Last year, when I was at home in Ireland and my son was studying in the United States, I found myself sending him a picture from Twitter followed by a warning: “There is a sniper on your university roof, please stay in your room.” I had been keeping a maternal eye on the Gaza protest on campus, bribing him to stay away from it with daily donations to Doctors Without Borders. I realize that, for many Americans, an armed police presence at a campus protest feels normal, so I want to say that nothing about that tiny, global political moment felt ordinary to me. Freedom of speech means people can say anything they like online, but as soon as they bring their bodies along, the guns come out. It was really strange.
I also do not think it would have played out differently had a different president been in office at the time. Some of the things about America that feel extreme do not change from one administration to the next. Here in Ireland, the tax ploy that brings big-tech dollars flooding into the exchequer through local shell companies continued undisturbed through Trump and then through Biden. Racist violence has come to Ireland, however: a small group, mentored and sometimes funded by the American right wing, is marching, rioting, and committing arson in opposition to our EU immigration policies. The rhetorical struggle between Democrat and Republican has never felt more like a battle between good and evil. Here we all are, in Ireland as elsewhere, online and on tenterhooks, watching twelve billion election dollars chase down a few thousand anxious minds in Pennsylvania.
Every word written on the subject feels partisan, panicked, and prone to error. I find myself, like a good conspiracy theorist, fully distrusting The New York Times, yet I listen to its podcast The Run-Up because the host, Astead W. Herndon, speaks to voters as well as pundits and gives them time to puzzle things through. The fact that “ordinary voters” lie to reporters, or try to impress reporters, does not stop me attending as though to the word of God when Herndon interviews undecideds about where they stand after the Harris–Trump debate. You can feel the focus of an entire planet bearing down as they consider the arguments and fail to make up their minds. One woman objects to the candidates even talking about Gaza because, as she says in exasperation, “they should be focusing on American issues.” Her husband defends Trump’s refusal to share his “concept of a plan” on health care: “Honestly, that’s his decision,” he says, sounding aggrieved, maybe even a little henpecked. “And he’s allowed to make that choice.”
These good people sound small and lost and poorer than they used to be. None of them mentions the fact that Trump is deranged, and this, in its turn, seems crazy to me. I am hypnotized by their denial, blinded by their inability to see. What is the secret, maddening wound that sets their minds spinning away from the obvious problem here? And why are American men so huffy? Sometimes, when a Republican voter is interviewed, I catch the cold glint of racism—it seems to keep them smug—but the undecideds come across as helpless and well intentioned. They were given a poor initial choice of candidates, unclear statements about policy, endless high drama: they have been dragged about. In a country where most political affiliation is set in childhood, the vacillators sound lonely and sometimes pathetically grandiose. This summer 15 percent of all American voters polled for that hurt, mad child, RFK Jr.
Forty-four days from the election, in an interview in The Guardian, the statistician Nate Silver declines to say what his “spidey-sense” of a result might be, but he advises liberals to make contingency plans in the event of a Trump win. Look at the odds and check your passports. The families of undocumented immigrants will not be the only ones fearful of a knock on the door; should Trump come to power, it is easy to imagine officials responsible for his various indictments seeking asylum abroad. The women crossing state lines for abortions are already refugees: If the policies they are fleeing become sanctioned by a new president, where will they go? (Given the medical statistics, it already makes sense for a pregnant American woman to give birth in another country, if she is not white.)
As the power of social media wanes and Trump rambles on, his rhetoric, once so confusing, now seems a distraction from the fact that these politics are playing out in some secret part of the American psyche. The words that are not said are more important than those spoken aloud, and voters are not listening to their politicians in any real way. It was the handshake at the debate in September that nudged one undecided voter’s mind toward the Democrats. It was the way, he said, that Harris walked right over there and shook Trump’s hand at the top of the debate. Twelve billion dollars, trillions of words spent in argument and persuasion, spooling years of TV time, thousands of polls and op-eds, a candidate switch, and an assassination attempt—after all that, a simple physical gesture made the difference. OK. Fair enough. Whatever works for you.
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Or it might make the difference, he said. This voter wasn’t sure yet. He just wasn’t.
