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On the night of the U.S. election, I witnessed an interaction I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since.

It was a weird evening even for me, 4,000 miles away from the nearest poll. A friend had suggested that a bunch of us make an evening of it in central London and booked us a table at a hotel that was doing an all-night election party. It would be midnight or later before any states would be called, but no matter. We had been given a table in a smaller room off the main hotel bar, which we were sharing with three other groups. On our way in, my friend wondered aloud whether there might be any stealth Trump supporters here. This was the wrong question. As I walked to the toilet and counted one, two, five, eight MAGA hats, it became apparent that it wasn’t just that there were a lot of Republicans at this party—the overwhelming majority of the attendees wanted the former president to win.

This was something we should have foreseen. It was a nice hotel, in a chichi part of town, with a bar called the American Bar. Of course there were Republicans there. We decided to stay on the basis that it would at least be more interesting than drinking beers on someone’s sofa in front of the television. It turned out that our smaller room off the main bar, whether by coincidence or some kind of clairvoyant insight by the hotel, contained only people hoping for a Harris win. When the first call was made for Trump—Kentucky—a woman spun around and eyeballed my group for our reaction, then seemed visibly relieved. She and her friends, all Americans working in London, said they needed to be together that night. “I think we’re in a safe space here,” one of the woman’s friends said to her, “but the walk to the bathroom? That’s not a safe space.”

After 1 a.m., my friends began to peel off, with work to do in the morning. Around 2, bored of waiting for anything definitive and curious about what was going on in the main bar, I went exploring. Given the way that our roommates had been talking about the MAGA crowd, as if they were genuinely afraid of interacting with them, I felt strangely nervous. But the mood in the main bar was jolly. The Trump people were decidedly not worried. I hung out with two Republican guys in suits who live in Brussels; they merrily ribbed each other and spoke about the importance of freedom to the American spirit.

As 3 a.m. came and went, I sat at the bar with one of my last remaining friends and an espresso, thinking that the metaphor of the two factionalized rooms at this hotel—their proximity but total separation—felt absurdly on the nose. Then my attention was drawn to raised voices elsewhere in the room. A British guy in a black velvet jacket and MAGA hat and an American woman in a pair of Gloria Steinem–style glasses were arguing. The woman was gesticulating with carefully contained fury.

“Can you point to any statistics about immigration?” she was asking him. “There are a lot of documented immigrants in New York who are not allowed to vote. Did you know that?”

Their argument continued for perhaps 45 minutes, running in circles around all the big political talking points. Neither of them ceded any ground, no headway was made in any direction, and yet they carried on.

“You can’t engage in rational debate,” the man told the woman eventually, “but Trump deals in facts, facts, facts, and that’s why he’s gonna win.” The woman snapped and stood up. There was a tense moment during which it seemed that one of the two combatants was going to have to leave the bar. But instead, they both stayed, studiously ignoring each other.

A big, middle-aged Irishman sidled past my friend and muttered, “I thought it was bad in Belfast.”

Trump did, of course, win. But I’ve been thinking about this concerted ignoring since then. I had started wondering, a few weeks before the election, why I hadn’t had many conversations about it. Sure, here in the U.K. we all talked about the election after that guy tried to shoot Trump, and when Biden looked increasingly incapable of participating in the race. But in general, I felt as if my peers and I, a group usually pretty engaged in politics both at home and abroad, had been more tapped out than usual.

It’s not that nobody in the U.K. cared about the U.S. election—far from it. According to a recent poll, more Brits cared about who won the U.S. election than who won the Tory leadership race, although the context here is that every single person in contention for the Tory leadership was a clown. But there’s been a deflated response to events in the U.S. compared with 2020, or even 2016. It may be that we just had a general election in July and people are generally trying to enjoy the sensation that the lesser of the two evils won ours, a first in my voting lifetime. But I think it’s also that, to many of us over here, a second Trump presidential term has seemed too dreadful to seriously contemplate. As one friend put it a few days before the election: “From time to time, I remember that it’s happening and that the most powerful country in the world might have a mad fascist in charge again, and then I sort of recoil from paying attention.”

With only a few weeks to go before Trump’s inauguration, we still aren’t talking about Trump much, and we like it that way. I get the sense that over here, people are clinging to the last moments when it will be possible to ignore him—a phenomenon I’m told has taken hold of more than a few people in the States too.

But eventually we will have to care. What goes on in America becomes our business, one way or another. “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold,” as the saying goes, a phrase I had to Google because I misremembered it as “When America shits its pants, the whole world smells it.” Wrong, and gross, but maybe there’s something to it. What we’re worried about catching off you guys come Jan. 20 feels less like a case of the sniffles and more like, I don’t know, dysentery. We won’t be able to ignore each other across the room for much longer.

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