THE richest man on Earth bought the global town square and swung the world’s most important election for a billionaire, using lie after lie.

Now every other billionaire is cheering. America’s richest men - all tech bros - saw their wealth boom after Donald Trump won. And the richest of them all, Elon Musk, will soon be in government - making himself even richer. But sure, let’s pretend Trump is socking it to elites and sticking up for the little guy.

There was plenty of chatter ahead of the election that we were heading for fascism. Rather what we’re seeing is oligarchy rise. That oligarchy rose on the back of hard-right populist rage curated online. The tech bros are taking over - and they’ll move fast and break things.

The first Trump presidency was - will be - very different to Trump Two. Now, it’s clear that half of America - maybe half the world - idolise him, despite knowing exactly who he is. Trump is unleashed.

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For those who don’t idolise Trump, it’s like a separating door has closed between us and the others. Indeed, it’s more than a door - fittingly, it’s a border. A border to another reality. For that is now the 21st century’s battleground: the nature of reality itself.

Essentially, Trump asks you to believe what he says reality is, not what others tell you, or what you see with your own eyes. That’s where we are: the leader is always right.

The days of left and right are over. Until the advent of social media, we all agreed on facts. What we disagreed about was how to respond to those facts. Do we raise taxes or cut them?

Now, in Trump Time, facts are whatever you want them to be. It began in the first days of his first presidency. Remember the enormous crowds at his inauguration which weren’t enormous but in the minds of his supporters became enormous because he said they were? That’s the permanent present from now on.

Trump said free and fair elections were stolen. What mattered wasn’t the truth, but how that claim made you feel. Dogs were eaten by migrants, except they weren’t. Russia really wants peace. America is our great ally - except it no longer is. January 6 at the Capitol was a ‘Day of Love'. Women will be protected - whether they like it or not.

The left isn’t getting what’s happening. I spent hours after the election talking to Democrat friends in America. They blamed black men, Latinos, Arab-Americans, the white working-class - everyone but themselves: well-off, white, college-educated, urban liberals. Nearly all earn over $100k, but across the rail-tracks on the bad side of their town folk in trailer parks can’t afford teeth.

The west - Britain, America, the rest of the democracies - allowed the working-class to sink for the last 40 years. Politicians thought because they were doing just grand that everyone should rah-rah for the system. But the system became a lie for millions.

Kamala Harris lost the electionKamala Harris lost the election (Image: free) Everything is great, the poor were told. Except the poor could see that everything wasn’t great. In fact, everything was awful.

If that simple truth could be a lie - that life was okay - then everything was up for grabs, everything could be contested. If you’re telling me life is super, but I can’t feed my kids, then why shouldn’t I believe the guy who tells me the crowd in Washington is huge when it’s not - especially as he’s also telling me the system is broken and he’ll make everything great again.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Right?

By not facing the truth about the failures of democracy and capitalism, the entire system was put in doubt. The liberal response was to call opponents Nazis. Listen, there’s one sure thing: all Nazis definitely vote for Trump, but there were millions who voted Trump and aren’t Nazi, they’re just ordinary people with nothing left to believe in but the Wizard of Oz in a MAGA hat.

And if liberals weren’t shouting ‘Nazi', they were preaching the absurd creed of ‘when they go low, we go higher’. Sure, that’s how you win a fight - debate etiquette on CNN while Musk smokes a blunt with Joe Rogan.

Now reality is disintegrating before our eyes in America, and the collapse will soon cross the Atlantic and spread around the world. Robert Kennedy Jnr, an avowed anti-vaxxer, is the MAGA movement’s voice of health. Black is white; white is black. When will war become peace?

This will have real-world consequences for real-world people. Women’s rights are on the chopping block. America’s civil service will be stacked with loyalists taking the country on the path towards Modi’s India, Erdoğan’s Turkey or Orbán’s Hungary.

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Then there’s the migrants. Trump promises mass deportations of 21 million illegal immigrants - assisted by private industry, of course. Here’s one reality that won’t crumble: deporting millions of human beings requires ‘holding facilities’. So let’s get real and call them what they are: concentration camps.

So how many concentration camps will you need, Mr President?

Let’s keep to reality: when I say concentration camp, I don’t mean death camp. A concentration camp by definition is somewhere large numbers of people are interned. Britain invented them for ‘non-combatants’ during the Boer War; America used them for Japanese civilians in World War Two. A concentration camp is where humans put other humans en masse: political prisoners, members of national or minority groups we don’t want around, ’the other’ in general. They are a monstrous creation.

We shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve entered the age of contested reality. Since the turn of the century, we’ve abandoned the notion of shared culture. We no longer watch the same TV programmes, read the same books, listen to the same music.

Everything has splintered, not into an amazing mix of diverse art and literature, but into a grey goop of consumerism. We no longer have ‘physical’ culture in our homes: everything is digitised.

If we no longer share a culture, no longer take culture seriously enough to even pay for it, how can we share a reality?

The same damn thing is happening here. Nigel Farage and his kind trade in reality distortion. These are the anti-elitist born into the British elite, after all.

And we wonder why this is the age of the conspiracy theory. It’s the age of the conspiracy theory as those who should be on the side of ordinary people surrendered the fight and accepted a monstrous system that throws the weak to the wolves.

Conspiracy became preferable to reality. Now the wolves are fat and they’re not just at the door, they’re in the living room.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics