Upon rising this morning I watched reports stumble in, heaving the results first from Pennsylvania then Wisconsin, and I was reminded of an old children’s show on TV featuring live chimpanzees mouthing Get Smart-style dialogue. It was called Lance Link, Secret Chimp, and I recall it often had a lone orangutan lurking around, whom the others always derided as “that weirdo.”

Well, let’s talk about that weirdo. As I predicted, you now have your very own Berlusconi. And, having lived through his 3 electoral victories and their consequences, I can pretty clearly predict how things will go from here. Allow me to apply some cold compresses; it won’t be the sort of apocalypse you hear about in the U.S. media.

Trump is hardly a native arch conservative. He’s an odd mix of unquestioned influences who has operated as an easy fit in both liberal and conservative New York milieus most of his life, but hardened by dollar celebrity and the advantages he learned from his father and cobra-eyed Roy Cohn. He is known on the East Coast as the obnoxious guy who spent decades photobombing coke-celebrities. Like Berlusconi, Trump has little interest in foreign hassles, and will instead spend most of his tenure rejiggering laws to his personal advantage (and that of his friends), keeping himself from being sued or jailed, and cementing new profitable relationships (right after Putin, I’d guess Duterte, just for laughs).

His cabinet is less likely to be filled with connivers and war hawks, and will more probably look like rejects from The Addams Family; these will, ironically, act as moralizers above all. In fact, they will be power-slurping toads with perverted impulses and no empathy in their DNA. But, because they will have spent their lives fighting in pig shit for a glowing City on the Hill, their targets will be chiefly internal American affairs.

The administration as a whole then will be busy conducting a cultural contra-revolution within the borders that will beat down media, business law, social safety nets, and environmental law into a stupor. This will render all the foregoing pliable to the current interests of the Administration’s partners, as well as open the future to irreparable damage and depredations by those who will rise in these circumstances. However, it is for now still debatable whether these will have any worse consequences than the Clinton presidency’s gutting of environmental, social, banking, and international war laws, not to mention all which followed afterwards.

As for the culture in general, this will likewise be stomped to brain-dead, tube-fed, and barely surviving. But perhaps you can now admit that America was ready for this anyway. The vulgarity and incoherence Trump displayed from the beginning (and some years before this election, and including revelations and accusations and legal travails) are a source of delight to his voters, just as Berlusconi had everyone in stitches when caught on live TV making humping gestures behind a female politician, or being overheard calling Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lardass.” Every time Berlusconi opened his mouth some lurid absurdity would squirt out of it; the next day he’d deny saying it, and the day after that he’d say it was taken out of context, and the next day he’d say he was right and there was nothing wrong with saying that. In other words: don’t expect it to stop.

Finally, I should say that, for those who call themselves activists, all this should actually shove them into a positive position. The lines of attack within the States will be absolutely clear (see above) and every countermeasure will be equally obvious. There will be no subtlety or even subterfuge in what Trump’s team lunges after, so for the people there will be no excuse for pusillanimity of mind. On the other hand, while the inherent American violence has been fed Trump steaks throughout this squalid election, the voters who gnashed their teeth and Made America Grate Again will begin to fade in importance, being too busy just trying to survive, since this President, like Berlusconi, will do absolutely zero for them.

Part Two

In a twisted lap of personal history, the original Goldwater Girl sailed full circle to defeat. With Trump even having won some districts that Obama carried last time, the Democrats, like the social democrats across Europe, no longer have any realistic base. Or any realistic benefits to offer. These parties have unsuccessfully attached their electoral herpes –I mean hopes- to following the right-wing parties and making the people’s lives as miserable and precarious as any other party would. But the science is, no one will vote for an ersatz right-wing when the real thing is still available. People will support those parties that stand up for them. –In one of the few such cases, while TTIP has seemingly stalled (unless Obama reanimates it by last-minute decree powers), the Canadian version –CETA- was blocked in Europe only by the elected socialists in little Wallonia.

Believe me, the right remains a shambles, only staggering to electoral wins because of the determined extroversion of diverse groupings of bigots –bigotry in its true sense of being willingly obtuse just to enjoy solipsistic pleasures and pleasures of resentment. Trump himself is an ordinary east coast egotistical mogul, a long-time friend of the Clintons, and probably bred with only the common Waspish aversions. He is more used to the Mob than the mob, but he will use racism, patriotism and a infantile sense of exceptionalism as seemingly core beliefs, but he himself has none: Trump has always been nothing more than an ectoplasmic doughnut operating on a base biological imperative to maintain his contiguity. To win –or, rather, to win the game- Trump told the simple folks whatever they wanted to hear, like a barker enticing suckers in to the dark skid row hall of their lowest dreams. Worry about what’s in their heads, not whatever nonsense comes out of Trump’s mouth.

Look: these votes are being cast by local yokels endangered by their diminishing shelter from the machine of supranational capital. Furthermore, the people are woozy with malnourishment after a decades-long diet of cheap identity politics franchises run by all sides. The public is not beyond doing these things, and they are not expected to understand the consequences any more than those who chose Rufus T. Firefly to be head of Freedonia.