Anti-Trump protests were held outside Belfast city hall in 2018 during the former president's visit to the UK. File photo by Kelvin Boyes, Press Eye
WHEN President John F Kennedy hosted a dinner for 49 Nobel prizewinners in 1962, he joked that it was “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Jefferson, who became the third president in 1769, is revered in American political history for his remarkable intellect. Kennedy, who succeeded to the office in 1960, is regarded as one of the most charismatic.
The 46 men who have served as United States president vary in style and success but the office has a rich history of distinguished leadership.
It’s a sign of how far the country’s politics has fallen that initially the American people were being asked to choose between the elderly and confused incumbent Joe Biden and another old man, the polarizing and rabble rousing Donald Trump.
Biden, of course, was replaced in the contest by his vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the United States along with the rest of us finds out this week who will become the leader of the most powerful democracy in the world.
Politics has always been regarded as a dirty business but this has been a particularly unedifying campaign. The language of public discourse in American politics has gone way beyond the norms of decency, not just in terms of coarse insult but with an underlying cynicism.
Debates over the issues which matter to people in the United States - the economy, abortion and immigration - appear to have been drowned out by divisive noise.
Does any of this really matter to us?
Directly, and indirectly, yes. Half of the external economic investment in Northern Ireland comes from the United States with some 260 US-owned firms employing people here. The Republic is even more economically reliant on America.
Across the island, there are numerous emotional and psychological links. Over 20 of the 46 American presidents were of Irish descent and the flow of emigration from here to the States happened over centuries.
The concern for the future of democracy in American goes much wider than us, however.
America has always seen itself as the leader of the free world, with some justification despite many self-serving foreign policy decisions by some presidents over the decades.
Bill Clinton described the United States as “truly the world’s indispensable nation” and Barack Obama “the one indispensable nation in world affairs”.
One can only imagine the impact on an already-unstable world if the United States is so embroiled in internal political division that they cannot lead the democratic world.
The old saying is that when America sneezes, the rest of the world gets a cold.
How seriously should we take suggestions in the campaign that the future of democracy is under threat?
The Trump campaign is alarming, not just for its racist rhetoric. The undermining of the basic tenets of democracy, such as the press and media, the judicial system, the integrity of the political system and even the role of the churches, is deliberate.
Hannah Arendt, the historian and philosopher who fled Nazi Germany, said: "The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."
The sneering at the 'mainstream media', now called the legacy media, fits into this.
Television networks on the right are basically political movements under the guise of news organisations and wealthy newspaper owners, such as Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, are cowed into breaking with the tradition of endorsing a candidate for fear of losing financial contracts.
The traditional media landscape is now politicised and polarised, and the advance in social media and podcasts reaching millions are often unchecked and biased to the point of further poisoning the debate.
Furthermore, the sight of evangelicals praying over Trump as God’s "chosen vessel" like Saint Paul is another indication of how a section of Christianity has further corrupted discourse
It's no wonder that there are genuine concerns the principles of the Constitution, which forged the freedoms that America has enjoyed for centuries, are under attack.
America is divided as never before. And the emergence of a new president is unlikely to heal that in the short term.