After Trump’s victory, I’m struggling with the enemy within

Extract from The Guardian

Emma Brockes

Walking through Manhattan, I find myself dividing other people into ‘them’ and ‘us’: those who voted for the president-elect and those who didn’t

Columbus Circle, New York. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Contact author

@emmabrockes

Friday 18 November 2016 04.15 AEDT 

This week I walked from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to a hotel in Midtown. It was one of those New York mornings when the sky looks shellacked and the sun is impossibly bright, and as I walked by Columbus Circle, with a towering Trump building to the north, I passed two young policemen standing sentry outside. The tower looks different now, the gold lettering less a gaudy joke than a monument to our collective stupidity, but that’s not what I thought as I passed. Instead, I looked at the cops and thought: I bet you come from Staten Island and both voted for Trump.

Name stripped from Trump Place apartments in New York after residents protest

Ten minutes later I skirted the northern reaches of Times Square and ran into the tourists. You did this, I thought, you people from out of town, who come in on coaches and think Mexicans should go home and that Jersey Boys is the best Broadway show ever made. A hot dog cart had been overturned by a car, and two rough sleepers were standing watching, smoking cigarettes, and I stopped for a moment, paralysed because I had no idea how to categorise them politically.
A block before the Hilton, I passed the Chase bank on the corner of 56th Street and 6th Avenue. It’s one of those branches reserved for account holders who clear a minimum balance many times higher than the average national wage and with Chase Private Clients hanging on a sign in the window. Pouring in and out of the glass towers either side, lots of young white men in suits with slicked-back hair. Aha! Here they were, the real villains of the piece, the masters of the universe etc.
So it went this week, walking around New York wearing goggles through which everyone looked like the “them” on the “us” and “them” divide. Of course, there has always been an element of this in the city; people who love Jersey Boys or wear too much gel in their hair will excite the derision of people who don’t. And if this election showed us anything, it’s that those superficial determinations are wrong. It’s the suburban mom who voted for Trump, the person who looks like Hillary Clinton or who once voted for Obama.
On the television, Trump talked unity then appointed the most divisive figures in the rightwing political landscape, while on the streets of New York his son was heckled by teenagers. All I could think of was that awful saying of Margaret Thatcher’s – “the enemy within” – though that referred more to my own thoughts than my view of other people.

Trump’s little sweetener

No olives, please – we’re British. Photograph: Teubner/Getty Images/StockFood

A couple of friends discover that, if Trump sticks to his proposed tax plan, they will be significantly better off than under Barack Obama. Both hate Trump and fear for their country. But after doing the maths, it was impossible to miss in their response the small leap of joy at having more money. This was a hard one. Everyone is at their keyboards already, poised to accuse everyone else of selling out, giving in, collaborating and the rest of it, but unless thought crime is a thing now, the Pavlovian response to increased wealth shouldn’t, I don’t suppose, be something to resent. But I did resent them for it. I really did.

Nostalgia ain’t what it was

Escape came in the form of that ITV import, The Durrells in Corfu, currently showing on PBS in the US. The script is good and the acting great, but it has about it that slightly deathly Sunday night feel, an air of something designed to soothe the unnerved in ways I find myself irritated to submit to. In this week’s episode there was a comedy English couple who hated abroad – “Should we go wild and risk an olive?” – that seemed less cute than it once might have done. People on the left used to accuse people on the right of retreating into nostalgia, since the world they valued had ceased to exist. I guess those roles might be about to reverse.