Una Mullally: US on edge of something awful – and may take Ireland with it

Reading the New York Times every morning is akin to rolling the dice on Jumaiji. Summoning a stampede of terrible ideas live from Trump HQ;the latest grinning right-wing disaster gurning their way up to the Trump Tower to meet with Dear Leader. The nonsense tweets from the president-elect. The back stories to cabinet nominees who would make your skin crawl. The very dictator-y visual of Trump surrounding himself with gristly ol' military mad men. The fact that Trump continues to go about his real estate business and doesn't see this as a conflict of interest . . . everything, all of it, is playing out exactly as our worst nightmares projected, and it hasn't even started yet.

The strands of Trump's ascension are multiple, and many people will spend the next four years trying to unravel what they hell happened and what the hell is he doing now. One of the million things to dissect about the Trump era is the greater existential shift it represents for chunks of the world, especially Ireland: where do we stand with America now? What is our relationship? What happens when someone in your family starts to go out with an absolute psychopath? Ireland is so culturally entwined with America; our relatives, our cultural references, our travel plans, many of our employers, our film, television and music consumption, our speech patterns – we look west. I think Irish people feel particularly affected by Trump's rise to power, because the US, in many ways, is only down the road.

Gracelessness

More worryingly, we also know that Fine Gael will react to any US administration – regardless of how morally bankrupt it is – like a St Bernard greeting its owner after returning from long holiday, with all the gracelessness, slobber and clumsiness that entails. Already, Enda Kenny has virtually high-fived his new pal Mike Pence on Twitter; let's just hope Mike doesn't see any of those photos of you with a rainbow flag, Inda, or you'll be in conversion therapy before you know it.

We are the capital of capitulators when it comes to American relations. This is the country where Trump himself was greeted at the steps of his ego-ship on a runway by the Minister for Finance and a harpist. There he is now, the big rich fella all the way from America. Sure lookit him with his golden hair, do you think he could bring us a few bits back from Macy’s? I hear you’re a racist now, Father.

Gombeenism is alive and well in Doonbeg with some of the locals falling over themselves to shine the shoes of the big man in the big house. They'd want to cool their jets, this is the type of foolishness that gets petrol stations named after presidents. Irish people warp their perception of America to suit their own agenda. Before the election, in New York, I found myself explaining to an African-American friend why Irish people liked the Clintons. He looked at me like I was crazy.

I was 17 when George W Bush was elected, and like many students at that time, my politics were formed around anti-capitalist movements, Naomi Klein's and Joseph Stiglitz's writing, anti-consumerism, the anti-war and pro-civil liberty movements of the early 00s. I wrote my college dissertation on the philosophies of neoconservatism.

Viciousness

America has never recovered from the viciousness it enacted on its citizens and others in the aftermath of 9/11; the illegal wars, the torture sites, the Patriot Act, the anti-Muslim racism and attacks, the mass-surveillance the cowboy idiocy of George W Bush. We must remember how fractured Ireland's relationship with America was then. In Dublin in 2003, 100,000 people marched against the invasion of Iraq, and many decent politicians have consistently spoken out against the morally wrong use of Shannon Airport by the US military.

Eight years of Obama, even with all his faults, was a sunburst compared to that grim era. But the generation below me has never really known a different American political landscape. If you are a politically astute 18-year-old right now, Obama was elected when you were 10, and America always seemed progressive and Bill Clinton was always an old man. Watching The War Room documentary on Clinton's campaign feels like something from the 1970s. With Obama's era, there was a sense that Ireland was happy to be back on terms with its mad cousin again.

Now, with Trump, the world is threatened, America is threatened, and in a way, so is the Irish psyche when it comes to how tangled up with the US we are. Being a small, emigrating country means our points of reference are often elsewhere, and that our identity is not just embedded in this island, but propped up by other big places; England, Australia, America, Canada. They are almost geographical voodoo dolls, with pins stuck in them that make us hurt. When they go mad, we go mad. And things are about to get very mad indeed.