pro-assassination stance, the infamous ‘fire and fury’ incident had only just occurred that month, and many believed that Trump was about to usher in a new and final era of nuclear Armageddon, so I guess we can forgive granny a little of her zeal. Besides, more than half the planet probably agreed with her.

Even though I laughed – partly at the shock of this assertive but sweet old lady openly advocating murder – she probably felt that she’d gone too far, and moved to balance the scales by telling a story that highlighted The Donald’s good side.

A man she knew had booked at Turnberry for a meal and some drinks with clients, but when they arrived Trump himself was still using the room, so they had to wait well over an hour – possibly two – before being seated. Trump apologised by way of waiving the cost of their meals and letting them drink all evening for free.

“He won’t hear a bad word against Donald Trump now,” said the woman with a roll of her eyes and a shrug.

Money talks, granny.

In the Zen surfing shop – Surfing Buddha – a few doors down from Tartans & Tweeds, I detected a few ever-so-subtle indications that the owner didn’t have tickets for the Trump Train, either. A giant net was fastened to the ceiling, inside of which dangled a shark wearing a MAGA hat, and a severed Donald Trump head: wide-eyed, dead and orange.

I pointed to the display above my head as I approached the owner at the counter, “I was going to ask what you really thought about Donald Trump…?”

He smiled.

I did, however, ask about the viability of a year-round surf-shop in Girvan, and I could tell from his wearied, slightly defensive response that I hadn’t been the first to ask him that question.

“We sell a lot more than surfing stuff in here,” he said. “People will just scoff, or stand outside and take pictures of the sign without bothering to come in and take a look, see what we do.”

I nodded, and opined that some people were too blinkered to open their minds long enough to engage with, and question, the world around them, and then instantly felt guilty because a few minutes before I’d almost kept walking after standing outside taking pictures of his sign and scoffing at it.

His shop was really cool, with a beautiful ethos that was the polar opposite of Trumpism. In the back room of the shop the owner operated a cafe, selling hot drinks, biscuits and snacks and asking customers only to pay what they could afford, from zero upwards. With Trumpism, zero is all the little guy ever gets.

The owner let my eldest son, Jack, play the piano that was positioned on the periphery of the cafe, which put us all in a happy mood.

“Let’s all go to Turnberry and check out Trump’s hotel!” I suggested, rather dampening the happy mood.

We bundled the kids into the car and drove along the coast to Turnberry, parking the car on the road so we could get out and take pictures.

The stone fountain on the lawn outside the clubhouse is usually the first thing that draws your eye as you reach the fringes of the resort. It’s ostentatious to say the least. A Greco-Roman warrior stands atop a circle of lions, themselves held aloft by yet more lions. It’s striking, but I couldn’t help wonder if it would’ve been better suited to a Vegas hotel with a chorus of can-can girls dancing around it.

It’s quite telling that Trump would commission, or at least approve, such a statue, given what we now know about his predilection for brutal regimes, iron-fisted autocrats and chest-smacking shows of strength. He must see himself as that ripped warrior with the pointy-stick, staring imperiously over the heads of the plebs bowing at his feet. Anyone want to help give those lions a leg up?

There were golfers everywhere, more checked trousers than a Rupert the Bear convention. Golfers tend to dig Trump. The one thing Trump appears to be indisputably good at is building world-class golf courses: it’s just everything else he has trouble with.

Behind us, up on the hill, stood Trump Turnberry itself, a magnificent, imposing building that brought to mind the Overlook hotel in The Shining. Perhaps its shinier cousin.

“Will we go up and take a look around?” I asked my partner.

She pulled a face. “We’re not playing golf. They won’t let us in.”

“It’s like any hotel, anywhere,” I said. “You can just walk in off the street and have a coffee, sandwich, whatever. We don’t have to be playing golf.”

“But they’ll know we’re poor.”

I laughed. “They won’t know that.” I looked down at my clothes. “Well… maybe they will know that. But we’re still entitled to have a nose around. It’s a free country, let’s go.”

I’d taught Jack how to do a pretty good Donald Trump face – lips petted and pushed out, eyes drawn into a scowl formation – some time before, and the main reception at the Trump Turnberry hotel seemed as good a time as any to try it out in public. The ladies behind the desk laughed good-naturedly, but there was a nervous glint in their eyes, as if they feared that at any moment Trump would leap out from behind a potted plant and shout “You’re fired!” at them.

The décor of the arterial corridors leading to the heart of the hotel harked back to a time before taste and decorum, the carpets and colour scheme colluding to create a unique style I’m content to christen ‘blind 1970s grandmother chic’. The interior seemed to scream ‘The Shining’, too. That movie haunted me when I was a child. Imagine how much more terrifying it would be with Donald Trump front and centre. 

‘Heeeeeerrrrrrreeeee’s Donny!’

ALL POLITICS AND NO PUSSY MAKES DONALD A DULL BOY (BUT STILL GREAT, I’M SO GREAT, YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE HOW GREAT I AM)

PS: He’d fuck the corpse in room 237. No question.

Jack ran around in one of the big empty ballrooms like a greyhound hurtling round a race-track, and I must confess – giant child that I am – I followed his lead.

My partner seethed at me through clenched teeth. “You can’t do that here.”

“Where’s the sign that says that?” I asked, adding: ‘wheeeeeeeeeeeee’.

“We’ll be thrown out,” she pleaded.

“We won’t be thrown out for this,” I laughed, “but if we do, what a funny story we’ll have to tell!”

She took no comfort from that.

Jack kept running, but I stopped, because I was an unfit 37-year-old man who didn’t want to be seen dead in Donald Trump’s hotel.

As we walked around – peeking in here, peering in there – we noticed that we were being followed, and being asked incredibly frequently by various members of staff if we were okay, and if we needed anything, far more times than was strictly necessary even for a swanky resort hotel with a top-tier commitment to customer service. The staff must’ve been trained to sniff out the paupers, the subversives, and the potential reporters, I guess. Contrary to what I said earlier, carrying your kids around with you doesn’t always put you above suspicion.

I did manage to ask a female member of staff some questions as she took our order for a cup of coffee in one of the restaurants, like: who the hell buys bottles of wine that cost thousands of pounds (a far cry from the offerings at Surfing Buddha), and have you ever met Donald Trump? She said she hadn’t, but Eric Trump was at Turnberry quite a lot, and he was ‘very nice’. I checked her face to see if she was Rupert Murdoch wearing a mask. She checked mine to see if I was Eric Trump wearing a mask.

A few minutes later Jack, our eldest boy, needed a number two, so I huckled him down a corridor to the gents’ bathroom like I was a secret service agent and he was the President: a tiny little Trump on a dump run. The bathroom was opulent in an understated way – if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms – an impression only partly spoiled by the smell of my son’s excrement unfurling into the air. The sink unit was marbled in a Greek revival colour scheme, with a row of mirrors hanging above it that seemed to share some ancestry with the magic mirror used by Snow White’s evil Queen to seek out rivals. The rest of the room was uniformly striking-white, with only a landscape picture of a rugged canyon upsetting the minimalist tone. There were also bundles of dinky hand towels, each wrapped like a scroll and made from the finest Egyptian cotton. A little of the spirit of Frasier Crane entered my body as I reached out to grab one from the bowl and…

“Finished, Daddy!” came the cry from my son’s toilet stall.

And, no, I didn’t use the finest Egyptian cotton cloth to wipe my son’s bottom as part of some dirty protest against Trump, although I appreciate from previous experience of reading my work why you might be tempted to assume such a thing. Bum wiped, hands washed, we came back out into the corridor, where my partner and youngest son, Christopher, were nowhere to be seen.

Christ, I thought. This really is The Shining.

A few moments later they emerged from the female toilets. My partner had decided to duck into the bathroom to avoid the scrutiny of yet another member of staff who’d twice asked her if she and the baby were okay.

“What was the ladies’ bathroom like?” I asked.

“Plush,” she said.

“Mine, too.”

“The tiles were nice,” she said.

“The tiles were nice,” I agreed. “Did you see the…”

She unzipped the baby’s nappy-bag so I could see inside. “I stole this cloth!” she said excitedly.

“Me too!” I said, yanking mine out from the sleeve of my jacket.

We high-fived and stared lovingly at each other.

Maybe Trump will never Make Girvan Great Again. Maybe he’ll make it worse. Maybe one day he’ll end the world and all life on earth. Maybe no-one will ever make him pay for any of the things he’s done.

But our house was two tiny hand-towels up.

Scottish comedian Janey Godley delivering a mysterious, mystical, almost obscure message at Turnberry. What could it mean?

It’s a small victory, granted, but I guess that’s the only kind of victory we’re ever going to get against Trump until the world either comes to its senses, or dies trying. The man could stand in-front of a camera and admit he’d beaten a man to death with the corpse of a second dead man, while sixty kids looked on from cages, and he wouldn’t meet any real resistance or consequences. He uses people, and they try to use him, to trade on his power and ubiquity. Just like I am now in writing this article. I guess I’m bottom-feeding, too. He’s the devil, and everyone in his orbit makes a deal with him. That’s what makes him almost impossible to stop.

What was that? You were expecting me to meet Trump at some point over the course of this article?

Ah, I see why you might think that. Because I called the article ‘Making Girvan Great Again: Meeting Trump at Turnberry,’ right?

What’s a little fake news between friends?

Donald Trump: The Apocalypse’s Casus Bellend

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I have to keep reminding myself that Donald Trump has held office for a little over a month. It feels like his cartoon duck mouth has been issuing terrifyingly hilarious proclamations since before America was even discovered; as if the vortex of evil that propelled him to prominence is so powerful that it has bent not just reality, but also time and space to its will. “I was there at the creation of the universe. The ‘let there be light’ thing. That was my idea. And God was very appreciative, said my idea was the greatest. And when that light went on? No dinosaurs, people. FAKE. You know I’m right.”

I can’t envisage a single day in the next four years when I won’t see or hear the onomatopoeiac fart of his name. Being president must be doing wonders to stoke the fires of his pomposity, paranoia and narcissism: the entire world really is talking about him. Incessantly. Every hour of every day. Trump would have you believe that our obsession with him is due to a giant, media-fuelled conspiracy, or sour grapes on the part of the losing side, but it’s clear that Trump is a megalomaniacal ratings chaser who will stop at nothing to keep himself in the limelight, even if that means inventing terrorist attacks, banning journalists from his briefings, or labelling reality ‘fake’. We shouldn’t be too concerned about our attentions being hijacked by Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric: what should concern us is what would happen if we all chose to ignore him. He’d probably nuke Belgium, or declare war on Lidl.

Many people have been quick to point out the societal similarities between modern-day America and Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. There’s definitely some weight to that comparison, however there is one crucial, towering difference between Donald Trump and Hitler: Hitler was a good orator. If evil must have a face and a voice, then it’s a pity that this time around it’s got the face and voice of a malfunctioning android stuck in a six-phrase feedback loop, or a racist, half-mad taxi driver who’s been ripped from his cab, pushed behind a presidential podium and handed a scrap of paper that’s got ‘Everyone except you is an asshole’ scrawled on it in blood. When Trump talks he sounds like a man who’s being continually interrupted and fed lines by an invisible hologram only he can see, who’s also a complete fucking idiot. “Ziggy says there’s a 40 per cent chance that wall, wall, muslim, muslim, wall, wall, America, great, America, dude, wall, bad guys, bad dudes, enemies, bad dudes, wall.” “…What the fuck?” “Just say it, Sam! Just say it!”

Feel free to insert your own crude mustache.

Each day the world wakes up, switches on the TV and stares at the orange man with the nest of half-dissolved, beshitted candy-floss on his head, and thinks: how the fuck did this happen? The man has all the grace and articulacy of the giant man-baby who’s forced to fight Mel Gibson in Mad Max 3. His face vacillates between that of a man who’s sneering with disgust at the whiff of a particularly foul fart, and then smirking a little cause he realises it’s his own, and he likes it. He possesses all the charm of a bogey-soaked tissue bobbing in a warm flute of piss, and all the compassion of a malnourished tiger let loose in an orphanage. You wouldn’t trust him to be in charge of a tombola stall at the church fete, much less place a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Seriously. How did this happen? Let’s rewind the tape, because somebody’s very clearly edited out a crucial sequence from this movie. Where’s the arc here? There’s no arc. It’s just: world is sane: world is crazy. Someone’s deleted the middle: the bit that explains this clusterfuck.

Within the space of a few short weeks, Trump has put a climate-change denier in charge of protecting the environment; placed a brain-damaged billionaire who struggles to comprehend basic facts in charge of education; classified dissenting (for dissenting read ‘truth-seeking’) journalists as enemies of the state; tried to erect an invisible wall to ban Muslims from entering his country; proposed to erect an actual wall around the border of another country; signaled that he’s ready to accept Vladimir Putin as his best-bro and role model; re-branded a smorgasbord of bare-faced lies as ‘alternative truths’; and harried, bullied, threatened, cajoled and alienated just about every section of society, with the exception of prickly white billionaires and the sort of alt-right, flag-waving, gun-toting tit-wanks that share both his disdain for reality and hatred for ‘the other’, whoever that ‘other’ happens to be in any given week. Never before has Orwell’s ‘1984’ been so successfully re-appropriated as a manifesto.

If you evaluate success in terms of capitalist excess, then Trump’s been a winner all his life. This is something, true or not, that seems to have struck a chord with many Americans, for whom Trump is the living embodiment of the American dream. If you’re rich and powerful, you must have worked for it, earned it. You must be smart, strong. You must deserve it, else you wouldn’t have got it. His supporters don’t necessarily think that Trump’s just like them, but believe that one day, with a little bit of graft and a lot less foreigners, blacks and socialists running around, they could be just like him. They admire his directness, his toughness, the way that his world-view hasn’t been corrupted by science, truth, nuance or articulacy. I’d maintain that just because you enjoy watching fictional sociopaths like Tony Soprano and Cersei Lannister ruling their empires with an iron fist, doesn’t mean that it’s a particularly good idea to elect a real-life sociopath to the most powerful office on Earth.

He looks like Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

You probably haven’t heard anything in the media about Trump’s financial successes. He tends to hide his light under a bushel, but if you listen really, really carefully to his speeches, you may occasionally, every so often, once in a blue moon, hear him mention it. Who am I kidding? No one’s better at telling people he’s better than people than Trump. His self-categorisation is, however, something of a hollow boast, given that he was born into his fortune. Look at it this way: if you happened to be born with a 6000cc engine in your back, and high-performance wheels instead of legs, then it would be rather churlish to berate your fellow competitors in the 100m sprint for failing to beat you with their shitty normal legs. Trump’s inherited wealth has always insulated him from failure, and gone a long way towards helping him construct and maintain the Death-star of his ego. The Art of the Deal, the most famous book Trump’s ever not-actually-written, only really needed one page, with the following written on it in big, bold letters: Be born a billionaire.

Given his arrogance and privilege it’s little wonder that Trump’s such a stranger to reality; his life must be like a virtual-reality tycoon simulator with cheat mode enabled. Trump was free to run his businesseses with a cold heart and an iron fist, pushing his employees around, conning his customers, eliminating competitors with the dead-eyed zeal of a Nazi death-camp commandant, and generally treating people like dog-dirt quesadillas, and people would applaud him for his tough-talking, get-results-damn-it, business acumen; and if they didn’t, or if one business or a thousand businesses imploded in a shock-wave of lawsuits, bad PR and bankruptcy, then who cared, right? Blame the government, blame the media, blame the Chinese, lie, lie, and thrice lie, pick up another bundle of dollars, clean the slate, and start again. Unfortunately, if you take the same set of principles necessary to succeed as a ruthless CEO with an infinite supply of inheritance behind you, and apply these to government, then what you are is a dictator.

Trump is reminiscent of a vengeful Scientologist, or the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who famously appeared on camera with a fleet of American tanks behind him to claim that there wasn’t a fleet of American tanks behind him. Lying is such an integral part of Trump’s strategy and defence mechanism that it’s difficult to believe anything that he says. Even his fortune is up for debate, given the amount of businesses he’s allegedly sent to the grave. But it doesn’t matter. Some evil supercomputer has calculated Trump’s ground-base of support down to a man, and told him what TV stations they watch, which news outlets they read in print and on-line, and what size of shoe they take. All he has to do is keep preaching to the converted, telling as many outrageous and egregious lies as he likes, and they’ll always be lapped up, and never cross-referenced. “Ostriches are green. Japanese TVs electrocute people. Barack Obama once killed a penguin with a hole-punch. I’ve never met Vladimir Putin… who is he again? I’m so smart. My hands are the size of frying pans. Mexicans are responsible for ISIS. I cured AIDS.”

If Trump really believed his rhetoric, then his best weapon against his critics would be the steady, patient unveiling of his vision to Make America Great Again, piece by piece, encouraging transparent democratic debate every step along the way. After all, if a man was lying bleeding on the street, and I could help him, but between me and that man was another man, who was shouting out vicious slurs about my motivation and intentions, then I’d still move forward and help the bleeding man. I wouldn’t thunder off in a fit of rage, and proceed to hold scores of press conferences in which I angrily discredited the shouting man, as the other man – the one I was supposed to be saving – died in the street.

I guess it begs the question: who, or what, does Donald Trump want to make great? Because it sure as shit doesn’t seem to be America.