Events of 2016 have made me anxious that things are about to go properly tits-up. The whole year has felt like one wrong-step after another, with seemingly nothing that can hold back the tide: Russia stepping up it’s hostilities towards the West, desperate, homeless refugees struggling to survive in an unwelcoming Europe just as a large minority of British people voted to leave it. In many ways, things are bad as they are, but America has been looking to have the final say on how incredibly depressing this year can get as its people take to the polls and pick the best worst person to run their country so they can spend the next four years deriding that person and calling for them to resign.

But if my ominous sense of foreboding is anything to go by they may not even get those four years, because if Clinton wins, the raw, red, smacked, pooping ASS of America might just follow through on its collective promise to take up arms against its first female President; if Trump wins, with his hands on the nuclear codes he might just take up arms against the first twerp that ridicules him on Twitter come November 9th. Canada, possibly.

You have to feel for Americans, who haven’t even got a John Lewis Christmas advert or I’m a Celeb to look forward to this week. Thanks to celebrity endorsements, many American voters are being divided along cultural lines too. Imagine you’re a gun-toting, racist simpleton who thinks that Trump is your long-awaited saviour. You’ve been listening to Lady Gaga for eight years – since The Fame album’s first day of release in fact – and you’ve just perfected a linedance routine to You and I with the girls down at the club. Then you get home, flick on the TV and discover with great shock and alarm, that perhaps Lady Gaga doesn’t share your rigidly-held beliefs and principles on how to make America great again; because there she is – cosying up to that crook! Who’d have known? No-one warned you!

The last paragraph is perhaps a little unfair to Trump voters in its reckless stereotyping and oversimplification, but then conversely, by its own standards, it is also exactly the kind of thing that they’d typically lap up. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a whole host of liberties taken with the truth on the reporting of the Trump side of the campaign: for instance, it’s been stated that trump presents a Massive Problem for America, which is inaccurate. He did present The American Apprentice, but doesn’t at the moment owing to his busy schedule of bringing the world’s largest economy to its knees.

One could suggest that it is because of his experience on The American Apprentice, and in business in general, that he’s using tried and tested interview techniques he’s seen time and time again to win over the American voter. The main one, many of you will know, is making bold claims that can only ever be found to be bullshit once you’ve successfully won the job. Like building a wall between the US and Mexico. It will quite obviously never happen, even if Trump wins by a landslide, but it sounds good to some of Trump’s key voters; i.e. the clinically braindead. My recommendation – to keep both sides of the electorate happy, whatever the result –  would be a much smaller wall, built in a circle around the people who want the wall, who have been lured into a tight huddle thanks to some cunningly placed bait: burgers, AK-47s, that kind of stuff. Then I’d spend a little extra money on a lid, whack it on top and get on with the rest of the presidential term.

It’s perhaps owing to her lack of imagination when it comes to her own flagrant lies that Hillary has struggled to capture the headlines like Trump has. She doesn’t want to outlaw an entire religion and its followers from her shores, she doesn’t want to buddy up with Russia and doesn’t claim to have a so-called ‘secret, foolproof plan’ to destroy so-called ‘Islamic State’. She definitely doesn’t want to build a great big wall, and to be fair, no-one wants to see an old lady lifting bricks. But the lack of anything attention-grabbing or convincing emanating from her face has left plenty of room in the news for attacks on her character: she has, for example, taken an immense amount of flak for being in the pockets of foreign diplomats, big business and the banks; whereas the only pocket Donald Trump is in is his own, where he furiously counts his pocket change whilst interviewing prospective future girlfriends on escalators.

Others have said she is weak, drawing on everything from her forgiveness towards her husband for his infidelity, to her funny turn in New York during its 9/11 memorial ceremony. The latter generated claims across the press and internet that Hillary was using a double to fill in for her while she lay sick in bed. There have been no claims of Trump using a double – possibly because it’s nearly inconceivable that anyone else could look like that –  but Trump has compensated by stating completely contradictory things on almost every topic that’s been thrown his way. Why mess around choosing an opinion on something when you can just garble out absolutely anything at all with the same amount of conviction?

The other big criticism of Hillary is her use of personal email accounts for conducting official state business. Problem was, apparently, that she couldn’t sign into her government email on her personal phone, and she’d only just started a mammoth contract on the latest Samsung Galaxy or something and like hell will they let her out of that, even if she is Secretary of State, those damn snakes – and you try carrying two modern phones about your person when you’re trying to look presentable in a well-fitted ‘pant’ suit – bulging in your inside pocket, making the jacket all misshapen. How on earth are Israel going to take your requests for restraint and calm when your left side of your jacket is hanging down like your suit just had a stroke? Fine, maybe, when she’s carrying a bag on her shoulder, but then you have to leave it places don’t you? You can’t show up to a podium at a press conference with a purse and just plonk it down. I mean you can – it is physically possible – but it wouldn’t look right, would it?

The FBI have stated that there was nothing illegal found in the latest batch of Hillary emails that underwent investigation, but Trump says he knows she’s guilty, that Hillary knows she’s guilty and even that the FBI, too, know that Hillary is guilty – which must’ve been quite the revelation to the FBI, who you might remember, back at the start of this paragraph, seemed to indicate that they felt quite the opposite. For months in fact, Trump has been adamant that his rival belongs in jail, or at the very least in a kitchen making him a tasty sandwich. Whatever lies have dripped out of his gutter of a mouth, he has at least seemed fairly genuine in his repeated claims that Clinton is a crook – which is possibly why he hasn’t grabbed ‘er by the pussy.

YET.

All of the above is as typically sneering and negative as you might expect from a Brit with a liberal, left leaning, but in all honesty it’s been a welcome change contemplating another country teetering on the brink of electorate-engineered disaster – so thanks America. Hopefully things won’t go as ‘properly tits-up’ as I fear, and if reports earlier today of people writing ‘Bernie Sanders’ or ‘Mitt Romney’ on their ballots are anything to go by, it seems that there’s still plenty of optimism left in some of your hearts. And hey, should Armageddon actually be nigh, with the likes of Gaga, Madonna, Bon Jovi, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen on stage it’ll at least have a half-decent soundtrack.