SHOULD I be stocking up on ammunition and shopping for a flak jacket? As voters go to the polls in the US today to elect their 47th president, Americans live in the shadow of Donald Trump's threat of civil war and a "bloodbath" if he loses or enduring an authoritarian dictatorship if he wins.
Arsonists and machete-wielding thugs have already attacked ballot boxes, and the latest polls show 62 per cent of Americans believe election violence is "likely".
For months, Trump has been echoing his admonition before his 2020 electoral defeat: "The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged." A Kamala Harris victory, if America survives Trump's wrath, promises years of inchoate woke policies, pushing diversity, equity and inclusion programmes despite a growing backlash against them.
Americans are possibly more divided today than since their civil war ended in 1865, polarised between Republican former president Trump, aged 78, seeking his second term in the Oval Office, and Democratic Vice President Harris, aged 60, hoping to become the first woman president and the first of Jamaican and Indian descent.
As a Brit who has lived for more than three decades in the US, I have watched with dismay the degeneration of American politics, like human evolution in reverse, crawling back into the primordial swamp.
Having been raised on a heritage of sterling British Parliamentary debate and soaring oratory, it is dispiriting to see the US presidential election reduced to schoolyard name-calling.
Trump has branded Harris "retarded," "lunatic," "lazy as hell," "scum" and "garbage." Harris has called Trump "unstable," "unhinged," "weird," "unserious" and "a fascist".
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