One of my best mates in the U.S is a Donald Trump supporter, and he texted me yesterday morning to ask if I had put aside some time later in the day to get in front of the TV? 

For the basketball? I asked. 

“Come on... you’re supposed be a politics man!” he said. 

“DJT. Hashtag 45. Trump’s convention speech.” 

Got it. Of course. We got to comparing notes. 

I asked him how he thought Trump was handling the coronavirus. He said he figured the case numbers were only so high because they’d been testing so many people.  

What about the deaths? I said. Some reports are now suggesting 300 thousand people will die of covid-19 in America before the end of the pandemic. That’s a death toll a hundred times the greater than 9/11.  

‘We’re a big country,” he said. “300 thousand out of 330 million.” 

We weren’t arguing. It was all very low key. I was just getting his steer on things and he was getting mine... after a Republican convention where speaker after speaker used fire and brimstone to paint a Joe Biden presidency as a huge threat to suburban American life.  

This is a direct quote from the current Vice-President Mike Pence and his convention speech.  

“You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” 

Three hundred thousand deaths. Hmm. But of course Pence wasn’t talking about the coronavirus. He was talking about Black Lives Matter. While the convention was underway, protestors were back on the streets after the Police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. If you haven’t seen the video, think carefully before you look it up. It’s pretty hard to watch someone take seven bullets in the back... especially when you know his kids are sitting right there.  

But perhaps even more disturbing to me was the video a couple of nights later. After the Kenosha protests had turned violent the night before and some protestors had burnt buildings and looted businesses, self-appointed militia decided to join protestors and take to the streets. There were videos of police officers handing out water bottles to civilians with rifles and tactical gear. And then what do you know... a 17 year old fanatic, apparently obsessed with law enforcement, took it upon himself to shoot three people with an AR-15. There’s video. It’s chaotic. It’s awful.  

And this is actually the thing I can’t stop feeling anxious about.  

What’s going to happen when the election results roll in? Is it too extreme to wonder if there could be really serious violence in the streets?  

I told my friend I thought it was concerning that Donald Trump is already suggesting the election results might be illigitimate. How will his most gung-ho supporters react in November if they think the election has been stolen? How many 17-year-olds with AR-15s would take to the streets and decided to do more than just parade their guns? How many might cross the threshold and feel compelled to start shooting? Could that happen in America? Could there be a major historic civil conflict? 

My mate said, ‘Well, you can’t trust the postal voting system.’ 

The future is uncertain for all of us but increasingly I worry that November in America has the potential to be very nasty, indeed.