Armageddon outta here – An Irishman’s Diary on Donald Trump and the apocalypse

Not the least worrying thing about Donald Trump is that his surname (as amended from the original German) turns up a lot in the Bible, especially in sections predicting the end of the world.

Here’s 1 Thessalonians (4.16): “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God...”

And here’s 1 Corinthians (15.52): “...but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump”.

You don’t even have to go to the Bible for this sort of thing.

As my occasional correspondent from California, Bill Casey, reminded me recently, a Trump is also among the characters in Máirtin Ó Cadhain's classic novel of 1949, Cré na Cille. Which, with ominous timing, has been republished in two English translations within the past year.

Cré na Cille is set in a west of Ireland graveyard, just up the road from the US president-elect's luxury golf development at Doombeg (sorry, I mean Doonbeg). And its characters are all dead, despite which they can't stop talking, including one who's an enthusiast of Hitler.

Then there’s the inhuman protagonist who speaks occasionally, as in chapter 3: “I am the Trump! Let my voice be heard! ... Darkness is overcoming brightness ... I am the Trump of the Graveyard. Let my voice be heard! It must be heard.” Elsewhere in the passage, the same Trump resumes with the cheerful message: “I am the last voice that will be heard in the dust of Armageddon.”

Bill was writing back in August, by the way. But even then, he told me, his family were sufficiently embarrassed by the election campaign that they had a bumper sticker with a slogan supporting: "Giant Meteor for 2016".

Trump’s biblical associations might not be so worrying in themselves, as much as for the effect they have on a certain impressionable sort of person, in the US and elsewhere. And sure enough, his triumph has not gone unnoticed by websites predicting the imminent end of times.

There are even people out there who believe that the orange one is himself the Second Coming (God help us), and that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be at the starting line in Belmont Park any day now.

But relax. Armageddon is not due until 2019, apparently.

So there's still be time for Joe Schmidt to win us the Rugby World Cup first. Another consolation is that, if Trump is the second coming, there won't be a second term.

Speaking of Second Comings, indirect beneficiaries of Tuesday’s election also include WB Yeats, whose poem of that title has just won four more years of being quoted everywhere as a prophetic text.

Written in 1919, against the backdrop of the Russian revolution, it has always had an uncanny ability to adapt to whatever new harbinger of doom appears.

So all the usual lines are being quoted about Trump (“the centre cannot hold”, “what rough beast is this?”, etc). But I also predict a rise in the share price of “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”, which is not as yet a political cliché.

As for “slouching towards” places – usually Washington, in Trump’s case – well, the slouchometer has been busier than ever since Tuesday.

Interestingly, however, the president-elect did not slouch very successfully in actual Bethlehem. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, that is, former home of America’s second-largest steel mills, and as such part of the “rust belt” that was key to Trump’s victory. He swept the state in general. But Bethlehem was a democrat hold-out, voting Clinton 2:1.

That same township has a claim to Irish literary fame, via another classic of the first official language, Micí MacGabhann's Rotha Mór an tSaoil (1958), translated into English as The Hard Road to Klondike (still available from collinspress.ie and all good bookshops).

As the English title suggests, MacGabhann was not slouching towards Bethlehem. He was passing through it, en route to better things. But he did spend a year there, in the mills, and was unimpressed.

For hard work and low pay, he declared it almost as bad as “Scotland”. His ultimate destination was the Yukon goldfields, where he would strike lucky. And more than a century later, Trump’s Pennsylvanian supporters seem to expect a similarly dramatic change of fortune soon.

Only Bethlehem has resisted his trumpet call, and no doubt the more zealous of his followers will interpret this as meaning that, once again, there was no room at the inn.