Trump card
Donald Trump is running again. He made the announcement in the ballroom of Mar-a-lago, in a building raided by federal authorities only three months ago, in a lurching speech that dragged on for more than an hour, full of vainglory and rictus self-delusion. Gina Rinehart was in the room, seated behind the former president’s son.
“Two years ago, we were a great nation, and soon we will be a great nation again,” Trump said. “In order to make America great and glorious again, I tonight am announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”
Two years after the Capitol riots, after becoming the first president to be impeached twice, after the electoral repudiation of an administration built on slime and venality, he said: “We will defeat the radical left Democrats that are trying to destroy our country from within.”
His voice like answering machine tape, he continued to replay stilted fears about Islamic terrorism and the “China virus”. He intimated he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. He mocked climate change and transgender athletes. He promised to clean the “blood-soaked” streets of America and plant a flag on Mars.
In announcing his candidacy so early, Trump is ensuring his rhetoric will frame the next election. He will continue to debase the political system, to lie about what is real and what is not. He will run with no greater purpose than his own satisfaction.
Along with Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, Trump represents a special kind of political illness. Each man is a personification of distrust in the system, not because they are there to address it but because they so nakedly embody all that can be wrong with politics.
They are each fundamentally unserious – buffoons who regard diligence as weakness, whose inability to appreciate crises imperilled the people they claimed to represent. Each prided himself on a smugness that bordered on corrupt. Each took the unthinkable and made it acceptable and briefly even popular.
Democracy is vulnerable to spivs such as these. The system relies on the decency of those within it. Much of it is built on convention: that a person will accept the outcome of an election, that he will act only in the ministries to which he was publicly appointed.
These rules are predicated on people being willing to serve in the interests of their country, on people who see a need other than their own. The system was not prepared for a tourism marketer, a newspaper columnist and a waxwork reality star.
Should Trump win in 2024, the world will be worse off – just as Australia would suffer should anyone even remotely like Morrison ever again be made prime minister. Democracy is too fragile to endure egos as fragile as theirs, to suffer through their righteous incompetence and make do with the myopia of their self-interest.