Democrats now lie in wait for lizard-brained Trump
Donald Trump seemed to retreat into a cocoon of unreality following the shellacking his Republicans received in the midterm elections he vaingloriously billed as a referendum on himself.
It would have been hard otherwise to maintain the pretence that the loss of up to 40 seats in the House of Representatives was a triumphal vindication of his presidency. Even on a good day, that should have taxed this master of mendacious spin.
True, the Republicans picked up two seats in the Senate, with the results in Florida and Mississippi still to be determined. These wins confirmed that the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was now the party of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama whose appeal was principally to rural blue-collar whites without much education
and to the sharks, like Trump, out to monetise their prejudices, fears and false consciousness.
Never in a nonpresidential election year have voters turned out in such numbers. By a margin of close to 8% they voted against the Trumpublicans, giving the Democrats subpoena power to make life hell for Trump and his family, both in the genetic and the Mafia sense.
There was a deranged quality to Trump’s post-election media conference. It brought to mind the movie Downfall and its depiction of a dictator who, when cornered, emigrated to a parallel universe.
Perhaps, though, there was a method to Trump’s apparent madness a desperate theatrical turn for an audience he was sure would thrill to his denouncing as “racist” the African-American correspondent of a highbrow news programme when she asked what he meant by calling himself a “nationalist” and whether he meant it as a racist dog whistle.
Which, without doubt, is precisely how he had meant it and precisely how it was taken, not only by the committed Ku Kluxers and neo-Nazis who heard it, but also by the larger mass of citizens open to the suggestion that black people, immigrants from Latin America and George Soros are the cause of their distemper.
Cut to Paris, where Trump came, nominally, to mark the centenary of the armistice ending the war that many would call the beginning of the world we live in now. Would he join a score of other world leaders’in leaders pride showing and folly? respect No. for He the millions butchered in the service of their predecessors’ would not even come out on the birthday of the US marines to honour the heroes of Belleau Wood, the corps’s signature World War 1 immolation. He blamed the weather and, several days later, the secret service.
For any of the others, of either party, who might have been elected president in 2016, November 11 2018 would have been the moment for a big speech about the lessons of the Great War and the botched peace that ended it, sowing the seeds of a second and, in the cold one, a third. But Trump, knowing little and caring less about history, scarpered home to brood and tweet about his electoral wounds.
He strikes me as cognitively challenged. When he speaks, his vocabulary is increasingly limited. More and more, his nastiness on Twitter seems instinctive rather than tactical or strategic. You can tell by the spelling and grammar when his staff are tweeting for him.
That he has difficulty expressing himself more articulately than Tony Soprano does not mean his lizard brain is not fully functioning. He knows the Democratic majority in Congress in 2019 will have access to the tax returns he has long sought to conceal. He knows Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Russian interference saga, is about to indict his son, Donald Jr, who makes the Godfather’s Sonny look like a stable genius.
God knows what lies ahead. It will certainly be riveting.
● Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.