I n the days before the 2020 US election, the expensive shops and elegant restaurants of Manhattan’s Upper East Side near where I live were battened down in fear. The managers of Madison Avenue’s designer fashion boutiques and luxury goods stores boarded their windows in planks and plywood and instructed their employees not to come to work. Depending on the outcome of the election that week, they were expecting mobs furious with the result to smash, loot and burn.
The anticipated mayhem wasn’t expected to come from Donald Trump supporters refusing to accept defeat. There aren’t many Trump supporters in Manhattan and the ones there are tend to spend their money at Oscar de la Renta and Bottega Veneta rather than breaking the windows to help.