The morning after
Max Anderson wakes up in Arizona the morning after Trump’s victory and tries to find hope in birdsong, only to be interrupted by a uniquely American sound.
At 8:30am, the morning after the night of November 5, I stand on the deck of my uncle’s guest cabin. I’m looking at the mountains under a desert morning as bright as polished glass. The highest peaks are dusted in snow but the sun warms the shelving foothills, a vista of cactus, brush and homesteads.
Just like every morning there are two distinct sounds. There’s the birdsong, from the likes of cactus wrens, cardinals and phainopeplas. There’s also the muffled sounds of gunfire from Glocks, Sig Sauers and Smith&Wessons.
I’ve been coming to my uncle and aunt’s property in the Catalina foothills for nearly 50 years – so long that the benign sounds of Pima Pistol Club barely register. The sound of the shooters’ recreation is other-worldly, a bit exotic. It goes: “Tak-tak… Bok-bok… Tak-tak-tak”.
However, when I arrived three days ago, I couldn’t help thinking the shooters’ feint tattoo might not sound quite so benign after Kamala Harris was elected president.
Visiting the United States for the contest between Trump and Harris was all upside.
The hoopla of an American election (my first, and easily the most important in my lifetime). A night of MSNBC and CNN panellists discussing results as they came in hot (polls conveniently closing east to west). Bottomless Budweisers and paper plates piled with my Auntie Barb’s cooking (Jamaican chicken, a salute to Kamala from this staunchly Democratic household).
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I was mindful the visit came with an element of risk. After the votes were counted, I would be bang in the middle of a gun-toting state where at least one “constitutional sheriff” (look him up) had promised he’d go to the barricades if Trump lost.
This morning, the recreational gun owners – “Tak-tak… bok-bok-bok” – are exactly where they need to be, discharging their rounds into sandbanks. But I’m in a place I rarely find myself. A place of shock. And deep sadness.
In the end, election night wasn’t a slow death, it was surprisingly quick. It wasn’t long before the liberal-silo statisticians were declaring they couldn’t get the numbers to stack up in the eastern swing states. My uncle – a university professor and no slouch when it comes to numbers – called it for Trump about 9:30pm Arizona time. The voter turnout was healthy, and the mail-in votes were hopeful, but Trump was getting boosted by a part of the electorate no one foresaw.
By now, my aunt – a deeply thoughtful woman and very much a child of the sixties – had fallen into a terrible quiet. I know for a fact she’s cried twice for her country: when JFK was shot in 1963; and when the rioters stormed the capital on January 6, 2020. I don’t know whether she cried last night after she went to bed around 10, knowing the man who triggered the second atrocity had been returned to the White House.
Back in my cabin, trying to sleep, I kept glancing at the swing-state numbers tallying on my phone. It was a lonely, alienating vigil, and somewhat to my shame, at 1:00am I refused to watch Trump’s history-making speech.
For a further three hours I lay awake, tormented by fears.
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The global economy torn apart by Trump’s tariffs. The bizarre prospect of an anti-vaxxer overseeing American health. A proto-fascist “super-genius” gleefully scything costs (people) from the American civil service. The state machinery rendered less able to check or balance when fossil fuel giants want to drill national parks, when industry wants to pollute and degrade, when a president wants to use his new “absolute immunity”.
In the morning, with dark, stinging eyes, I realised how I’d been untruthful to myself.
Yes, I had doubts about which way the election could go with polls predicting toss-ups and razor-edges. But I had three cavalries ready to come over the hill to the defence of the shining city: women outraged by reproductive rights and girded by a sense of “it’s time”; old-school Republicans, tired of having their mores and manners scorned by Trump; and young people, a tribe that’s been relatively uncanvassed and surely untainted by the cynicism of MAGA.
So I allowed myself to intrinsically believe a big lie.
We – and by “we”, I mean my wife, my kids in Australia, my like-minded friends, my aunt and uncle in Tucson, all the American voters who thought an authoritarian convicted felon who wanted to deport 10 million migrants was a bad thing, all the people who believe in political confederations like Europe and NATO and the UN, the fighters of Ukraine, the people of Taiwan who will be forced to “do a deal” – we couldn’t lose.
Only we could. And we did.
Standing on my deck with its view, I try my hardest to focus on the singular birdsong. Their calls are a powerful motif of the Arizona deserts I’ve had the good fortune to come to know and love.
I try also to hope that the MAGA faithful – the blue-collar folk made desperate by holding down three jobs at a criminal minimum wage, eking out lives in rust-belt towns riven by opioids – will find their lives changing for the better under President Trump.
But I don’t see it. I can only hear it. It’s a sound of foreboding and it goes, “Tak-tak… Bok-bok… Tak-tak-tak.”
