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This column comes to you from Atlanta, Georgia, where but for one giant “Trump Stands Up For Families” billboard and some Harris-Walz placards in the leafier suburbs, you would hardly know there had just been an election. I was hoping to report a whiff of teargas after a contested result, but no. Urban Atlanta voted for Harris but rural Georgia was so solid for Trump that nothing was left to argument.
The chattering classes on the east and west coasts may be traumatized, but for plainer folks — with a sense of relief that no violent disruption kicked off — it’s back to daily life and business as usual. Or is that, I wondered, a false observation from conversations with my conference group here? “No, you’re right,” a Washington economist told me over breakfast grits. “Government just isn’t a big thing for most Americans. They have opinions, they vote, but a change of president doesn’t actually make a great difference to their lives.”
Frequent flying
What clearly does make a difference is the state of the local economy — and Atlanta’s is stronger than those of most southern cities, chiefly due to its position as a regional transport hub that began as a pre-Civil War railway junction. Its most potent modern asset, delivering a $35 billion annual impact, is the vast Hartsfield-Jackson airport — the world’s busiest with 105 million passengers per year.
Built on a former racetrack owned by the founders of Coca-Cola (still a huge employer here, alongside Delta Airlines), Hartsfield-Jackson has a distinct southern character. Its longest serving shoe-shiner, Charles Sanders, died recently aged eighty-five and for eight straight years it has claimed the title of the airport whose luggage scanners find the highest number of undeclared firearms. But with 2,100 flights per day, it’s a formidably efficient mover of people and freight — and the bunglers in charge of the hell that is Heathrow would do well to fly over and study it.
Crypto convert
The only prejudice I’ve ever knowingly shared with President-elect Trump is — or rather, was — an aversion to the concept of cryptocurrencies. Three years ago he called bitcoin “a scam against the dollar.” But now, I’m sorry to say, he wants to make the US “the crypto capital of the planet.”
His conversion may have to do with campaign donations in bitcoin, plus polling that said libertarian cryptonauts were highly likely to vote for him. One such, his emerging policy guru Elon Musk, perhaps also persuaded Trump that his action list for January should include sacking Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who is keen to regulate the crypto sector.
I’m sorry to say all this because only a fortnight ago I advised against a belated “Trump trade” on bitcoin, suggesting gold might be a better bet. And then what? Gold has fallen 5 percent since Election Day, while bitcoin is up by a quarter at $86,000; and if the buying frenzy continues, it could hit $100,000 in time for Trump’s inauguration. Oops-a-daisy is all I can say — with a footnote that bitcoin will never be anything but a wildly volatile gambling chip. You may retort that it could also be a hedge against whatever other financial mayhem Trump is capable of unleashing. But if you’re in and up, I’d say get out while the going’s good.
Meanwhile, there are also rumors that Trump wants to fire Federal Reserve chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell — though Powell says the law wouldn’t allow it and he won’t resign if pressed to do so. Trump’s line is that the Fed has been too slow to cut interest rates and that he himself would actually be a better rate-setter, being the super-smart Midas-touch business guy he is. To which I suggest, while he has time on his hands at Mar-a-Lago waiting for power, he should read Lucky Loser, a new book by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig which chronicles his record of slippery hit-and-miss dealmaking funded by the fortune he denies having inherited from his far smarter father.
Too busy to hate
Arguably another reason for Atlanta’s relative prosperity is relative racial harmony. When I first visited as a banker forty years ago, everyone in business was white and every service worker or waiter was black. A decade before that, there were notorious tensions around the routing of Marta, the rapid transit system, voted against by white suburbanites claiming the acronym stood for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”
But despite those facets of its history, the city has long championed social mobility through its cluster of black colleges — including Morehouse, founded in 1867 and alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A visit to the manicured Morehouse campus to meet alumni who have become leaders of Atlanta’s civic life was an uplifting experience, completely without bitterness or recrimination. The slogan of William B. Hartsfield, a progressive mayor during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s, has taken time to come true but I’ve seen what he intended: this is “a city too busy to hate.”
Pushed pooch, pulled pork
Regular readers will be wondering where I ate in Atlanta and what else I learned. The Chastain in the city’s wealthy northern woodlands was so good that we lingered all afternoon: the food was excellent (perfect French onion soup) and the only worrying social indicator was the number of customers and passers-by pushing suspiciously fit-looking dogs in baby strollers — a growing trend, I’m told, and one which might suggest, at a stretch, an upper middle-class so unmanned by Trump’s triumph that its pooches have to be grotesquely pampered as a form of consolation.
By way of downtown and downmarket contrast, Twin Smokers BBQ on Marietta Street offered pulled pork butt and a pint-sized hangover-cure Bloody Mary. Robust, sustaining and reassuringly symbolic of the America that always bounces back.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
