David Sedaris: ‘We’ve got to do something about Trump. I know I will, maybe after Fiji’

Someone will say, “Can you believe this is happening? He’s snatching people off the streets! He’s calling for judges to be impeached and here we’re all just looking on with our mouths open! Why aren’t we doing anything?”

Everyone will nod.

“If someone told me, ‘There’s a march on this specific day and at this specific time,’ I’d be there.” Someone else, sometimes me, will say. “If they suggested we storm the Capitol, smashing windows and defecating on people’s desks, you better believe I’d do it, even though it would be hard, shitting on command like that, and in front of people.’”

Everyone agrees 100%. But where is that person who’ll unify us and spur us on? They don’t have to be a politician – it’s probably better if they’re not. They just have to be a leader, to have both courage and charisma. To be an electrifying speaker, but also someone who rolls their sleeves up and really gets into it. You don’t realise how rare that sort of a person is until you need one.

“I say we bust Luigi Mangione out of jail and make him the leader,” someone said one night at a restaurant where the special had caviar in it and cost $1,000.

I turned to the person seated beside me, “Well, that’s a milestone,” I said as the waiter left to get our drink orders. “A thousand dollars! I won’t soon forget this because eventually it will be normal. Likewise, it costs $950 to see Denzel Washington play Othello on Broadway now. Today that seems outrageous but in a few years it’ll just be how much a Broadway ticket costs. You’ll see!” I took note of it. I put it in my diary.

Another thing you hear now, at a party, say, where you look to your right and see the guy from Mad Men just standing there, so much taller than you imagined, and so very handsome, a virtual mountain of handsome, is: “That’s why the president won.”

It could be a response to an Instagram video – someone with green hair and five rings in their nose screaming about their pronouns. It could be looters rampaging a jewellery store or a homeless person shooting up in a tent city beneath the overpass.

“That’s why the president won,” someone said with a sad shake of their head at the glittering party. And I said back, “Hold on a second, is that actually Lauren Bacall walking through the door?”

“No,” the person told me. “She’s dead. That’s just someone’s mother.” How did Lauren Bacall die and nobody told me?

Sitting in the salon we like, having our toenails shaped and our feet massaged with a paste that smells of grapefruit, we pray for the failure of our country. “Let the markets totally collapse,” we say. “Let the sick and elderly not get the support they need – veterans too! Let farmer’s crops rot in the fields. Then those people who voted for this president, then they’ll see!”

But they won’t. Because he’ll blame his predecessor or China, and the news outlets that back him will reiterate his lies. When the price of eggs and lumber rose during the administration of the last president did I say, “What a fool I was to give this man my vote!” No! Did I even notice that the prices had gone up?

Sometimes at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles or Seattle or Cairo, I’ll look out the window and tell myself OK, maybe it’s someone else’s time to be happy. In an ideal world shouldn’t we all have a turn? Look at me back when X was president, then, eight years later, Y. Watching his victory speech in Chicago, that great crowd around him, I felt something. I wept. “We won!” my friends and I said, as his victory was our own. Doesn’t everyone deserve that feeling?

The answer is, well, within reason. That’s why we’ve got to organise, plan, put our heads on straight and do something! I know I will, maybe after Fiji, unless I change my plans and go to Hawaii instead, in which case I’ll do something after Maui because, like I said to someone yesterday afternoon, maybe one of my doorman, “People are hurting!”

Photograph Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images