On the prospect of a Trump Presidency…

I think I started to drift off to sleep around half-past-four this morning – just as it was starting to become clear that it was looking like Donald Trump's night, in the US Presidential Elections.  I woke again a few hours later, still half expecting to see that results had swung back to Hillary Clinton, who had just edged it after a very narrowly-fought race.  And then I checked my phone…  Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

I'm not sure the initial shock of the result has worn off, yet (as I write, this news is barely twelve hours old, after all).  When Britain voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, just a few months ago, the result took a while to sink in; the prospect of a Trump Presidency is orders of magnitude more frightening than 'Brexit' could ever be.  People today are feeling nervous, anxious, worried and scared.  They have every right to.

There are also people trying to calm everybody down, of course.  They say that Trump won't enact the more extreme things he has said he'll do; that he will 'soften' as a character, now that he doesn't have to chase votes any more; that the enormity of the responsibility he now has will change him…  I'm afraid these soothing words do little to quiet my concerns.

Even if all the calming words are true – even if Trump himself is nowhere near as bad a President as we had feared – he has unleashed something in this campaign, something which cannot just be put back in its box.  The people who cheered Trump's incendiary speeches and divisive rhetoric at his rallies and campaign events haven't formed those views overnight – such prejudice and unpleasantness has been around for years – but in the President-elect, they realised they had found a mainstream focal point for their anger, hate and bitterness.  He was a figure around which to unite.

Trump's candidacy emboldened all manner of racists, misogynists, anti-semites, homophobes and the pedlars of paranoid conspiracism and small-minded victimhood.  They felt their opinions – once widely recognised as being unacceptable – becoming legitimised. They were on the up, and they grew in confidence, making more and more outrageous demands and sounding more and more bloodthirsty with each passing day.  They are still in the ascendancy now, and growing bolder than ever.

Even if Trump 'mellows' once he gets the keys to the White House, these people won't just go away.  They won't just stop shouting.  And having been promised policies which ban Muslims, remove gun-free zones in schools, and build border walls with Mexico, their anger won't simply dissipate if Trump fails to follow through on these promises; it will intensify.

I worry that a President Trump who doesn't do all the extreme things he has said he'll do will be as dangerous as a President Trump who does do those things.  He has legitimised bigotry by stoking these flames, and he has sent a message to his supporters that it is OK to think that way.

Even if he backtracks on the wilder points of his policy proposals now, those ideas don't just disappear.  The rage, and the hatred, won't just disappear – it will grow.  That genie doesn't go back in its bottle in a hurry.