The clown has left, athletes can visit White House again
It was good to wake up and not have reason to be angry on Thursday morning. It was good to wake up and realise that the greatest mistake in US politics since Senator Lindsay Graham’s parents forgot to practise safe sex on a no doubt awkward and rushed night in 1954, had left the building.
Trump the Frump left with a whimper and a bang, issuing more pardons than a fat kid with wind after drinking all the fizzy drinks at a classmate’s birthday party. Just about everyone got let off for something they had done in their past. A romp through the list of those pardoned showed how rushed the Obese Orange Oaf was in getting out of Dodge before he could no longer dodge the news that he was the biggest loser.
There was no pardon for the greatest misdeeds, though. Not a word for Herschelle Gibbs in 1999 and the brain fart that was more fart than brain as he tried to show off and showed himself up. Thierry Henry will have to appeal to Joe Biden if he is to gain clemency for his deliberate handball in 2009 that cost Ireland a spot in the 2010 World Cup. John Terry must wonder if his chance at absolution for slipping as he took and missed what should have been the winning penalty in the 2008 Champions League final will ever come. There is no way Terry will ever be forgiven for wearing his full kit for the 2012 Champions League cup presentation even though he had been banned for the game.
“The purpose of sports, even foreign sports, is not to bore people,” the US satirist PJ O’Rourke wrote. A Republican by leaning, he became antiTrump by necessity and no small sense of morality. He, too, would have woken up with one less thing to feel angry about on Thursday morning.
His book, How the hell did this happen? The US election of 2016, is rhetorical in the question it asks because it was a campaign and a result that did not make any sense at all and had no fixed answer.
“Americans have had their fun electing a clown flapping around in huge shoes he can’t fill, honking incessantly on his Twitter horn, the little car of his administration spilling forth far too many buffoons, zanies and felony indictments.
“His greasepaint now looks nothing but greasy, his fright wig is too frightful. His antics cause the tightrope walkers of foreign policy to totter, the trapeze artists of domestic policy to lose their grip, and he’s scaring the children in the ringside seats, particularly the millennial voters,” O’Rourke wrote for The Times of London last year.
And, now, the clown has gone, the circus has left town, with barely the holes from the pegs to hold down the big tent marking where there was once the worst show on earth.
A sense of calm, decency and, yes, normality has returned. America, so powerful and so omnipresent, seems predictable again.
Athletes of the US and around the world have welcomed the swearing-in of Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris on Wednesday. Megan Rapinoe, the double World Cup winner who stated: “I’m not going to the f***ing White House” if the US won the 2019 Fifa World Cup, tweeted on Wednesday: “Let us not waste this opportunity to reckon with our past, and move forward justice and equality.”
In 2020, Biden supported the US women’s team in their fight for equal pay. Biden’s relationship with sport has defined and built him into the man he is. He was a high school gridiron star, using sport to help him overcome the stutter that afflicted him when he was young.
He knows how sport can be used to unify rather than, as Trump tried to do with the anthem protests, stir up his support base for political gain.
Winning US teams may resume going to the Rose Garden in the White House once again, a tradition that started during the time of Ronald Reagan. They may feel more at ease, more in tune with the values of a president who is just tired of all the fighting and mudslinging. More acceptance, more talking, more celebrating and more doing.
There was less reason to feel angry on Thursday morning. It felt like a new day. It felt like a good day.