Russell Jones's Week Moment: Donald Trump and the Rise of the Candied Yam
The bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' on how soaring inequality paved the way for Trump, and why the same could now happen in the UK
There are only two Tuesdays until the US Presidential Election, and the polling shows Harris and Trump are neck and fat-neck. It’s lavishly bewildering. From this side of the Atlantic, the possibility that the USA could once again choose a dick-waving, pussy-grabbing insurrectionist seems ass-backwards to the point of derangement.
The candied yam is currently bounding through a series of staggering norm violations, any one of which would kill off a normal candidate in a normal year. Just this week, for example, he has claimed to be the father of IVF, bridled under the merciless lash of infant-level mathematics, and turned voters’ opportunity to ask him searching questions into a 39-minute impromptu dance recital that looked like Vogon Poetry in Motion.
That such a man is still in the running comes down to one thing: his supporters treat him like the leader of a cult. Although to be fair, he does share a lot of characteristics with one: nothing he says is true, he’s made an incomprehensibly large number of much younger women pregnant, and his tenure concluded with the violent storming of a building full of acolytes. If you are what you eat, he is literally Kool-Aid. He’s even perfected the colour.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Byline Supplement to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.