True-blue New Yorkers are bracing themselves for Trump’s return

Fleeing the United States ahead of a ‘fascist takeover’ by Donald Trump on 20 January has been the talk of liberal circles, and nowhere more than in deep-blue New York City. A New York Times story revealing that tech billionaire and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman was ‘weighing a move overseas’ because he feared ‘retribution’ from the next president added fuel to already smouldering speculation ignited by the relocation of the anti-Trump TV celebrity Ellen DeGeneres and her wife to England. I tend to ridicule such quailing as absurd and unpatriotic, if not downright cowardly. 

I was thrown off my leftist assumptions, however, when my plumber visited our family’s weekend house on the East End of Long Island, inside deep-red Suffolk County, New York. Before discussing our broken furnace, he asked, with no perceptible irony, ‘So what’s your exit strategy?’ My plumber fits the profile of a pro-Trumper, but he isn’t one. On the contrary, he regularly berates East Enders about Trump’s character deficiencies.